Last year, the Breakthrough Association presented The Bizarre Fairy Tales during the Macau Arts Festival. This year, the association presents The Fairy Tales from the World of Chaos (Chaos). I am glad to have been invited to continue participating in the creation of this series.
The production model and team of The Chaos have largely adopted those of The Bizarre Fairy Tales: connecting three independent stories and presenting a theatrical metaphor of society, politics and humanity through the hands of marvelous local painters, musicians, song writers, playwrights, directors, singers and actors.
The three stories in Chaos are: Collector written by me; Diligent Work by local writer Eric Chau; and The Hungry Ghost by Chaos’ artistic director, composer and lyricist Joe Lei.
The Collector combines the family story of a “memory plastic surgeon” with elegant and delicate illustrations by Lam Ieong Kun to reflect on the importance of memories in our lives. Diligent Work by Eric Chau shows the author’s usual critical style, using the story of a rank-and-file employee who is swallowed up by the dark side as metaphor to discuss current social issues. Pairing with the absurd drawing style of Un Chi Wai, Chau’s story seeks to launch serious enquiries against the society.
In The Hungry Ghost, the author sets the story against the backdrop of an ancient Chinese era of war and demonstrates the tragic lives of war-torn people. The story is an excellent match to the ancient style illustrations by Eric Fok.
I will leave it to the audience to comment on the performance of Chaos. But the three stories in the performance with “chaos” as their themes are in fact giving people all sorts of feelings, especially The Hungry Ghost.
This story reminds me of the short sci-fi story The Year of Great Famine written by a young mainland author. This story depicts a famine caused by bacteria that has brought humanity to its end days. These special bacteria live in people’s stomachs and change the eating habits of people, triggering a global wave of cannibalism. The story starts in the Tang Dynasty, and travels to China, Japan, the United States, South Africa and India. It i vividly depicts scenes and successfully creates a very creepy atmosphere, delivering a disaster story that could` compete with those of the Hollywood movies. It is unsurprising that the story won the of the Best Novella Award in the 2012 Xinyun (Nebula) Award for Global Chinese Science Fiction and the 2014 Chinese Sci-fi Galaxy Award’s Best Novella Award.
From The Year of Great Famine to Chaos and The Hungry Ghost, all of these stories touch on the idea of cannibalism. However, humans eating each other is by no means fictional and is indeed not far from us (The real-life news photographs at the end of Chaos are truly shocking).
For Chinese, the Cultural Revolution that took place 50 years ago was in fact a type of “man-eat-man” situation. When we reflect on this humanitarian disaster that still has such a huge impact after 50 years, is it enough to deter us and to prevent the coming of another chaos?
