In May, the Macao Arts Festival returns for its 26th edition featuring 30 acts and visual arts exhibitions from around the globe that, together with the outreach programme, total over 100 activities. The theme of this year’s edition, “Encounter”, represents an attempt to explore the linguistic diversity of the performing arts and to break through various language barriers. In addition to presenting world-class innovative works, the Festival is also committed to providing opportunities for local artists to showcase their talent. Here are just a few of the tremendous performances coming our way in May.Lied Ballet
Lied Ballet
Created within the 68th Avignon Festival 2014, Thomas Lebrun’s Lied Ballet is a world in three acts where epochs that have morphed and fashioned today’s art of choreography coincide and clash. Evoking the imagery and symbolism of historic eras, eight dancers incarnate the zeitgeist of momentous times through variations of ballet steps and clean-cut gestures.
1, 2 May | Friday, Saturday | 8pm | Macao Cultural Centre Grand Auditorium
Savanna – A Possible Landscape
A compelling piece of visual theatre, tells two touching stories of the cycle of life. The first story, an autobiographical narrative by Israeli puppeteer Amit Drori, tells of a boy’s jealousy of his mother’s piano. While captivated by the instrument he is resentful of the attention she dotes on it. After his mother dies, the boy hunts down the piano and disassembles it trying to erase it from his memory, only to find he suddenly can think of nothing else. In the second story, the performers set about unpacking wooden crates and constructing the “Savanna” landscape. As more boxes are unpacked, wonderful robotic animals are revealed – an image of paradise where life is being created for the first time, or a scary possibility of an artificial nature that could only exist in a room, isolated from the “real world”, like a lost paradise.
2, 3 May | Saturday, Sunday 11am, 8pm (2, 3/5); 3pm (2, 3/5) | Old Court Building
The Suit
While returning home from work, Philomen arrives home just in time to see another man exiting the window, who in his haste leaves his suit behind. The incensed husband decides to punish his wayward wife Matilda with an unconventional burden. She must treat the empty suit as if it is alive and a guest in their home, feeding, entertaining and strolling through the streets of their town with the inanimate, empty garment. It is only when Matilda dies of humiliation that Philomen realizes the cruelty of what he has done.
8-10 May | Friday – Sunday 8pm (8, 9/5); 3pm (10/5) | Macao Cultural Centre Small Auditorium
Aerodynamics
Commissioned by the Macao Arts Festival, through the reorganisation of the stereoscopic dimension of space and time, Lin Wen-chung carefully observes the details of muscle movement and creates a set of movements which demonstrate the motion of the body through the air, with every muscle fibre tense in a trial against gravity. The dancers explore the space and the relationship between the physical and the psychological, only bound by the imagination.
9 May | Saturday | 8pm | Macao Cultural Centre | Grand Auditorium
Old Age
“Do I say I am old because I am old, or am I old because I say I am old?” This is the question that the Portuguese theatre group Teatro Praga sets out to answer in Old Age. The actors, before starting, have already retired. People with a past, with wrinkles where we can’t see them. The nearest horizon is death, but melancholy is comedy and despair is laughter. In this play the plot serves as a pretext to deepen the questions of “Who am I?” and “What is old age all about?”
21 – 23 May | Thursday, Friday, Saturday 8pm; 3pm (23/5) | Old Court Building, 2nd floor
Macao’s Got Talent
Macao’s Patuá-language drama group Dóci Papiaçám, aims to preserve this unique dialect through original and humorous plays performed in Patuá by local actors. This year’s play, Macao’s Got Talent, observes that Macao is a land of talented people, but where are the talents and who decides about their geniality? The plot unfolds in today’s Macao, a city in which the production of talents is a priority, in order to contribute to the intellectual and technical development of our city.
23, 24 May | Saturday, Sunday | 7pm | Macao Cultural Centre | Grand Auditorium
Transports Exceptionnels
With 700 performances since its creation in 2005, and having performed in more than 160 cities in France and in more than 50 countries, Transports Exceptionnels is an unexpected duo between a dancer and an excavator, a poetic twenty-minute dialogue between a man and a huge machine, between iron and flesh. The machine has almost human movements and is in harmony with the choreography of the dancer. The metaphor is legible; it’s a matter of accepting that the world is under construction, in motion for the worth and the better…
23-25 May | Saturday – Monday | 3pm, 5pm | Sai Van Lake Square
Out of Context – for Pina
Director Alain Platel continues his search for a language of movement connected to the unconscious, the arbitrary, the uncontrolled. The movement material covers the entire range of dyskinesia and dystonia, in other words: spasms, convulsions and tics. As a former special-needs educator working with children with motor and multiple disabilities, Platel understands deformities and muscle impediments. Rather than censuring, he celebrates the beauty that the malformed and the misshapen have wrung, the laid-bare crux of human emotion expressed through movements and gestures. Platel attempts to devise a new physical language, from which, out of chaos, we can decipher rational undertones and find peace.
23, 24 May | Saturday, Sunday | 8pm (23/5); 3pm (24/5) | Macao Cultural Centre – Small Auditorium
Trust
Considered one of Europe’s most important theatrical voices, German playwright and director Falk Richter masterfully pens narratives that analyze economic and political situations and the psychological and physical effects they have on the emotional state of the modern individual. In collaboration with celebrated dancer and choreographer Anouk van Dijk, Richter created Trust. Performed by an ensemble of actors from the renowned Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz theatre in Berlin, and dancers from the anoukvandijk dc company, Trust fearlessly questions the contemporary world in which we live. Written in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crash, the piece explores, through dialogue and dance, the behaviours that led to the financial tsunami, the resulting collapse of trust in political and economic institutions and the emotional aftermath.
29, 30 May | Friday, Saturday | 8pm | Macao Cultural Centre | Grand Auditorium
Tale of the Pipa
An all-time classic, Tale of the Pipa is highly and widely regarded as the most influential piece of traditional Cantonese opera. Its artistic significance and historical influence have remained undiminished throughout the centuries and inspired many contemporary operas. The opera’s characters personify traditional virtues championing loyalty to one’s country, family and marriage – still important to this day and age.
10 May | Sunday | 7:30pm | Alegria Cinema
