Happy new year!
Hello and welcome to The Works, I’m Ben Pelletier. Later in the show, ringing – or should that be banging and hitting? – in the New Year, members of Toolbox Percussion will be with us. They’re an organisation that promotes contemporary percussion music in Hong Kong.

But first, in the words of theatre critic Akihiko Senda, the Japanese film director, writer and dramatist, Shuji Terayama was “the eternal avant-garde”. Terayama died relatively young, at 47, but despite his short creative life, his work encompasses experimental television, feature-length and short films, theatre, photography, countercultural essays, short fiction, and more. In December his play “Nuhikun (Directions to Servants)” was presented for two days at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre.

"Borrowed Scenery” is a traditional East Asia garden creation technique that incorporates the background landscape into the composition of a garden. It is also the title of an exhibition that’s part of this year’s Hong Kong Arts Development Council’s Jockey Club New Arts Power programme. Seven artists and art groups use different mediums to reimagine Hong Kong’s urban space against the background of our colonial past.

Welcome back. Toolbox Percussion promotes the creation of contemporary percussion music in Hong Kong.
It does so by commissioning musicians to do new works, taking local musicians on tour to neighbouring cities and organising education programmes.
From 6th to 12th January, Toolbox Percussion is bringing back the Toolbox International Creative Academy for its second year.
Co-presented by the University of Oklahoma, the programme includes concerts, lectures, panel discussions and workshops. The event’s director Louis Siu is here to tell us more.