SPOTLIGHT: A Season of Performing Arts 2026

Play Reading: Small Town Boys【SPOTLIGHT: A Season of Performing Arts 2026】

Play Reading is Tai Kwun's all-new platform that breaks away from conventional staged readings, exploring different spaces to create site-specific performances throughout the historic site. Outstanding texts selected from three disciplines – namely film, theatre, lifestyle and culture – are presented to support emerging theatre makers while offering the audiences a fresh theatrical experience.

Jason Lam's feature screenplay Small Town Boys* received development support from the Hong Kong Emerging Content Creators Association, and was subsequently published and won first place in the Readers' Choice Award. Set in a city undergoing rapid change, the story follows two men from different backgrounds who share a passionate yet fleeting romance - one determined to return, the other desperate to leave. The work was presented as a reading performance at Golden Scene Cinema last year. Here at Tai Kwun's Laundry Steps, it will be reimagined through video projections, silent disco and more.

Programme 1: Small Town Boys
Date : 2-4.4.2026 (Thu-Sat)
Time : 7:30pm – 10pm（2.4.2026）, 3pm – 5:30pm（3-4.4.2026）
Location : Laundry Steps

*Production of the script supported by the Hong Kong Emerging Content Creators Association.

Play Reading: Try again. Fail better【SPOTLIGHT: A Season of Performing Arts 2026】

Play Reading is Tai Kwun's all-new platform that breaks away from conventional staged readings, exploring different spaces to create site-specific performances throughout the historic site. Outstanding texts selected from three disciplines – namely film, theatre, lifestyle and culture – are presented to support emerging theatre makers while offering the audiences a fresh theatrical experience.

Li Chi-tat, winner of the Taipei Literature Awards First Prize (Stage Play Script Category), continues with his exploration of "the body as a battlefield for power" in the work Try again. Fail better. From the individual and society, he broadens his discourse to human "fragments" as well as animal ethics, touching upon topics like freedom, autonomy and moral order. In this Tai Kwun presentation, the actors will move from confinement to freedom, echoing the interplay between space and text at the historic former Victoria Prison.

Programme 2: Try again. Fail better
Date : 7-9.4.2026 (Tue-Thu)
Time : 7pm – 8pm
Location : Site-wide

Songs of Being【SPOTLIGHT: A Season of Performing Arts 2026】

Good and evil, light and darkness, reality and ideal, being and non-being, innocence and experience—such eternal dichotomies can be readily observed in Songs of Innocence and of Experience, the poetry collection by English Romantic poet William Blake. The work also became the inspiration for Songs of Being, the debut collaboration between sought-after composer Daniel Lo, Hong Kong Arts Development Awards' Artist of the Year (Media Arts) Keith Lam, as well as celebrated choral conductor and musician Sanders Lau. This one-of-its-kind site-specific production seamlessly fuses contemporary music, choral singing and multimedia art to highlight the unique structure and aesthetics of this dual-faceted work.

Songs of Innocence and of Experience puts side by side two contrary states of humanity – the purity of the soul versus the dark side of reality. During the fear-ridden pandemic period, Daniel Lo revisited the classic and pondered on finding his safe haven amidst life's conflicts and absurdities. From the poem's contrasting and dualistic structure, he not only gained new insights for his compositions but also incorporated poetry into Songs of Being, which also carries cautionary undertones.

The performance takes place at two Tai Kwun venues of distinct architectural styles. Members of local choir NOĒMA weave the opposing states into a sonic tapestry that sets off each other like twin reflections. Within the contemporary JC Cube, four female vocalists harmonise hymns with their joyful, ethereal voices in praise of “innocence”; within the revitalised historic F Hall, two male vocalists make use of its echoey soundscape and evocative lighting to exemplify the atmospheric and emotional complexities of “experience”. As if travelling in and out of dreams, the audience are given a double taste of existence – the bliss of complete emptiness and a sense of oneness with the outer world.

Education Specials
Tailored for secondary and tertiary students, the Songs of Being Education Special offers young audiences an entry point into contemporary theatre through live performance. During the post-show sharing, the creative team will explain their process of reinterpreting literary classics into a multimedia musical work. The session will further explore how multimedia elements are woven into the distinct architectural characteristics of Tai Kwun’s venues to craft a site-specific theatre experience.

Please send your inquiry to performingarts@taikwunarts.hk for details of enrolment.

Date: 15 – 16.4.2026 (Wed-Thu)
Time: 3pm – 5pm
Venue: JC Cube
Group size: 80
Language: Cantonese

Between Selves【SPOTLIGHT: A Season of Performing Arts 2026】

Through SPOTLIGHT, Tai Kwun has been committed to supporting independent choreographic works since 2018. Many artists were commissioned over the years to create small-to-medium-scale dance productions, gracing the different venues and spaces of Tai Kwun. This year's SPOTLIGHT presents Between Selves, a double bill of contemporary dance pieces by dancer-choreographers Cola Ho, Hong Kong-born and Europe-based, and Liu Qingyu from Guangzhou. Staged for the first time on the Laundry Steps, a non-traditional performance space, Between Selves explores the boundaries of identity and the "self".

Waiting is the suspended state of staying and leaving, movement and stillness, past and future. Who exactly is waiting for whom, and for what? His and her ethnic and cultural backgrounds are being speculated, questioned and judged – and vice versa. Cola Ho's Limbo: The Waiting Room draws upon Ho's own experiences of Asian life abroad. Her imagination runs wild with two immigrant dancers inside a waiting room, creating a collage of psychological landscapes filled with ample drama. Within this subtle liminal space, identities and roles are blurred between gazing and being gazed upon.

In the digital age, alongside our real-world identity, we also have virtual ones – mirror images or alter egos that are constructed and idealised personas. The two identities continue to overlap and flow, gradually becoming intertwined and inseparable. A spinoff from Tai Kwun's "Performance Co-Lab: Rehearsing Symbiosis" in 2024, Double Being features Liu Qingyu as a live stream host. As she dances in front of the computer, her live footage is magnified, distorted and mirrored, turning her solo into a duet or even a group dance. Similar to the split personality in Satoshi Kon's Perfect Blue or human–machine fusion in Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell, Liu pairs up with another version of herself in a joint attempt to cross the divide between real and virtual identities.

Play Reading: The Midnight Gallery【SPOTLIGHT: A Season of Performing Arts 2026】

Play Reading is Tai Kwun's all-new platform that breaks away from conventional staged readings, exploring different spaces to create site-specific performances throughout the historic site. Outstanding texts selected from three disciplines – namely film, theatre, lifestyle and culture – are presented to support emerging theatre makers while offering the audiences a fresh theatrical experience.

Alice Lee, founder of ZtoryTeller, teams up with veteran theatre-maker Tree Kwok on her first venture into performing arts. In The Midnight Gallery, Prison Yard become the stage for the theatrical piece, where two actors and one storyteller move between glass structures to examine the weight of emotional distance between people.

Programme 3: The Midnight Gallery
Date : 19-21.4.2026 (Sun-Tue)
Time : 8pm – 9pm
Location : Prison Yard

The Liar【SPOTLIGHT: A Season of Performing Arts 2026】

An actor stands on the stage. His name is Tai, he is from Hong Kong, and he begins to tell a story. It is about himself, his life, and his background. He tells of an assault of which he was the victim. Suddenly, he stops. He says that some of what he said was not true. He says that he adjusted parts of it, and he starts again.

The Liar is a performance about how easily we can be seduced by a good story, and about the anatomy of a liar. It exposes an actor on stage, but it could just as well be the story of how heads of state, the media, corporations, and many others practice the same art of seduction—an art that has, at all times, been performed on the world's stages.

Acclaimed across the European and American theatre scene, Danish director Tue Biering makes his Asian stage debut with The Liar. Joining forces with Hong Kong actor Tai Yin Chan, the two have co-created a long-gestating, internationally commissioned solo performance. Media artist Hon Ka Chun deftly creates live visuals, magnifying striking, sensory-impacting images through bold live streaming. Audiences are warmly invited to step into witnessing the working bench of story-making, as the performer conjures various worlds from minimal props, sound, and even the audience themselves—assembling scenes out of a blank canvas for a unique theatrical experience.

On the Up Grade【SPOTLIGHT: A Season of Performing Arts 2026】

Eccentric with a sense of humour uniquely his own, Guangzhou choreographer ErGao (He Qiwo) returns to Tai Kwun with his latest work inspired by fabrics. Following Disco-Teca (2018) and Butterfly Island (2023), On the Up Grade weaves whimsical dances with quirky knockoff-inspired aesthetics into dazzling wax prints while extending the artist's long-standing concern for the marginalised. Famed video and multimedia artist Cao Fei collaborates as artistic director for the first time, inviting audiences to a futuristic pedestrian street and global shop in a boisterous celebration full of unexpected delights!

The wildly colourful batik fabric has travelled across Indonesia, the Netherlands, the African continent and China. Brimming with vitality, it is like seeds that took root in different soils and grew into different cultural narratives. ErGao made multiple visits to the African communities along Xiaobei Road, Guangzhou, where he was fascinated by the history and culture of this export-orientated fabric. From there, creative elements took form in his dance, projecting his boundless imagination for communities of the future.

During the performance, F Hall will be filled with batik fabrics. Against a kaleidoscopic backdrop, dancers blend African dance, Chinese folk dance, contemporary dance, Wingchun and Hung Fist into a potpourri of cultural gems that nourishes both the body and the soul. The Prison Yard will become a futuristic pedestrian street where batik fabrics are shaped into a parade of human forms, all brought alive by this ritualistic celebration of life and rebirth.