Performance + Talkback: Hong Kong Exile | HEAVEN FM

Join us for the world premiere of Hong Kong Exile’s performance HEAVEN FM (2025).

Five artists journey towards the edge of a universe that is teeming with spirit and sound. Equipped with low-tech gear, they attempt connection—tuning in and out of otherworldly stories. The absurd is juxtaposed with the sublime; the comedic revealed within the sacred. Powered by joy, grief and battery-operated magic, HEAVEN FM dances with the unseen and the ever-shifting gravity of loss.

HEAVEN FM is born from Co-Artistic Director Natalie Tin Yin Gan’s reflections on Chinese ancestral ritual in the modern, digitized era. Weaving together dance, theatre and multimedia performance, this collectively devised work is informed by Hong Kong Exile’s thirteen years of exploring technological interactivity in performance.

Tickets: Gallery Members: $30  |  General: $39

Performance Run time: 60 minutes. No intermission.

The Registration Desk, located in the Gallery Lobby, will open 30 minutes before showtime.

Enjoy a cup of tea and mingle with friends before we head up to the space together. The performance will start promptly. No latecomers will be admitted. Seating is first come, first served.

Please be advised that this production contains flashing lights, strobe-light effects and the use of water-based haze.

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This work was developed as part of a residency at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

HEAVEN FM is being presented as part of the Gallery’s Asian Heritage Month programming and is an initiative of the Centre for Global Asias.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS 

Hong Kong Exile is a Vancouver–based, interdisciplinary arts company made up of three contemporary artists: Natalie Tin Yin Gan, Milton Lim and Remy Siu. The three have been consistently creating and producing work since 2011, developing a reputation as an engaged, rigorous and prolific arts company. Since its inception, Hong Kong Exile has created thirteen original works presented in dance, theatre, film/media and new music contexts across Canada and internationally. Projects over the last several years include an ambitious month-long gallery exhibition, presentations at CanAsian International Dance Festival, Prairie Theatre Exchange, Dancing on the Edge Festival, Gaudeamus Muziekweek and PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, as well as various collaborative international initiatives. Hong Kong Exile aims to create vital and innovative performance drawing from their diasporic experiences as first-generation Chinese-Canadian settlers. The company values pushing beyond the conventions of their respective disciplines, seeking expressions/aesthetics that evoke the strange and speculative as much as they speak to contemporary political realities.

Natalie Tin Yin Gan (顏婷妍) is an independent dance artist, writer and facilitator based on the unceded, ancestral lands of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. She has performed and presented work in Asia, Europe and across Canada. Her practice squats at the intersection of diasporic dissonance, somatics and technology-induced melancholy. Gan is Co-Artistic Director of company Hong Kong Exile and the smaller half of the vulva clown duo Pulsive Party. She is the award-winning Narrative Designer of the critically acclaimed video game 1000xRESIST. She is also a certified teacher of Fitzmaurice Voicework®, a body-centred and trauma-aware approach to the voice. Gan is the younger daughter of a mother from Hong Kong and a father from Malaysia. She speaks Cantonese poorly and proudly.

LEAD ARTIST & PRODUCER Natalie Tin Yin Gan
CO-CREATED BY ellis cheadle, Juolin Lee, Alex Mah and Alex Tam
STAGE MANAGEMENT Song Xin Xuan and Agnes Hui
ASSISTANT STAGE MANAGEMENT Rohmann Barisoff and Kady Yeung 
CULTURAL CONSULTANT Rosemary Georgeson

PERFORMANCE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you to the Canada Council for the Arts, BC Arts Council, the City of Vancouver, SFU Cultural Programs, SFU School of Contemporary Arts, Theatre Replacement, Plastic Orchid Factory, Left of Main, the Cultch and the Scotiabank Dance Centre. Our deepest thanks to Lynn Chen and the staff and volunteers at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

We raise our hands in gratitude to the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples for protecting and stewarding the lands upon which we dance and call home.