The Beautiful Ones

Artistic Directors' Notes

The Beautiful Ones is Rooftop Productions’ first public production as a company. We set ourselves up in Hong Kong at the end of last year with a vision to make work that is innovative and unique. Our work is informed by our international training and experience in contemporary theatre making, but we hope to go beyond this, making work that is fresh, original and specific to Hong Kong.

The ideas of site-specific theatre are also fundamental to our creative work. By allowing ourselves to be guided by the space we work with, we hope to use its peculiarities to inspire us and allow us to find new audience-performer relationships.

Technology in the theatre is becoming much more widely adopted as the tools become more accessible and easy to use. We believe it is important to find ways of integrating technology into performance without losing the essential live and interactive nature of theatre. We also hope to use the advantages of new technology to make theatre more accessible to new audiences, and to share the tools we develop with other emerging artists to expand on these new possibilities.

The Beautiful Ones

The show was inspired John B. Calhoun’s rodent crowding experiments in the 60’s, and their striking similarity to modern society in a densely packed global city like Hong Kong. In order to approach this topic in a more nuanced way, we looked to mythology, and particularly Ovid’s Metamorphoses to expand on the themes and similarities that emerged.

“By giving life to the inanimate and rendering the divine human, Ovid makes mythology the everyday, flesh-and-blood world of his reader. [...] Ovid's version of mythology intimates that the past was not larger than life: it was like the present.” - Solodow, The World of Ovid's Metamorphoses

The polyphonic singing we’ve created for the performance uses traditional Georgian harmonic structures and melodies, whose origins date from around the same time as Ovid. The rhythms come directly from Ovid’s text, following the length of the syllables of his dactylic hexameter. We have used an academic reconstruction of the original Latin pronunciation instead of following the more familiar Italian church pronunciation. We hope that this can help to bring something unfamiliar but authentic to the audience.

Apart from text taken from Calhoun and other academics concerned with his research, we have also used original and translated versions of Ovid, as well as translated versions of Euripides and Hesiod. We should also acknowledge the influence of Samuel Beckett - particularly Quad; his piece for four players, lights and percussion, which has no spoken text, and whose only instructions describe a repetitive sequence in which the performers walk between the corners of a square.

This performance is a synthesis of many different eclectic elements, in terms of both source and structure. We hope that by pushing ourselves to go beyond familiar territory, we can start to discover and expand on new forms and approaches for contemporary theatre in Hong Kong.

Last but not least, we would like to especially thank our creative team for all their hard work, and our friends and audiences for their support. Please carry on supporting the development of Hong Kong “small” theatre. - Ivor and Michelle