The art of growing old: oral history theatre plays a part

ABSTRACT

This article reports on an oral history theatre project completed by a Hong Kong professional theatre company which involved more than 200 elders who participated as devising actors in two stage performances, with school students and the wider public as audiences. The study found that older participants in the project were much satisfied with their creative experience as a meaningful process to make sense of their past life – an artistic integration of memories for achieving coherent internal life-history. Using both quantitative questionnaire and qualitative methods, the paper discusses how these elders were mentally, emotionally, socially, and physically transformed through the art form of oral history theatre.

KEYWORDS:

• Oral history theatre
• internal life-history
• theatre for the elderly
• reminiscence theatre
• ethnodrama

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Officially established in 1981, Chung Ying Theatre Company originated in 1979 as a colonial theatre troupe with a mission to teach Hong Kong students, through theatre, English as a second language; first funded by the British Council and Hong Kong Government in the 1980s, the company introduced Theatre in Education with the leadership of a British Artistic Director Bernard Goss (Wong and Chan 2007). The name Chung Ying is a transliteration of the Cantonese words meaning ‘Sino-British’.

2 The Lion Rock was the name of the most spectacular mountain in Hong Kong, which shaped like a crouching lion viewing from her left side. ‘Under the Lion Rock’ became a common phrase meaning ‘(Hong Kong people) living our shared life’ since the late Hong Kong canto pop singer Roman Tam’s lyric was largely popularised especially after the 1980s.

3 The funder of the programme was Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust, and Chung Ying promised to use a small portion of the money to commission Hong Kong Metropolitan University (formerly The Open University of Hong Kong) to complete the research component in order to inform the funder about the outcomes achieved.

4 The performance was finally cancelled after some rehearsal sessions because of COVID-19.

5 During the 1960s–1970s, water rationing was a frequently used policy in Hong Kong under British colonial administration for limiting water using when water was scarce before the construction of larger freshwater reservoirs and water imports from mainland China.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust.

Notes on contributors

Jack Shu

Jack is Associate Professor at Hong Kong Metropolitan University. He wrote Applied Drama: The Praxis of Daily and Educational Drama (《應該用戲劇：戲劇的理論與教育實踐》) and translated Structuring Drama Work and Gavin Bolton: the Essential Writings.