Point and circles (This week's Photo Hunt themes)

This year's edition of the Hong Kong Arts Festival started a month earlier than is usually the case but I've yet to check out any of its offerings. This time last year, however, I already had taken in a performance of Hobson's Choice by the Birmingham Royal Ballet and the Power Plant show (which also originated from Britain) that were two of the 39th Hong Kong Arts Festival more unusual -- and, to my mind, inspired -- offerings.

The Power Plant show -- which I wrote about previously but am doing so again for this week's contribution to Sandi's and Gattina's Photo Hunts, took me out to Kowloon Walled City Park. Even in the daytime and bereft of the special effects, sounds and visuals that make up the Power Plant show, this public park is a place where the imagination can go pretty wild due to its colorful historical connections. (This now beautifully landscaped park stands on the site of the infamously more or less lawless Kowloon Walled City that began life as an imperial Chinese outpost but went on to become one of the most densely-populated places in the world.)

However, this magical mystery tour of a night show truly transformed the Kowloon Walled City Park into one where the unexpected would be found whenever one rounded one of the space's multiple corners -- with such as balls of fire dancing near the surface of one of the park's ponds, colorful circles of light floating about in another area and what at first glance looks like circular-shaped luminescent fruit stuck on trees in yet another area.

So, one might ask, was the point of all of this? The short answer looks to be "to entertain, of course!" A longer answer might well be that this show demonstrates how wonderfully art can combine with nature and, also, that the artistic experience is a sensory experience that utilizes the audience's as well as artists' abilities to imagine, share a love of fun surprises and reach out to one another and, in the process, rise above linguistic and cultural differences. :)