Hong Kong Creative Aging Arts Festival

EVENT DESCRIPTION

The first-ever “Hong Kong Creative Aging Arts Festival” (“HKCAAF”) , sponsored by Link REIT’s Link Together Initiatives and organised by Arts’ Options,  will be held from 25 September to 6 October 2024, at the Jockey Club Creative Arts Centre, Shek Kip Mei. The festival will feature over 100 senior artists who demonstrate their unwavering creativity and passions in drama, music and dance performance, visual arts exhibition, and celebrate life with the goodness of arts.

The theme of the first HKCASF “Enjoy and Immerse in Arts” originates from Confucian Analects. It underlines the organiser’s mission to promote arts as a means to enhance one’s wellness and spiritual abundance, as well as a medium of life education that works to influence lives.

The Link’s Link Together Initiatives has been supporting Arts’ Options’ “Sage Players”, a programme designed to provide professional theatre training for the silver-hair.

Drama, Music and Dancing

Some 100 artists partaking in the HKCAAF are aged between 55 and 86. They will present more than 30 shows spanning theatre, music and singing performance, video productions, dance and exhibitions.

The drama shows will be kick-started by “King Li, The Final Escape,” directed by Brenda Chan. The script borrows idea from Shakespeare’s King Lear to depict the stories unfolded in an elderly home of which the residents are played by the actors and actresses of the “Sage Players” programme. The closing show will be “Whispers of Life,” directed by Alan Lyddiard from the UK. Other theatre works include “May’s Musings” and “Tea Ceremony—A Gentle Discourse on Life”. Sing Ladies from Singapore will present a musical theatre “Eternal Stars”.

The music performances presented by musicians who are all 65 years old or above include a cappella show “Golden Tunes Under the Banyan Tree, “Band 1011’s   “1011 Music Party,” and an orchestra concert “Endless Sunsets Red Again”.  Unlock Dancing Plaza, a senior dancing group, will present “One, Two…Two and a Half” choreographed by Andy Li and Wong Wing-luk. The dancers will integrate childhood games like the rainbow hoop and “monkey bars” into their energetic movements.

Visual Arts and Photography Exhibitions

The visual arts exhibition “Forever Blissful Days with Arts,” which is curated by Dr. Evelyna Liang, will feature the works by 12 senior artists, including retired university professor, farmers, residents of nursery home and retired executive. Lau Kin-hung, a veteran film director and visual artist, curates a photography exhibition “Endless Moments,” which will showcase the works of over 20 senior photographers from Hong Kong, Korea, and Japan.

Cross-Generation Video Making Workshops

Two workshops catering for senior citizens will be conducted. The award-winning young film director Tsang Tsui-shan will host a workshop on Mobile Visuals to teach participants to write scripts and express their inner world using basic cinematography.  Animator and multimedia artist Yung Shing-fung will lead a work on stop-motion production, using handmade clay dolls.