
"Deep Roots" Small-scale Imaginative Practice
Director: Henry Chan
Producer and composition: Loui Yuen
Performers: Ko Ki-yan Kookie, Tong Chung Can, Vida Wu, Chan Tak Wing, Tsang Fung Ching
Lighting design: Wong Ka-ki
Sound design: Brian Ting
Performance photography: Edwin Chuk Yin Man
Video: Jovita Siu, Tiffany Wong
Thank you for the commission from the Taipei Museum of Art to conduct phased creative research
Deep Roots will enter its next phase of creative development in 2023.
Become one of the performance productions of the "Three-year Table" project of the Forward Drama Workshop: "Roots Passing Through Your Air"
"Deep Roots" is adapted from the work of the same name by Hong Kong writer Huang Yi. It uses the love story of a young woman "you" as the starting point. It writes about a banyan tree that was chopped down outside Hong Kong University, women's struggling self-worth under social media, and Memory and forgetting of a generation.
Photos by Edwin Chuk

1. Tang Chi Ng Building, University of Hong Kong, Bonham Road, Banyan Tree
She and he fell in love under a century-old banyan tree. She took great pains to arrange a wedding photo shoot on a narrow and busy street to attract everyone’s attention. In the end, the wedding photo was abandoned in a garbage dump, and only her face was clearly photographed and posted on social media. People say that the century-old banyan tree is the collective memory of many Sai Wan residents and HKU students, and is a unique landscape that should be preserved. But for her, it only symbolizes the humiliation of her being broken off and is proof of her failure in life.

2. What do you listen to and what do you think of?
How is memory based? Sometimes we hear a song, some sounds of fabric rubbing against each other, or an overly loud air conditioner, and the sound triggers us to "feel" that we are in a scene that left a deep impression on us from the past.
If we listen to familiar songs in the theater and have impressions of sounds every day, how can our memory construct another meaning for the performance? When different technical media such as sound, text monologues, and actors' performances belong to different memory fragments of girls, what happens in the theater is the collision of contradictory memories belonging to different time and space.

3. You who cannot defend yourself
You are every female narrator, the female model who is not allowed to speak, the human microphone that receives the sound, the heroine who appears repeatedly in the text and is always described in the second person... You can also be the still photo of the computer on the stage, or the audience.
The performers repeatedly told the audience: This is "your" story. How far are these silent protagonists from the world on stage?
