On a “Beautiful Bus”, “passengers” witnessed a most extraordinary sight in a very ordinary context.
As one of the outreach activities of the recent Macau City Fringe festival, the programme invited the audience to dress up to the nines while taking a special sightseeing tour on the “Beautiful Bus.”
The programme’s director Un Iat Hou talked to the Post on the sidelines of the show last month.
According to Un, the setting was on a hired bus, which set off from the Navy Yard No.2 in Barra, headed to Taipa and returned to the starting point, taking the audience on a tour of an imaginary city, where all the rules and spaces have a humorous sense of similarities to the real Macau.
As the DJ dropped a cool beat, an exclusive and vibrant party came to life. Dressed in high heels and adorned with shimmering makeup on their faces, performers joined a number of “passengers” on the bus, dancing to the rhythmic beats.
The “passengers” had earlier signed up to join the special bus tour across the city for about an hour.
“When it comes to beauty, we all have very mainstream impressions, but beauty itself should not be defined,” said Un, who played the host MISS BONDY in the show, standing among the “passengers” in 15-centimetre-high heels, a rainbow-coloured long fluffy coat, and fiery red lips.
As the bus passed the casinos in Cotai, Yuan invited the imaginary city’s “model citizens” to get on the bus to perform - three drag queens took the stage in turn, lip-synching and dancing while interacting with the audience.
The “passengers” gazed upon the performers with amazement rather than curiosity, and their feeling for beauty was reflected in the cheers, applause, and laughter throughout the entire tour.
“We rebel, we are unrestrained, but all of this is harmless,” affirmed Un.
After the show, Un walked backstage at the Navy Yard No.2 in the Inner Harbour area and shed his bright sweater for a T-shirt, saying that cross-dressing is not exclusive to the LGBTQ community, but it’s a means of shedding the ubiquitous societal frames placed on individuals.
The original idea for the Beautiful Bus came from Italo Calvino’s novel The Invisible City, in which Kublai Khan calls an emissary to help him see the world, and they imagined a perfect city that doesn’t exist.
Un said as Macau is very small, people living here are so familiar with almost all places, but they do not seem to have any imagination of this city, “as long as we lose the imagination of the city, we will also lose the possibility of the city’s further development.”
“Art creation is about constantly searching for new things to break through, and I have to abandon my original imagination before I can start a new one. Drama and performance are worlds full of imagination. Imagination is free and doesn’t cost anything, and it is only in imagination that we can truly be free,” Un remarked.
The Beautiful Bus also welcomed mediocrity, peculiarity, and even being alternative, yet, they all shared a collective characteristic, which is presenting “your own beauty”, Un said. “Real beauty is not just being perfectly ‘pretty,’ but being able to be your ideal self.”
So, let’s revel in beauty, even if it’s just for a single journey. Whether it be through shouts, admiration, or critique, each expression will become part of this story.
Drag queens dance on a hired bus travelling between Macau and Taipa, an outreach activity during the recent Macau City Fringe Festival. - All photos provided by the organiser
