Testimony Review in Delta magazine

Documentation is always composite. The documentary theatre piece Testimony focuses on the lived experiences of South Asian Hongkongers, using various media such as personal narratives, interviews, government archives, books, and film clips to form its main content. While this production centers on issues of social reality, the creators also present their own positions as documentarians to the audience, revealing the representational structures inherent in "documentation." Rooftop Productions employs live feed along with chroma key technology to create a rich and dynamic performance, integrating simple green screen effects with puppetry, slide shows, and singing.

The content of Testimony is quite serious: it highlights the discrimination faced by South Asian Hongkongers in education, welfare, and nationality policies, as well as the various prejudices they encounter in mainstream culture and workplace exclusion. At the same time, it affirms their contributions to Hong Kong's history. Perhaps in the eyes of the government and many ethnic Chinese Hongkongers, the status of South Asians can be summarized by Chief Executive Carrie Lam's remark, "They have no stake in society"; this play allows these Hongkongers to clarify this "misunderstanding" as creators and performers: "We all have a stake in Hong Kong!"

In documentary theatre focused on social reality, if the collected data is simply reproduced, the performance may feel like a classroom lesson, leading the audience to boredom and making it difficult to absorb the information. Testimony completely avoids this issue. Although the content is primarily documentary, every story chosen by the directors and performers is dramatic, and the constantly changing multimedia performance effects make it feel like a variety show, combining entertainment with depth and seriousness. The creative team possesses a sense of humor, addressing issues of discrimination and racial bias with a light touch. Among them, Pakistani actor Kashif stands out with his energetic presence. He has learning difficulties and is a minority, facing dual challenges in Hong Kong's educational system, which limits his opportunities compared to ethnic Chinese students: "It's either being a bartender or working for Foodpanda." However, he boasts, "I'm a natural actor"; in addition to his good looks, his live performances demonstrate his talent, consistently eliciting laughter from the audience.

What other roles can Kashif play besides himself? We would need to see his other performances to know. However, in Testimony, "playing oneself" occupies a nuanced position: it is both documentary and interpretive. The performance guides the audience to pay more attention to corners of social reality that are often overlooked, but what is reenacted is never the reality itself, so this performance cannot fully represent or reproduce the truth. The creators are keenly aware of this reflexive layer and incorporate it into the performance.

One scene reenacts the story of one interviewee: she recounts being interviewed by a television station, where the "director" asked her to enhance her appearance with flowers, such as donning a headscarf that she originally did not wear, to conform to the public's established image of South Asians. This scene combines two interviews: the television station's interview and the theatre company's interview, the latter discussing the former. Thus, this "reenactment" has the dual layers of an "interview within an interview," reminding the audience to be aware of media representations of minorities. Even if labeled as "documentary," it is never reality itself, always subject to the interference of the media, including the performance of Testimony.

What impressed me most is how Rooftop Productions combines live recording and chroma key effects: the techniques are flexible and varied. Some theatre performances use live recording techniques that fall flat, merely enriching the viewing angle and adding close-up effects. However, this performance, enhanced by special effects, utilizes the traditional "green screen" background technique to create visual effects that align with the text and are constantly changing. For instance, in sections that quote book content, they attach green paper to the relevant pages to serve as a green screen, allowing the actors' performances to be "embedded" in the book, which is then projected on a screen, expressing the source of the information while bringing the printed text to life. They creatively adapt, even using green tea as a green screen, although their related filming techniques were not yet polished, leading to instances of misalignment and focus issues in the composite images. The combination of these two audiovisual techniques is not only more interesting but also reminds the audience of the constructed nature of documentary theatre. Their camera operations and the process of creating special effects are all visible on stage, with the control panel beside the audience, showing that although documentary theatre is based on real data, its outcome is a composite art form. Not every South Asian in Hong Kong is as fearsome as the "South Asian Gang" portrayed in newspapers, nor are they all as lovable as the actors in Testimony. If we truly wish to care about and understand ethnic minorities in Hong Kong, it is best to engage with them in person.

Automatically translated from the original Chinese article.