Electric Requiem: God Save the Queen

As Hong Kong has been handover for over 10 years, something remarkable and memorable are now gradually demolished. Samson Young, the school new teacher as well as well-known emergent media and music artist and composer, produced a show to remember the days of colonial ruling by the U.K..

In this entry, I won't discuss about the multimedia theater but on the arrangement of the whole requiem. Samson is trained as a traditional music performer and composer. However, he always composes contemporary style of music and matches with some videos with symbolic meaning. This show has no exception.

In this show, he includes some sound extract from TV news in the requiem. Most of them are related to the government officials attitude towards protection of historical building and also the comments from public on it. This makes the requiem more like a complaint to the government policy and dissatisfaction which is more experimental and different from the traditional.

The show just presents the name of each movement but not the contents and lyrics. They are all printed on the programme booklet. However, as the light are dimmed in the black box theater, people who don't understand Cantonese might not know what's this show about. They are forced to listen the content by reduced listening. It is a kind of fun!

In the end of the show, there is an interview recording of Law Lan who is performing in the video. This makes us remember she acts as a queen which is a symbolic icon of colonial Hong Kong. Also, this shows the different personalities of Law Lan and remembers us that something are missing and thus we should preserve them.

I also use reduced listening to listen to the whole show as the videos and images are vague. After all, I still don't understand a lot about the message behind and the colonial Hong Kong immediately. But I can feel there is an urgency of saving the things missing. God Save The Queen, Please!