“Travel is the traveller. What we see isn’t what we see but what we are…” this quote by Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa represents precisely the initial aspiration that the two creators, Leong Son U and Mok Kuan Chong from PO Art Studio, had in mind when producing Lift Left Life Live. This production premiered in the Macao City Fringe Festival in 2022, where the lifts in the Macau Tower were transformed into air cabins to simulate the check-in, boarding and sightseeing process, creating a familiar yet novel travel experience for the audience.
After “boarding”, the audience could enjoy different performances when the “cabin door” on each floor was opened as the lift moved. The small and intimate space in the original version, which could only hold two “passengers”, has been changed into a freight lift in the Macao Arts Festival version this year that can accommodate a larger audience and allows for more interaction. In Leong’s words, “The production originally talked about the wish to escape from the lockdown and to go see the outside world during the epidemic, but this sentiment has gradually faded away after the reopening of borders. In this version we ponder: ‘how should we leave, and why’?”
By Wong Weng Si
Wong is a member of the audience, embroidery worker and former media practitioner. She took the “Modern Drama and Contemporary Theatre for Beginners” lecture series in 2018 and worked as a critic-in-residence for the “Reviews” website in 2019. She is currently engaged in art administration and curation.
This article is excerpted and translated from Chinese