Romance of the Rock (1987)

Having watched the archives on Youtube over and over again, with visuals, only audio, only visuals, here is a sort of review of my journey with it. The play was performed 25 times during 8 runs around different theatres in Hong Kong. It was a big success for Zuni the theatre company and a huge deal in terms of the size of Hong Kong.

Audio only:

It is harder than I thought it would to consume, I find it very hard to fall asleep due to the lack of sound and me being very tired at the time. It was however still very fascinating what my head is doing to fill in the gaps with imaginary visuals. Why do my brain try to locate where the sound (whether it is made by an object or a human) is coming from even though it is a mono recording? You can still hear if the sound is made facing the audience and vaguely the distance of it but that’s it in terms of theatre blockings and compositions.

The dialogues (if you can call it that) are very much keywords and sort of main social and political concerns, cultural important artifacts and an irony that’s built on the current society they found themselves in in 1987 Hong Kong.

I felt an immense pain listening, kept thinking about the future for them at the time. So hopeless about what’s going to happen to Hong Kong and how little they can do about anything. And that would turn out to be true, or even more horrible than imagined. That is why I think Hong Kong people are so romantic and at the same time passivists. In our heads we make up stories to make ourselves feel better, but we know tomorrow is only going to be worse.

With Visuals:

This time it is of course way more clear what they are doing and trying to achieve. It felt way more comedic as the movements now fill in the gaps of what the microphone could not pick up. Having seen the movements, it seems the play is way more sarcastic. There is a fear inside the comedy, fear of the future.

The story also appears to the surface. It is a three part story about three rocks in different times, how are they oppressed, how are they wronged, and how do they lift the rocks in their hearts and move on.

The piece makes me think about how the future must have seemed like to the people at the time. Before Tian An Men incident in 1989, before freedom being taken away. None of the people at the time could have imagined how bad it would be, yet they are already so impossibly pessimistic about it.

That is why we are not very forward thinking people. We are taught that our futures are not in our hands, but the hands of the authority, which we have no parts in playing. The only thing we can do, is to do a good job at whatever we are doing, to provide our family with a good life, to not tip over and fall, that is an achievement on its own. Future is not for us to think, but to prepare for it arrival, because it will be bad.

And slowly moving into now, people could not even think about the present, because tomorrow had arrived, and it is awful. If you’re too conscious of our present you will just get depressed and ends up harming yourself. So we shift our focus on work, on entertainments, on romantic ideas. To get away from the present, for just a little longer, hope it will get better soon.

Back to my piece, how do I even start to imagine this future? How do I not create an activist piece, and propose a future with hope? How do I imagine a future with the knowledge of the present?

This is a parody of the theme song to the play in 1987. One thing we are good at is laughing at ourselves, and reflect through that.