"Flee By Night" - Danny Yung Experimental Theater, Hong Kong, 3-27-10

An open letter to Danny Yung, Director, Scriptwriter, Set Designer

“Flee By Night”:  reflections nine days after attending a performance

Since these remarks are generated via reflection and memory, always an act of recreation and interpretation, they should be seen not so much as a commentary on the actual performance, but on the impact of that performance on me as a spectator/consumer of the evening’s entertainment.  They are also firmly imbedded within the experiences of my first trip to Hong Kong (which I experienced as quite marvelous).  This clearly has colored my recreation of this performance to some degree but, as with all art that successfully engages its audience, the aftereffect is of greater and more lasting value than initial reactions in the first glow of post-performance.

“Flee By Night” was presented as an opera of the body and mind, rather than primarily of the voice.  A “mute” opera, if you will, performed by Kun opera performers who do not sing on stage.  Performance is thus freed to a certain degree from text, at least the declaiming of text on stage by actors.  That duty is performed via text projected on a backdrop that both introduces and comments upon the action taking place on the stage-- thereby shaping audience interpretation of what is unfolding both on stage and within them--and by a static actor who does not directly engage with either the actors or the audience.  The body regains its role as an expressive medium of communication—standing half-way between traditional text-based theater and dance.  Perhaps this production is more akin to silent cinema with its interpenetration of expressive movement, text and music.  As an aficionado of silent cinema since adolescence and a dancer for most of my life, I approve of the primacy given to the body and expressive movement in this production.

A series of juxtapositions comes to mind when I initially reflect on the performance of this theater piece.

Roles and role playing
Identification and disidentification
Audience and performer
Open and closed
Black and white
Either, or

All of these apparently exclusionary categories circle around the following critical questions:

What is the subject of art?
Who is an actor?
Who and what is an author?
Who is an audience member/
What/who exists apart from the act of creation?
Does the subject choose its author?
Does the author choose his subject?

Additional questions raised by this work include:

How does art acquire its meaning(s)?  (a very common topic of inquiry in recent discourse on art)
How mutable is meaning?
How mutable is identity and identification?
Time/plot—is it a line, a circle or a spiral?
Who confers meaning on a work of art?
When does art belong to its creator and when does it free itself of its author?

Additional questions raised by this work are:

Is there truly a division between “I and thou”, or is this a totally artificial construct on some level?
What does it mean for an individual, a society if the division between “I and thou” is artificial?
If the distinction between creator and subject, between actor, stagehand and audience is artificial, where does the responsibility lie for continuing the trajectory of a work of art?

Finally, how does (or even should) art engage in political dialog?

Many questions are raised, open-ended, left to the audience to provide their own answers in the moment and through time.  As an author myself, I have pondered these questions (or others, quite similar to these) time and time again.  Where does art come from, who is it for, who does it belong to, how to best communicate with an audience?  Attending “Flee By Night” was a very fruitful experience for me personally.  Indeed, nine days after the evening’s performance I am still contemplating the questions it raised for me, searching for my own answers, and unlocking new questions and areas of inquiry.  This demonstrates the richness of the experience—from the initial concept, to the script, the performances and stagecraft, to direction and the preparation of the audience to be active participants in the process.  I found the concepts and presentation struck a universal chord.  You are to be congratulated on this deep, rich and though-provoking theater experience unlike any other I have attended.  I wish you all the best with its broader diffusion outside of Hong Kong.