Ripped (This week's Photo Hunt theme)

As I write this, I'm not sure if this will be my final Photo Hunt entry -- not because I don't want to participate in the meme any more but, instead, because I don't see any themes on the list on organizer tnchick's blog past December 3. I'm hoping that it won't be the case as this week's entry is the kind that makes Photo Hunt feel meaningful to me -- in that it got me hunting through my now pretty substantial photo archive to find appropriate images for the designated theme.

As it so happens, I ended up going all the way back to August 2009 in my archive -- to photos I took after a multi-arts troupe visiting from the Netherlands called Hotel Modern came to Hong Kong and performed The Great War. A work that that fuses drama, visual art, object theater, puppetry, music, and film, it has the company making use of various paraphernalia to construct scale models of the nightmare world of the world war one soldier, then projects them on a large screen in real time to show the horrors of trench warfare and how lives were -- and Europe itself threatened to be -- torn and ripped apart over the course of "The World to End All Wars".

After the performance, audience members were invited on stage to more closely check out the miniature sets and talk to troupe members -- something that many people, including myself, eagerly did. Looking at what was used to fashion a compelling and actually moving anti-war story left me in greater awe of the abilities of the performers and the way in which they were connect imaginatively with the audience. I also was struck by how engaging the individual members of Hotel Modern were -- and how they seemed genuinely happy to answer questions they've undoubtedly been asked scores of times before and talk to their audience.

Thus it was that despite feeling saddened by the story that was told that evening, I actually left the performance venue feeling pretty good. Put another way: it really was heartening to encounter talented individuals who seemed less interested in "bigging up" themselves and more in their craft and message -- and especially so when their work are clearly successful in touching other people's hearts. :)