16th Macao City Fringe Festival was officially inaugurated
The 16th Macao City Fringe Festival, organized by the Cultural Affairs Bureau and co-organized by the Civic and Municipal Affairs Bureau, is held from 13 to 22 January. The opening ceremony was held on Saturday, 14 January, at 3pm, at the Old Court Building, and was officiated by the President of the Cultural Affairs Bureau, Ung Vai Meng; the Head of the Department of Cultural Events of the Cultural Affairs Bureau, Kent Ieong Chi Kin and the representatives of the artistic groups, among others.
On the day of the opening ceremony, six excellent shows were presented, including Zuò Zuò Tea House, Night, Mobile Kitchen, In Good Hands, Body Code: Post-colonial Blue Birds and Antiwords, offering a rich and diverse programme for the public to enjoy the feast of art in the weekend. The programmes were well-received by the public. Tickets for the shows such as Mobile Kitchen, In Good Hands, Funeral for the Living, The Smooth Life, Bubble and The Other Side of the Sacred, among others, were sold out. A few tickets are still available for the remaining shows. The public is advised to purchase their tickets as soon as possible.
This edition of the Macao City Fringe Festival, taking “A Feast of Creativity! Bon Appétit!” as a slogan and adopting the concept of “All around the city, our stages, our patrons, our artists” again, invites artists from local and different parts of the world to participate, in order to create a distinctive event in the city. On the day of the opening ceremony, the performance Zuò Zuò Tea House, hosted in 6 consecutive sessions in the afternoon, reveals the solitude and secrets in Rua da Felicidade by combining elements of dance and music and digging into the history of the red-light district. At night, Night, rendered by Circolando from Portugal, encourages audience to question on languages and aesthetics through the dialogue with live music manipulated by a DJ and an intensely physical and emotional dance by a trio of men; Mobile Kitchen, invites an illustration designer and movie actress, Mi Lee, to make Chinese cuisine and share her life stories; In Good Hands, presented by Irish, is an interactive performance of music and storytelling at salon, revealing the secrets, trusts and human needs; the dance Body Code: Post-colonial Blue Birds, performed by contemporary dancers from Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, tells the colonial history of the three cities by using body language to leave historical marks behind; the performance Antiwords, presented by two actresses in huge masks, stimulates the audience with absurd humour as drunken characters in the show.
In the “Thematic talks: Foreign Theatre – Body, Memory and Labour” on Sunday, 15 January, at 4pm, at Sir Robert Ho Tung Library, Husam Abed from Jordan, Lam Teng Teng and Kevin Chio from the Rolling Puppet Alternative Theatre in Macao, Nicole Vong and Bobo Leong from Macau Experimental Theatre and Cally Yu from Hong Kong to share their creation process in artistic career. Admission is free. Registration for the thematic talks is now open, subject to availability.
Tickets are available through the Macau Ticketing Network. Online registration for the outreach programme is available at www.icm.gov.mo/eform/event. For more information about the programmes, please visit the Macao City Fringe Festival’s webpage at www.macaucityfringe.gov.mo. 24-hour Ticketing hotline: 2855 5555; online ticketing: www.macauticket.com.
