On 7 May 2021, a 10-strong cast – all members of Ma Man Kei and Lo Pak Sam College (MLC) – presented the Chinese version of the play The Three Ladies of Macao (3LM) at the First Annual Conference of Institute of Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences (IAS).
The 75-minute performance, which featured a kaleidoscopic soundscape of a 1960s Macao, was graced by the presence of Prof. Billy So, Vice Rector (Student Affairs) and Interim Director of IAS; Prof. Xu Jie, Interim Dean of FAH, Interim Director of Confucius Institute and Head of the Department of Chinese Language and Literature; Prof. Wang Di, Head of the Department of History; as well as keynote speakers, invited external researchers and IAS Research Fellows.
The Three Ladies of Macao (3LM), conceived in Canada and written in Macao, is ‘an original play made in Macao, about Macao’, according to Prof. Katrine K. Wong, Interim College Master of MLC and Research Fellow of IAS. Prof. Wong and her students wrote 3LM in 2016, a process inspired by the idea of allegory in Robert Wilson’s The Three Ladies of London.
Premièred in 2016, 3LM enjoyed two evenings of full-house and was included in Macao’s annual Literary Festival, The Script Road, in 2017. In 2020, the play was published in Eastern and Western Synergies and Imaginations: Texts and Histories (Brill) and was translated into Chinese by MLC students. Following the success of previous casts, the MLC cast continued to explore creative means whilst working with an experimental space, thereby forging a cross-disciplinary, staff-student collaboration.
