Your show explores various aspects of ritual practices, especially Chinese funeral ceremonies. What drew you towards these?

The short answer is: laughter and surprise at funerals.

The longer answer: I’ve always been fascinated by the rituals I was surrounded by as a child that shaped my worldview. I’ve been just as interested in how these rituals evolve or devolve over time to fit (or fail) contemporary life. With HEAVEN FM, I wanted to isolate elements of these rituals—materials, gestures, colours, spatial and temporal sensibilities—and give them agency to make meaning with one another. Over the years, stories, images, and new rituals emerged.

As a member of a diaspora and as a first-generation Chinese-Canadian, I feel a deep-rooted connection to my motherland(s). But because of how far away I am from these places, if I don’t invest in and nurture this connection, it gets lost. What do I leave behind? What do I carry forward? What do I chase? I’m always struck by how different my cultural context is in the West, how contradictory my reality is to that of my ancestors. I think this is a feeling shared by many folks of the diaspora, and part of Hong Kong Exile’s work resides in this paradox of familiarity and foreignness towards one’s motherland.

Your work is based on an approach known as “devised theatre.” How would you describe this method of working, and how was it deployed in the creation of HEAVEN FM?

Devised theatre is a common practice in Vancouver, probably because many creators here studied at the School of Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University, where we were taught a method that’s similar to collective creation or écriture de plateau (stage writing). All the materials and aspects of production are brought together into the room from day one. There’s no script, there’s no plan. The project is developed with everyone’s input based on improvisation.

Similarly, there was no script for HEAVEN FM. My job was more about gathering the right team, resources, and inspirations…and then fostering a charged, playful, sacred space. Devising HEAVEN FM meant that we were as bold about trying ideas as we were about letting ideas go. It meant that things happening in our personal lives and in the larger global political context were alive and present with us in the rehearsal room. Devising also asked that we sit in the discomfort of not knowing what we were making and where we’d end up. HEAVEN FM is an elusive work, with a fundamental slipperiness to it, and we wanted to embrace that volatility as it resonated for us both aesthetically and thematically. The challenge for us is to preserve this slipperiness and devising energy no matter how many times we perform the show.

What is the role of technology in HEAVEN FM?

In Hong Kong Exile, technology as body, as choreography, is often central to our thinking. For each project, we extensively research what tools, props, systems we want. We can't move far until we have designed the parameters of our playground. In this case, we went through various iterations before making our choice. At first, we wanted to work with motorized lamps hung from a fly grid but we quickly realized how much our creative process and budget would then rely on electrical engineers and materials that are not our expertise. We also knew the need for a fly grid would make development and touring very difficult. We are often seeking tech hacks that offer exciting creative constraints while making touring “lighter”. We therefore turned towards lights that wouldn’t need to be hung—such as moving head lights, the ones you see at concert venues. We explored all kinds of possibilities with these head lights in combination with the dancers, until we said to ourselves, “What if the lighting came from the dancers’ bodies? And why not the sound too?” This idea led to another: why not lean into battery-operated and hand-held equipment? Since Hong Kong Exile is associated with very sophisticated use of technology, we thought it would be fun to subvert audience expectations by using everyday devices, such as radios. Working with radio frequencies and how they constantly and invisibly circulate around us raised compelling.

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