SOAS Research Online

Abstract

In 2001 Mathias Woo, a trained architect and co-artistic director of Hong Kong's foremost performing arts group, Zuni Icosahedron, proposed the concept of 18multimedia architectural music theatre 19 (MAMT), which he later investigated through a series of performances focusing on three masters of modern architecture 13 Louis I. Kahn, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier. This article traces the development of Woo's architectural theatre aesthetics by examining the most ambitious work in the series, 'Looking for Mies', premiered in 2002 and revived in 2009 and 2011. This links Hong Kong's twenty-first-century postmodernist theatre to early twentieth-century European modernism, particularly the Bauhaus, and international examples of architecture-centred performance. 'Looking for Mies' unearths connections between theatre and architecture, and explores the relations between tradition and technology, man and machine, live performance and digitally mediated experience on the modern stage.