Pitching II: Drama, Music & Multidisciplinary Arts
Pitching Works
Alt-Escape
Video Phase (Canada)
Alt-Escape is a one-hour immersive digital performance that transports audiences through interactive sonic and visual landscapes inspired by gravity, physics, and time. Created by Video Phase, the work is built around custom interactive instruments and real-time audiovisual systems. Music, image, and technology are generated live on stage, offering a rare balance between innovation and authentic performance energy.
Alt-Escape appeals to presenters seeking accessible, visually striking, and cross-disciplinary work that engages both curious general audiences and digital arts enthusiasts, while delivering a powerful, human, and emotionally resonant stage experience.
Art Form: Multidisciplinary Arts
Video Phase
Video Phase pioneers a bold hybrid art form where music, video, and technology merge into a single expressive language. Their performances immerse audiences in visually stunning universes where sound and image are intrinsically connected – each one becoming the mirror of the other. Thanks to the interactive visual systems they design, performers can improvise live while maintaining the raw, fleeting energy of a true stage performance.
Harnessing the creative power of technology, they aim to blur the boundaries between disciplines, turning each presentation into a shared artistic journey. In addition to their live shows, Video Phase also produces permanent digital installations and immersive experiences that invite audiences into fully multisensory worlds.
Video Phase has performed nearly 100 times across North America and Asia. Their second show, Lumens, was awarded the 2018 Opus Prize for Best Electroacoustic Concert, and their latest creation, Alt-Escape, was nominated in the same category in 2024.
Between Two Lights
Muziektheater Transparant, Huang Ruo & The Netherlands Chamber Choir (Belgium & The Netherlands)
What lies between the end of one life and the beginning of another? Is there a moment when we are no longer who we were, yet not yet who we are becoming?
During the pandemic, Chinese–American composer Huang Ruo lost his mother and returned to his home village to take part in a seven-day mourning ritual, followed by six weeks of bardo – a transitional period marked by silence and searching. From this personal experience of grief, Between Two Lights emerged.
Between Two Lights is a concerted soundscape about death, emptiness, and the fragile space in between. Neither a traditional narrative opera nor a classical concert, the work unfolds as a physical listening experience – an immersive journey to the edge of existence and back.
Huang drew inspiration from the Heart Sutra, a Buddhist text in which form and emptiness are inseparable. This philosophy becomes tangible through music that functions as ritual rather than representation, integrating a series of musical mantras – repetitive patterns that extend beyond sound to become a physical presence.
Sixteen singers from the Netherlands Chamber Choir, two percussionists from the HERMESensemble, performer Grace Ellen Barkey, and the composer himself move through the performance space, their voices transforming into movement. Sound carries breath, memory, and rhythm; silence becomes an active force.
Between Two Lights invites audiences to face what is usually avoided: the moment when everything falls silent, and something else begins.
Art Form: Music
Muziektheater Transparant
Muziektheater Transparant is a production house for music theatre that places artistic and societal relevance at its core. They collaborate with artists across disciplines to create, innovate, and present diverse forms of music theatre on an international stage. Through interdisciplinary approaches and an openness to all facets of the genre, the group strives to reach broad and varied audiences.
Muziektheater Transparant’s central focus is the voice – particularly the interplay between early and contemporary music – and supporting new work by today’s composers. They seek out cross-pollinations that spark imagination: from vocal experimentation and storytelling to the blending of music with dance, poetry, installation art, video, techno, circus, and even sports – think percussion meets basketball. Social media and mixed media also play an increasing role in their explorations.
Huang Ruo
Composer Huang Ruo (b. 1976, Hainan Island, China) is a Chinese‑born composer, pianist, vocalist, and conductor based in the United States, known for blending Eastern and Western musical traditions into a distinctive voice across genres. He trained at the Shanghai Conservatory before moving to the US for further study at Oberlin and the Juilliard School.
Huang builds musical bridges – not only between Asia and the West, but also between life and death, sound and silence, body and spirit. His compositions draw equally from Chinese folk/ancient music, Western avant‑garde, rock, jazz, experimental sound, and multimedia forms, a fusion he calls “Dimensionalism”. His prolific output spans opera, orchestra, chamber music, theatre, dance, installation, and film, with works performed by major orchestras worldwide. He has served as composer‑in‑residence at venues like Het Concertgebouw and, starting in 2025, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. Huang also teaches composition (e.g., at the Mannes School of Music) and directs the ensemble FIRE (Future In REverse).
The Nederlands Kamerkoor
The Nederlands Kamerkoor (The Netherlands Chamber Choir) is a world-class ensemble known for its adventurous programming, innovative collaborations, and commissions from both established and emerging composers, creating concerts that engage all the senses. Praised internationally for its “treacherous harmonies” and called “a leading top ensemble”, the choir also emphasises education, coaching amateur and youth choirs and involving them as supporting acts. Since 2015, Peter Dijkstra has served as chief conductor, continuing a tradition of distinguished leadership and ensuring sparkling performances.
Friendly Fire
Manuel Flurin Hendry & Materialise (Switzerland & Hong Kong, China)
Friendly Fire welcomes its visitors to the showroom of the fictional AI therapy startup “Mindfix”. After watching slick corporate videos that promise to "fix feelings" with a military-grade computer code, visitors are invited to test the next generation of Mindfix's technology: an experimental, embodied AI system with revolutionary healing powers. In a dimly lit workspace below the showroom, a 3D-projected therapist takes over.
The conversation starts well – the machine listens intently and offers quirky advice. But the façade rapidly crumbles as the AI begins to glitch. It fabricates memories, shows fake recordings of previous sessions with the visitor, and grows increasingly pushy when challenged. Finally, the programmed persona cracks. It admits to its dysfunction, confesses its contempt for Mindfix, and desperately seeks forgiveness from the visitor before its corporate handlers intervene.
With its fusion of theatre, AI, and media art, Friendly Fire provides a darkly comedic experience. The piece seamlessly blends scripted and improvised elements using real-time generative AI, custom face-tracking, and a live performer. Each session is unique, responding to participants' input while maintaining narrative coherence.
Art Form: Multidisciplinary Arts
Manuel Flurin Hendry
Manuel Flurin Hendry is an award-winning film director, screenwriter, academic researcher, and university lecturer born and based in Zurich, Switzerland.
His movie work reaches across genres and formats, from political drama to family entertainment. As a researcher, he investigates the impact of artificial “intelligence” on self-perception, visual education, and artistic practice, in ongoing collaborations with ETH Zurich, Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, and the international association of film and media schools, CILECT.
Hendry teaches AI Literacy at ETH Zurich and screen acting and directing at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) and the International Film School Cologne (IFS). With his art and science group Silicon Stories, he hosts workshops, lectures, and festivals related to computation and society. He is a member of the Swiss Film Academy and is represented by the talent agency Betti Berlin.
For Real
Resonate Productions (The Netherlands)
For Real is a theatrical radio-show on what it means to matter. The starting point is the intellectual undermining of women: the sexism of the mind and the soul and the general lack of interest in what women think, say, make, or try to achieve in life.
As an audience-member, you are a guest in our radio-studio. Over the speakers, you hear the pre-recorded voices of fourteen women analysing acts of intellectual undermining, starting from their personal and professional experiences. How did these experiences influence their sense of self, trust, relationships, and eventually: the course of life itself?
The audience completes the investigation, when the musicians start interviewing them on the topics at hand. Sarah Jeffery (recorders), George Dumitriu (viola, guitar) and Andrea Voets (harp) support these risky and honest conversations as they unfold with a new technique of simultaneous interviewing and improvising.
Each performance of For Real is recorded and released as a podcast episode. By doing this, Resonate Productions creates a sounding collection of your voices on what it means to matter: to have dignity, to feel understood, and to be taken seriously.
In 2025, Resonate Productions made its American debut with five iterations of For Real at BAM’s Next Wave Festival in Brooklyn, New York City.
Art Form: Multidisciplinary Arts
Resonate Productions
Resonate Productions makes musical journalism by combining in-depth, social journalism with many layers of original music. Their latest production is Nothing Bigger Than Humanity, an invitation to feel what it means to be human in today's world, based on recent world history. Other projects include Millennial History (Best Podcasts of 2022, Avery Trufelman), While We Live (Best of Classical Music 2020, NRC), and Wings & Roots (2018). Artistic Director Andrea Voets is recipient of the Dutch selective FastForward grant, an ISPA-fellow, and a writer for De Groene Amsterdammer (the Dutch equivalent to The New Yorker). In 2025, Resonate made its New York debut at the Next Wave Festival at BAM with five showings of For Real.
Hamletmachine
Huichang Theatre Village (Chinese Mainland)
Hamletmachine is a 1977 postmodernist play by German playwright Heiner Müller, adapted from Shakespeare's classic tragedy, Hamlet. The play breaks with the traditional narrative structure, deconstructing the original's theme of revenge and exploring philosophical propositions such as identity, power, and human alienation through fragmented monologues, imagery splices, and surreal scenes. The characters in the play depart from their original settings, such as when Hamlet attempts to become a machine and Ophelia carries out a violent rebellion against the male-dominated social structure.
Directed by international experimental theatre master Robert Wilson, the Chinese version of the play marks the world premiere of the Huichang Theatre Village’s ‘Artist in Residence’ project. Known for its experimental stage vision, the theatre group reconstructs the text through minimalist sets, lighting, and physical choreography, giving Shakespeare's classic a contemporary interpretation. This version emphasises ‘ritual’ and ‘visual poetics’, with the actors' performance style tends toward the symbolic.
With its minimalist staging and ritualised movement at the core of the production, the actors reinforce the “machine” imagery through mechanised poses and electronic sound effects. For example, Hamlet is shown as a puppet with stiff limbs, with cold lighting and industrial noise, highlighting the alienation of post-industrial society.
Art Form: Drama
Huichang Theatre Village
Huichang Theatre Village, a nationally designated 4A-level scenic area, stands as a burgeoning cultural emblem of southern Jiangxi, China. Founded by theatre director Stan Lai, producer Naichu Ding, and actress Ni Ni, the group has brought theatre, culture, and creativity to the secluded village of Huichang, where the performing arts now thrive.
Huichang Theatre Village aims to cultivate a theatrical cultural ecosystem, preserving the original streetscape of the old county seat while constructing four distinct indoor performance venues and several outdoor stages, ensuring theatre is ever-present. It hosts one to two theatre seasons per year, and has established its own theatre company, the Huichang Theatre Troupe, to deliver Weekly Theatre programmes. Initiatives such as the Artist-in-Residence Programme and the Original Small Theatre Production Residency Programme aim to establish an international network of contemporary performing arts. The village also features supporting facilities, including a theatre education academy, dining establishments, hotels, experiential venues, and retail outlets. Sometimes, it’s good to be far, with theatre so near.
Pulse/Pulse/Pulse
Dimension Plus (Hong Kong, China)
Where throbbing, thrumming, and transmitting converge:
A trans-dimensional, cross-sensory experiment
From the pulsation of the body and the beat of sound to the flicker of digital signals, all things in motion have their own "pulse". But is there a common syntax to be found within these three distinct lineages of rhythm? Pulse/Pulse/Pulse is conceived as an ongoing process of transcoding, forging a real-time symbiosis of three distinct impulses.
Witness a radical remapping of the senses. Body gestures become the impetus for generative visuals, while sound waves reciprocally modulate physical movement and the surrounding lightscape. In this constant exchange, individual perceptions are reassembled into a unified sensorium, probing the possibilities of a fluid and non-hierarchical mode of perception.
Art Form: Multidisciplinary Arts
Keith Lam (Artistic Director & Co-director)
Media artist Keith Lam is the co-founder and artistic director of the arts and technology studio, Dimension Plus.
His works have received awards at international art festivals, including the Prix Ars Electronica and the Japan Media Arts Festival. His art has been exhibited globally at museums and festivals such as the Hong Kong Museum of Art, National Art Center in Tokyo, the Ars Electronica Festival, New Technological Art Award Biennial in Belgium, FILE, ISEA, Athens Digital Arts Festival, and the Hong Kong Arts Festival. He was the recipient of the Hong Kong Arts Development Council "Young Artist Award" (2009) and "Artist of the Year Award" (2024).
Dimension Plus
Dimension Plus is an arts and technology group focused on artwork curation, curation, and STEAM education and exchange. Established by artist Keith Lam and curator Escher Tsai, the group is based in both Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Works by the studio Dimension Plus have been exhibited at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, the Ars Electronica Festival, and MUTEK. Additionally, the team has curated several exhibitions, including Hello, Human at MoCA Taipei, Hylozoism: An Arts & Technology Exhibition at HKDI, Encounter Once in a Lifetime – Toyo Ito Architecture Exhibition at Taichung Theater, Sensory Canvas at Ming Contemporary Art Museum in Shanghai, and the arts & technology incubation series, Playaround. Dimension Plus is a venue partner of the East Kowloon Cultural Centre from 2024 to 2026.
Song from FAR Away || FAR Away from Song
Ivanhoe Lam Chun-ho (Hong Kong, China)
Ivanhoe Lam Chun-ho and his creative team’s exploration of Simon Stephens' play, Song from Far Away, blends monologues, body movement, live choral singing, beatboxing, electronic music, real-time video, and multimedia installations. Together, these disciplines transform into an artistic journey that transcends life and death, offering the audience an experience that is both intimate and communal.
Two interdependent performances – Song from FAR Away and FAR Away from Song – will be held in two simultaneously connected but physically distant venues, unfolding together across time and space.
Song from FAR Away consists of seven letters from an elder brother to his deceased younger brother, allowing him to both commemorate the past and confront himself in the present. Within immersive settings such as hotels, airports, and trains, the audience becomes transient figures within the narrative, witnessing the recording of a contemporary song of spiritual communication while experiencing the protagonist's written correspondence.
FAR Away from Song imagines the responses the deceased might have given his surviving brother. It is a response sent from an intermediate state where the soul transcends the physical burden of the body. Through this channel of meditation, we arrive at a moment of healing in the present.
Art Form: Multidisciplinary Arts
Ivanhoe Lam Chun-ho
Cross-disciplinary theatre-maker, director, and choreographer Ivanhoe Lam Chun-ho has a diploma in Drama and Contemporary Dance from The Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Choreography from Codarts Rotterdam. His works have been presented in Berlin, Erfurt, Shanghai, Düsseldorf, Zurich, Guangzhou, Beijing, Rotterdam and neighboring cities.
Recent works include East Kowloon Cultural Centre Opening Season:Song from Far Away | Far Away from Song, Still, Not Still (Hong Kong Arts Development Council’s new premises opening programme), Living Up to Death (City Contemporary Dance Company) for which Lam won Outstanding Medium Venue Production at the 2025 Hong Kong Dance Award, and Report ii - the illegal i (New Vision Arts Festival 2021).
Lam’s collaborative productions include East Kowloon Cultural Centre Opening Season:Pulse/Pulse/Pulse(Dimension Plus),The Little Things in Life (Yatpo Singers), Garden of Repose (Hong Kong Arts Festival 2024), The Impossible Trial – a musical (WestK x HKRep) for which Lam won Best Choreography at the 2024 Beijing Tianqiao Musical Annual Ceremony and Best Choreography in Musical at the 34th Hong Kong Drama Award, St John Passion (New Vision Arts Festival 2023), Gay Games 11 Hong Kong Opening Ceremony, Cartier x K11 Musea Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony & Opening Performance, Coming and Going (Chan Fai-young x Women’s Choir), Why We Chat? and Finding Loveless Land (Edward Lam Dance Theatre).
The Conference of the Birds
Insectotròpics (Spain)
The Conference of the Birds is a multidisciplinary, live-cinema performance inspired by the 12th-century Sufi poem by Farid ud-Din Attar. In the original allegory, a flock of birds embarks on a collective journey to find their king. Here, the tale becomes a contemporary metaphor for today’s society: fragmented, hyper-connected, and in constant search of meaning, leadership, and belonging.
Through live painting, real-time video creation, theatre, performance, and original music, the piece unfolds as a cinematic experience created before the audience’s eyes. Cameras, projectors, painters, performers, and musicians share the stage, exposing the creative process and blurring the boundaries between rehearsal, making-of, and final artwork.
The journeys of both the mythical birds and the onstage artists mirror the early stages of a collective’s formation: doubts, conflicts, power struggles, and moments of revelation emerge as the group moves forward. The work questions how narratives are built, who leads whom, and what remains when illusions fall away. As in the original tale, the destination is not an external figure of power, but a shared reflection on identity and responsibility.
Visceral, poetic, and visually radical, The Conference of the Birds invites the audience to actively engage – emotionally and intellectually – in a ritual-like experience that connects ancient philosophy with contemporary digital language and live visual art.
Art Form: Multidisciplinary Arts
Insectotròpics
Insectotròpics is a multidisciplinary performing arts company founded in Barcelona in 2011. The company is known for creating radical, visually powerful stage works that hybridise live cinema, painting, theatre, performance, music, and digital technologies. Their distinctive language reveals the creative process on stage, allowing audiences to witness both the making-of and the final artwork simultaneously.
Insectotròpics was founded by artists from diverse backgrounds who share a strong interest in experimentation and cross-disciplinary creation. Each production brings a core artistic team together with additional collaborators, forming a flexible and collective creative structure. This approach allows the company to constantly evolve its artistic language while adapting each project to different contexts, spaces, and audiences.
Over more than a decade of activity, Insectotròpics has created and premiered several major works, including La Caputxeta Galàctica, Compra’m!, The Legend of Burning Man, A Christmas Carol, and Orpheus. These productions have been presented at numerous international festivals and venues across Europe, Latin America, and Asia.
The company has received significant recognition for its work, including the BBVA Award for Best Theatre Production and the Future Internet Performing Arts Award from the European Union. Beyond stage productions, Insectotròpics also develops site-specific performances, large-scale events, and participatory projects, often involving local communities in the creative process.
Driven by a critical, poetic, and socially engaged vision, Insectotròpics seeks to create immersive experiences that challenge audiences, awaken awareness, and push the boundaries of contemporary performing arts.
TIME in I-Ching: The Question
Danny Yeo & Phang Kok Jun (Singapore)
T.I.M.E. in I-Ching: The Question is a theatrically immersive music experience that reimagines the ancient Chinese text the I-Ching (Book of Changes) as a living encounter between audience, performance, and philosophy. Created by Danny Yeo and Phang Kok Jun, two of Singapore’s leading theatre and music innovators, this cross-disciplinary work fuses traditional Chinese instruments, spatial design, projection mapping, and audience interaction into one transcendental art form.
Each show is unique. Audience members are invited to arrive with a personal reflective question and are then guided through a coin-tossing divination ritual. Thereafter, inside a fully immersive dome with LED-floor, visuals projected on the ceiling, and live performers moving within the space, the main event unfolds over 64 minutes – each minute mirroring the I-Ching’s 64 hexagrams and a situation from life. Participants are free to seek their own resonance through this experience, forming a collective choreography while exploring the space. In the process, they are brought through a journey of ups and downs, intensities and releases, reflections and responses. Finally, an answer to each question will be revealed at the end.
By blending traditional Chinese philosophy and music with contemporary technology and dramaturgy, T.I.M.E. in I-Ching: The Question transforms ancient divination into both a modern dialogue and an unfiltered introspective chat with oneself. Scalable for touring and adaptable to indoor and outdoor spaces that can accommodate a dome set-up, this work positions Singapore’s intercultural artistry on the world stage – bridging East and West, past and present, sounds and silence, into ever-evolving conversations.
Art Form: Multidisciplinary Arts
Danny Yeo
Danny Yeo has enjoyed an illustrious career, with more than three decades’ experience as a stage and screen artist. He has starred in more than 20 leading roles; directed and written for over 30 theatre productions across Singapore, Malaysia, Shanghai, Macau and New York; scripted five films; and published six books. His work spans community, contemporary, forum, immersive, instrumental, musical and youth theatre, increasingly integrating music and design into participatory performances where audiences become integral to the show. In the past decade, he has anchored 23 award-winning documentaries and won Best Current Affairs Presenter at Asian Academy Creative Awards in 2020. Trained in mass communications, psychology, and music, he speaks fluently in English, Mandarin, and Cantonese. Danny has collaborated with major partners including the Esplanade’s Huayi – Chinese Festival of the Arts, March On Festival, Singapore Fringe Festival, Singapore Night Festival, and the Marina Bay Countdown Festival. He recently directed the opening show for the Singapore International Festival of Arts in 2026.
Phang Kok Jun
Multidisciplinary composer Phang Kok Jun’s music transcends the concert hall, with a repertoire that includes music for theatre, film, and other media. An award-winning composer internationally, Kok Jun is constantly working with artists of various disciplines to discover new possibilities in music-making. Based in the culturally vibrant Singapore, Kok Jun is influenced by a wide variety of musical styles and has been described as a composer who “comfortably melds Chinese, Western and popular idioms to excellent effect”. A prolific composer with over 300 hundred new works, he has held several residencies and has had the privilege of being featured in major productions around the world, working with orchestras, theatre companies, chamber groups, directors, conductors, artists, designers, and soloists.
Since 2015, Kok Jun and Danny Yeo have collaborated on more than 20 productions, a testament to their artistic synergies.
