Derek Chan in Happy Valley (Photo by Pedro Augusto Meza)
I won’t give away the confession in Derek Chan’s Happy Valley, but it’s the best part of the script.
In this interdisciplinary solo, Chan sings and recites poetry — often in Cantonese with English surtitles. We also get Cantonese surtitles.
Chan grew up in Hong Kong when it was still a British colony and he refers to the British handover of the territory to China in 1997 as The Apocalypse. In various artistic forms, he tells us that he lost the beloved site of his childhood: he can never go home again and he is both furious and sorrowful. He rails against the feckless British colonizers and the social, political, and criminal abuses of the current Communist overlords. Happy Valley is an agonized expression of dislocation. The song “Swallow” begins, “How much shit can a motherfucker swallow/Before they have to spit?” [Read more…]
