How do you re-learn a land you once knew?

Responding to Spring Steps by Hazel Lam

Hazel Lam enters the screen at the start of Spring Steps, against a backdrop of Hong Kong’s Central district. Instead of turning towards the camera, she turns towards the city, stretching and twisting her body in a morning greeting. Her body is a silhouette against the bright greens and blues of the cityscape, and the camera cuts away to a shot of sleepy cars moving through a roundabout on the street in front of her. In these opening moments of Spring Steps, it becomes apparent that this solo performance has two protagonists: Lam and the city of Hong Kong.

Lam’s relationship to Hong Kong is one which treads between familiarity and unfamiliarity. The opening sequence suggests an intimacy with the city, in the looseness of Lam’s movements as she gestures towards the city. Yet, there is also a distance to this first scene, as the balcony frames the cityscape and marks her as separate from the space itself. After all, a greeting is only necessary when you haven’t been acquainted with something in a while. Thus, these first movements produce a sense of separation between the performer and the place they are working within; a feeling that only strengthens as the camera cuts to the streets of Hong Kong to reveal a first glance at Lam’s face that’s looking out onto the street with an expression suggesting that she is trying to relearn her surroundings.

Spring Steps is about what it means to re-encounter a place that was once familiar to you, following changes which make it unrecognisable. Lam created this performance upon returning to Hong Kong in 2021, after spending most of her life in Europe. What becomes apparent in her initial reunion with the city’s streets is that an encounter cannot be realised through sight alone. As such, Lam reaches out towards parts of the city’s architecture—the bamboo scaffolding of a construction site, safety barriers, a tree, a lamppost—and transforms it by means of play. As she lifts herself onto and then swings or flops herself over these structures, she becomes reacquainted with the city by disrupting the intended use of these sites and appropriating them for herself.

What makes Hong Kong a unique protagonist for this exploration are the particular ways in which movement in the city was and is constrained. Much like Lam, I also returned to Hong Kong for an extended period during the COVID-19 pandemic, after spending years away from the city. I, too, found a city whose face I didn’t recognise wholly: the working-class district of Sham Shui Po now gentrified with expensive coffee shops abound, shop fronts I had visited all throughout my childhood gone, priced out by rent or killed off by the pandemic recession. This I somewhat expected. I have grown up in this city, a city that has a propensity for changing faces overnight because property developers can do what they like.

What I didn’t expect was how my movement in the city was transformed. Some of it was benign, like the automatic disinfectant dispensers or relentless temperature checking designed to help keep the pandemic under control. Such changes were unfamiliarities that I came to learn very quickly. But what I didn’t understand – and couldn’t have, until I returned to the city – was how the aftermath of the 2019 protests meant that police presence increased tenfold in the city. I didn’t understand that I would witness teenagers getting stopped and searched multiple times on a single street. I didn’t understand that gatherings in shopping centres would now be read as dissent, and the ways in which this all would impact my own movement in Hong Kong.

I will not assume that these changes in space are exactly what Lam has in mind with Spring Steps. What I do see in her performance is the idea that an individual can reclaim their relationship to a place in subverting its intended use. In The Practice of Everyday Life, theorist Michel de Certeau argues that walking in a city is a way that citizens can “practice space”, making a place their own by moving in ways which go against how movement has been planned by the city’s authorities. Lam’s performance reminds me of a particular argument he makes, which is that “to practice space is thus to repeat the joyful and silent experience of childhood.” Trained in the circus arts, Lam’s interventions on Hong Kong’s streets restore a childhood wonder with space. She drapes herself over the bamboo scaffolding in a way that reminds me of children hanging from the monkey bars; she rolls herself down an empty concrete walkway, bringing playfulness into an otherwise drab underpass.

I am reminded, through Lam’s movements, that the automatic ways we interact with the city are not mandatory, that we can choose to move in other ways when we remember to. What’s more, her movements seem to provoke a similar reaction in the people that pass her on the streets of Hong Kong. Stunned by her refusal to comply with the agreed upon conventions of space, the performance is also marked by the ways in which people stop to watch her as she manipulates the architecture around her. Lam’s interventions in Hong Kong are her own way of becoming reacquainted with the city whilst also inspiring others to relearn the city that they thought they knew so well. Another world is still possible.