Artist Jaffa Lam works with Ong Yong Lock and Hakgwai this time to turn the theatre to a laundromat that washes not dirty clothes, but your fatigued soul. Borrowing from Lam’s very own experiences, the installation is centred around social issues and the theme of life.

Lam’s mind is often occupied by issues such as identity, as well as the increasing social turmoil in Hong Kong. Dealing with the associated negative emotions is just like washing a dingy white shirt: no matter how hard you try, you can never restore its “whiteness” – and its “purity”.

You’ll see the sight and hear the sound of washing and drying: some people are trying to scrape dirt off themselves, some pretending that the dirt’s got nothing to do with them. You’re the only one who doesn’t have to be part of this, so don’t you worry about getting wet – all you have to do is to open your senses. Clothing is our second layer of skin, something that covers and protects us, as much as it conceals and disguises us.

During this washing process, we are placed together with our clothes in a laundry net made of cords that inter-lace reality and fiction, floating freely in the vastness of liquid detergent.

You can smell a soft and sweet scent of fabric softeners in this laundromat, but if you pay attention, there’s also this pungent odor of detergents that just won’t go away. Life is perhaps just as intricate and complicated, but also full of possibilities: to fight and flee, or to reconcile and let go – it’s all up to you.

If we keep our eyes and ears open and our minds alert, day-to-day we will be having a whole lot more fun. Dimitri de Perrot is a Swiss artist, musician, and theatre director. His primary interest lies in sound art, and his work often draws from his experience working with stage actors. His two sound-based installations, UNLESS and MYOUSIC, will open up new perspectives for the audience, allowing them to view the world in bold, new light.

Using sound and light as its main narratives, his stage play MYOUSIC collaps-es the distance between the audience and performers. The audience will be immersed in a mind-blowing sensory experience which challenges the established ways of thinking, as they listen to percussion music and the sound of people crying and laughing coming in all directions in a pitch black theatre. At the end of the day, are we the viewers or the performers – and after all, does it really matter?

A space does not come alive without people making stories and creating memories.

Under teachers’ mentorship, the acting and playwriting students of the School of Drama at The Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts will come together to take you on an authentic multi-sensory journey in the Hong Kong Arts Centre through the McAulay Studio, Shouson Theatre, Atrium and other parts of the building. The audience will be experiencing the new generation in dialogue with traces of memory and history of the 40-year-old establishment as they follow the actors to travel across time and space.

Will these memories find a place to set-tle and live on – perhaps on the minds of this new generation of art practitioners?