Milk and Honey

Directors' Notes

In the process of making Milk and Honey, we have been looking for ways to elevate contemporary issues to eternal themes by finding their echoes in the myth and religion. Our starting point for the show was the biblical title, Milk and Honey, locating the idea of migrating in search of a better life - a ‘promised land’ - in Exodus, long before any of the borders we are currently concerned with were established. From that point, we’ve been on a relatively epic journey of our own, wading through everything from Sanskrit Puranas to Aeschylus, animal migration patterns to Hong Kong migration statistics, American Creationists to Egyptian creation myths. However, in spite of such an eclectic array of sources, the surprising thing in our research has been the shared narratives we have kept discovering between vastly different cultures and apparently contradictory ways of thinking. These narratives are largely journeys in search of the meaning in chaos, in coping with the absurdity of life and finding a way to improve social cohesion through shared ideas and ideals.

“The history of religions reaches down and makes contact with that which is essentially human: the relation of man to the sacred. The history of religions can play an extremely important role in the crisis we are living through. The crises of modern man are to a large extent religious ones, insofar as they are an awakening of his awareness to an absence of meaning.” - Mircea Eliade, Ordeal by Labyrinth (1982)

With Milk and Honey, we hope to introduce Song Theatre to Hong Kong. The act of singing has been a part of theatre since the dithyramb in ancient Greece, but the advent of Musical Theatre as a genre in the 19th century meant that the use of singing in theatre became largely associated with one type of show, with conventions of staging, structure, and content. By using the term ‘Song Theatre’ we hope to reclaim live singing for use in experimental theatre forms, mixing different traditions to create something new. Our sources for the songs are just as diverse as those for the images and text of the performance, including Ukrainian, Georgian, Bulgarian, Latin, Sanskrit, and English(es).

We are deeply indebted to the legacy of Tadeusz Kantor, both in the way we work with objects and with ritual. We are also hugely influenced by the work with song and tradition in the anthropological theatres that emerged from the 70’s (Grotowski, Barba, Schechner, Gardzienice) but from a strongly postmodernist perspective.

Exploring the theme of migration has been a very personal subject for all of our devising team, and we each have very different histories of both family and personal migration. As an immigrant in Hong Kong myself I feel extremely grateful for the trust and support of everyone who has made it possible for me to continue to live and work here, making theatre I care about. I would also like to specially thank my co-director Billy Sy, without whom this show would never have come into being.