HOME X

2021 - 2023

Home X is an immersive digital theatre performance originally commissioned by the British Council Hong Kong for the Spark Festival 2021 and performed at York Theatre Royal, Cambridge Junction, and the Barbican in 2023.

The project was originally conceived by An-Ting Chang, Ian Gallagher, and Donald Shek, with world-building and virtual environment design by Shek. Audiences enter Home X as online avatars, inhabiting a virtual world that evolves in response to their movement and interaction. As participants navigate this strangely familiar yet altered environment, their avatars change and grow, mirroring processes of transformation and adaptation.

Within this virtual space, audiences encounter live performances by movement artists and a soprano, who perform together across geographic distance using VR and holoportation technology. No longer situated in either Hong Kong or the UK, performers and audiences coexist within a shared virtual “third space,” where physical borders dissolve and new forms of presence emerge.

Home X explores themes of roots, belonging, displacement, destruction, and renewal. It reflects on home not as a fixed location, but as something continually shaped by movement, memory, and relational experience. As the work suggests, home is where the family is, while land becomes a witness to history, holding traces of legacy even as people are forced to move on, leaving those histories behind.

Original music by An-Ting Chang and choreography by Si Rawlinson (UK) is interwoven with choreography by Suen Nam and voice by Lam Wing Wing in Hong Kong. Holoportation technology was developed by Ian Gallagher, enabling live embodied performance across continents. Together, these elements form a hybrid theatrical language that merges digital world-building, live performance, and audience participation.

Key collaborators include:

Experience Designer Henry Lam · Costume Designer Christine Ting-Huan Urquhart · Dramaturg Daniel York Loh · Performer Mia Foo · Sound Consultant David Howard · Community Producer Katrina Man · Marketing Manager Sandy Wan · UK Administration Manager Apollonia Bauer · UK Production Manager Hannah Blamire · UK Stage Manager Brent Tan · Hong Kong Director Dino Fung · Hong Kong Producers Henry Lam and Fo Liu · Co-developers Toshi Wong, Sin Hang Kan, Logan Lee · 3D Design Assistant Graeme Wallace.

Credit

HOME X is co-produced by Kakilang (formerly Chinese Arts Now) and their Hong Kong partner, Don't Believe in Style, and co-commissioned by Cambridge Junction, Oxford Contemporary Music, York Theatre Royal, and The Barbican Centre. The work is supported by StoryFutures and The Space, originally commissioned by British Council Hong Kong.

Creative Team

Conceived by An-Ting Chang, Ian Gallagher, and Donald Shek

Directed and Composed by An-Ting Chang

Creative Technology by Ian Gallagher

3D Worlding by Donald Shek

Experience Design by Henry Lam

Costume Design by Christine Ting - Huan 挺歡 Urquhart

Choreographers/Dancers: Si Rawlinson (UK), Suen Nam (HK)

Soprano: Colette Wing Wing Lam

Dramaturg: Daniel York Loh

Actor Consultant: Mia Foo

Hong Kong Director: Dino Fung

Hong Kong Producers: Henry Lam, Fo Liu

Game Developers: Ian Gallagher (lead), Toshi Wong, Logan Lee

3D Design Assistant: Graeme Wallace

Production Team

Community Producer: Katrina Man

UK Marketing Manager: Sandy Wan

UK Administration Manager: Apollonia Bauer

UK Production Manager: Hannah Blamire

Supported By

Kakilang, Don’t Believe in Style, Bagri Foundation, Barbican, John Ellerman Foundation, Cambridge Junction, Oxford Contemporary Music, York Theatre Royal, Story Futures, Royal Holloway University, Creative Clusters, Arts & Humanities Research Council, Industrial Strategy, The Space, British Council Hong Kong, Arts Council England and, Jerwood Space.

The scene centres around a large ancient banyan tree that forms the location of a shrine representing To Tei Kung and To Tei Por.  According to the reconstruction tablet (1938)  inside Tai Shu Ha Tin Hau Temple, there was a big tree midway down the river between Tan Ka Wan and Tan Ka Po in Yuen Long 300 years ago.  The area was previously surrounded by water but today forms one of the largest districts in Hong Kong.  The original temple was built under the tree for worshipping Tin Hau and it formed a marker in history defining a junction of a new beginning as settlers migrated from the North of China to the fertile plains since the Song Dynasty along the Zhujiang River Estuary.  To this day it is not just a place of worship but a cultural and entertainment space that brings together old and new communities.  New communities in a sense families that had left these lands to migrate to other countries including the UK, returning to celebrate and to remember the past through tradition that can easily be forgotten when far away from home.

Wu Kang’s tree’s

Wu Kang is a figure in traditional Chinese folklore.  He is known for endlessly cutting down a self-healing osmanthus tree on the moon, a divine punishment.

Albert Camus describes the following absurd condition: we build our life on the hope for tomorrow, yet tomorrow brings us closer to death and is the ultimate enemy; people live their lives as if they were not aware of the certainty of death.  Once stripped of its common romanticism, the world is a foreign, strange and inhuman place; true knowledge is impossible and rationality and science cannot explain the world: their stories ultimately end in meaningless abstractions, in metaphors.  This is the absurd condition and “from the moment absurdity is recognised, it becomes a passion, the most harrowing of all.”