2022 Hong Kong Arts Festival unveils a pandemic-hit line-up dominated by local acts, with a Sun Yat-sen musical and ‘immersive opera’ Laila among the highlights

Festival’s landmark 50th edition won’t feature visiting international acts because of quarantine rules but will present some ambitious local commissions

Highlights include a free opera, a coming-of-age musical about Sun Yat-sen, Candice Chong’s long-awaited play We Are Gay, and dance opera Love Streams

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A scene from “Laila”, an immersive opera that is one of the highlights of the 50th Hong Kong Arts Festival in 2022. Six to eight audience members at a time will view a 15-20 minute performance. Photo: Hong Kong Arts Festival

Sophia Xu

Published: 10:42pm, 14 Dec 2021Updated: 9:21pm, 10 Feb 2022

Corrected [9:19pm, 10 Feb, 2022]

[9:19pm, 10 Feb, 2022]
On February 10, 2022 organisers announced most in-venue festival performances had been cancelled or postponed because of uncertainty about the availability of venues closed to curb the spread of Covid-19, and social-distancing measures.

The 50th edition of the Hong Kong Arts Festival (HKAF) should be celebrated with great fanfare for the cultural landmark that it is, but with Covid-19 travel restrictions unlikely to be lifted in time for spring 2022, on December 14 organisers announced a line-up dominated by local acts.

They said they hoped Hong Kong audiences would still be enthused by the plethora of new commissions and increasingly sophisticated use of digital technology in the arts.

The annual festival of performing arts officially kicks off on February 25 with Laila, an “immersive opera” with free admission co-produced by the HKAF and the Finnish National Opera and Ballet that is one of the major highlights among the 60 programmes to be presented over six weeks.

Unlike 2021, when the festival had to cancel a number of in-venue programmes because of social distancing and even move Hong Kong shows online, the 2022 edition will take full advantage of venues’ reopening; only nine of the programmes are going to be online.

Yat-sen, a musical based on the life of Sun Yat-sen, will have its premiere at the 50th Hong Kong Arts Festival in 2022. Photo: Hong Kong Arts Festival

Even if there is a general fatigue with streaming after two years of the pandemic, Tisa Ho, the festival’s executive director, said online programmes were probably here to stay.

“There are some things that, because they are intended to be online, you can’t do even if [the performers] were here,” she said. For example, TM, by the Belgian group Ontroerend Goed, is a live, interactive online performance for one audience member at a time.