This month I’ve been in Taichung, Taiwan for a performance of City of Floating Sounds, and Hong Kong for a visit to West Kowloon, a brand new cultural district.

Taichung is purported to be the home of bubble tea, where they first combined tapioca pearls and warm milk tea to make a delicious drink, which works so very well in this hot and humid climate. The gig we were doing took place in the National Theatre of Taichung, designed by Toyo Ito, an intensely ‘organic meets urban’ piece of architecture that feels at once homely and imposing. Huge curving lines intersect with the containing box of the building, like a fruit that’s been sliced. Contained inside is a 2000-seat venue where the City of Floating Sounds performance took place, and where we turned convention on its head by putting the orchestra in the stalls and the audience entering onto the stage.

Our city walks, which preceded the live performance, started from various points around the city, followed by the side of river paths and the occasional atmospheric temple, passing through incredible urban parks with raised walkways over lily ponds, and huge open spaces with massive civic buildings and towering condominiums watching over us. One route started in a park in a quiet residential area, surrounded by long-bearded banyan trees and the chirp of birds as children played in the playpark.

It was there that I was introduced to the phenomenon of Pikmin Bloom, which seems to have taken Taiwan by storm. Think of it as a successor to Pokémon Go; it’s a locative game where you grow little (virtual) plants/animals which can then help you achieve tasks, and which you have to feed. They are incredibly cute, and you can send them on expeditions for you, and they send postcards if you travel! Since we were doing so much walking in Taichung I managed to rack up quite a few points (steps). It’s well worth a try if you need another excuse to do some walking.
I found it very interesting that there was strong local interest in it, and that the locative game phenomenon quickly became quite niche in Europe.

After four performances in Taichung, I then travelled to Hong Kong to visit West Kowloon, a huge new cultural district which is on 40 hectares of reclaimed land. The scale of Hong Kong’s buildings and thinking dwarfs anything else I’ve seen. Skyscrapers are everywhere, and the scale of the biggest ones are difficult to comprehend in human terms, even when you’re underneath, simply looking at them. Walking in the city is deceptively local; it’s not a huge place, but when you factor in the vertical aspect Hong Kong becomes enormous. Often you’ll realise that there are multiple raised walkways above you spanning the huge roads, or 30+ storeys of restaurants, shopping, offices and apartments directly above. These provided food for thought when designing walking experiences. How can we combine the vertical into what is usually thought of as a 2-dimensional walking experience, when people can be part of the same experience but physically directly above another person?
The omnipresent blue dot can’t account for this, making me realise that often our simplified interpretation of physical space does not represent lived experience.

Regarding the West Kowloon Cultural District, the website doesn’t really do justice to the scale of the operation. They have a huge number of brand new spaces for performance: Freespace, an impressive black box theatre venue which is home to more experimental and interesting dance, theatre and cross-arts pieces; the Palace Museum, a massive and imposing museum with world-renowned shows on multiple floors; M+, a huge contemporary art gallery which had a Lee Bul retrospective when I went.
However, what we were visiting was the huge new WestK Performing Arts Centre, currently under construction and due to open next year.
All these are massive, world-class institutions with stunning art being performed, and all situated in a stunning ‘Art Park’, a wonderful green space with promenades along the waterfront and places for people to be outdoors, to relax and socialise, so sorely needed in this city.
This positions Hong Kong as a world leader for contemporary performance and arts, and a destination for the future.

It’s been a whirlwind tour, and it’s made me realise that we need to take stock of the possibilities afforded by such vastly different urban environments, both the possibilities offered and the reasons for thinking laterally about urban constructs and how we navigate them. It’s an inspiration for re-examining the way we walk in such spaces, and the responses we make in our creative endeavours.

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