2026 Performance Co-Lab: Collage of the Everyday

_**Performance Co-Lab**_ is Tai Kwun's initiative in response to the Hong Kong Performing Arts Expo (HKPAX), designed to foster cross‑disciplinary exchange and collaboration for contemporary performance-making. The platform exemplifies Tai Kwun's long‑standing commitment to dissolving boundaries of space and form. The first edition in Oct 2024 was warmly received by international delegates including artistic directors, producers and curators from across the globe, offering a window to international peers into the promising artistic talents from Hong Kong and the Greater Bay Area during the HKPAX. The second edition of _**Performance Co-Lab: Collage of the Everyday**_ is convened and co-curated with guest curator Joseph Lee (Hong Kong), a veteran choreographer an artistic director; alongside key facilitator Michael Li, producer and dramaturg (Hong Kong). The stellar line-up of mentors is formed by two senior practitioners and scholars: visual artist–choreographer Eisa Jocson (Philippines) and performance studies scholar Dr. Evelyn Wan (Hong Kong). An Open Call for participating artists will be made to invite artist who are committed to cross-media practices and collaborations. _Performance Co-Lab_ unfolds in two phases: Phase one is a residency in Foshan from 21 to 29 Jul 2026, with a focus on mentor‑led creative workshops and artist sharings to enhance mutual understanding and lay the foundation for future collaboration; Phase two will return to Tai Kwun, Hong Kong from 1 to 13 Oct 2026, where artists will be given time and space to re‑situated their collaborative ideas within Tai Kwun's space. The finale of the programme will culminate in public presentations during the HKPAX — showcasing both the collaborative outcomes and the experiential processes that produced them. This edition is framed by the curatorial proposition _Collage of the Everyday_, inviting participants to reconsider daily experience as constructed rather than neutral. It examines how sensory regimes — what we see, hear, touch, filter, and overlook — shape perception and the frameworks through which the world becomes legible. The everyday is approached as inherently mediated and hybrid, formed by bodily habits, technologies, social codes, and cultural scripts. _Co-Lab_ encourages artists to uncover generative potential in overlooked details, attune to frictions and overlaps across contexts, and reveal the latent performativity within ordinary gestures and routines. Collage functions not only as a visual strategy but as a collaborative methodology. It enables artists from diverse cultural and disciplinary backgrounds to work together without erasing difference. Gaps, misalignments, and asymmetries between lived contexts and artistic tools are treated as productive material. Through selecting, cutting, juxtaposing, and resequencing, participants assemble a provisional shared vocabulary, opening familiar experiences to collective reflection and recomposition. Within these newly formed points of contact, alternative relations and narrative possibilities emerge.