About Toolbox Manoeuvre

About Toolbox Manoeuvre

Percussion x Contemporary Dance x Literary Arts

Kafka speaks, the city stirs. Strange synthesis. The train rages, footsteps hasten. Hustling existences. The disoriented heart’s negotiating a new arrangement of reality. We’ll listen. Just listen.

In Toolbox Manoeuvre, a team of cross-media artists join forces to construct a dreamy and mystifying mindscape of contemporary life. Choreographer Alice Ma and Wayson Poon will dance to new music and arrangements performed by Toolbox Percussion and Artistor Director Louis Siu.

This is conceived as a sequel to Toolbox Mouvement, a collaborative project by Toolbox Percussion which has toured Gwangju in Korea, San Francisco in USA and Shanghai in China as well as locally in different forms since 2017.

As a cross-disciplinary performance that blends percussion, contemporary dance and literary arts, rhythm plays an important role in connecting these three genres. Rhythm lays the foundation for percussion, and is also an important element for the other two genres. To the dancer, every move, pause and breathe is connected by rhythm. Rhythm also has a delicate relationship with literature – different literary types each has its own rhythm. For novels and prose passages, the pace of how one recites also attributes different emotions to the same texts.

Dancer credit: Alice Ma

Louis Siu

Louis Siu is the Founder and Artistic Director of Toolbox Percussion, as well as Creative Director for MUSE3. In 2020, he was appointed as curator of The Classical: NEXT Opening, entitled Hong Kong / TAKEOFF, presented by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council. Siu served as Principal Percussionist of the Macao Orchestra and his orchestral appearances include concerts and tours with the Hong Kong Philharmonic, Hong Kong Sinfonietta, Qatar Philharmonic, Pacific Music Festival, Aspen Music Festival, Asian Youth Orchestra, Gustav Mahler Orchestra, the Busan Maru International Music Festival and Hong Kong New Music Ensemble. He was an ExxonMobil New Vision Artist at the 40th Hong Kong Arts Festival, where a full house solo recital was presented.

Siu received his music education at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, he graduated from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and received his Master's Degree at the Central Saint Martins in Arts and Cultural Enterprise. He embarked PROJECTTT in the USA with award-winning Afiara Quartet to promote music for strings, percussion, and tenor timpani, creating a platform for composers to experiment, which was the skeleton of Toolbox International Creative Academy (TICA) which he found in Hong Kong in 2019 with grants from the HKSAR Government.

Siu currently serves as a part-time instructor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and taught at the School of Creative Media in the City University of Hong Kong, he has also conducted masterclasses at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, Hong Kong Baptist University, Kasetsart University, Silapakorn University, Xinghai Conservatory of Music, Hong Kong Music Office, Hanyang University, and was a Teaching Artist at the San Francisco Symphony. He maintains an active voluntary role with the Asian Cultural Council Hong Kong as alumni.