Who are TS Crew and contact Gonzo? What do we do?

Tsukahara Yuya: contact Gonzo is from Osaka, which has a different mindset from Tokyo. In Osaka, being funny is much more important than being cool. If you act cool in Osaka, people will laugh at you. This mindset extends to contemporary art as well. We try to incorporate the Osaka spirit into our work, which is very fun while remaining professional. We've been working with TS Crew from Hong Kong for a long time. We first met quite a while ago and have been involved in several projects together, but this is the first time we collaborate on a long-term project. Both our groups are very physical. Although we talk a lot, we understand each other more through body movement.

Hugh Cho: Our first collaboration was in 2019, but I first saw you perform in Yokohama before that. It was a group of topless men hitting one another, accompanied by a rock band. That's when I reached out to you.

Tsukahara Yuya: Then we started working together. How many people are there in your company now? You scout different people often, right?

Hugh Cho: We have five performers. Our backgrounds are diverse. We have dancers from the academy, movie stunt performers, a beatboxer and a theme park performer. We do a lot of acrobatics and martial arts. I graduated from a dance academy but also do a lot of Cantonese opera. Our company incorporates many different elements.

Tsukahara Yuya: Steve does capoeira and parkour a little bit, right?

Hugh Cho: You know better than I do.

Tsukahara Yuya: Right. Each of their members has different techniques. This creates a mix of traditional and contemporary elements, presenting a different image of Hong Kong than what people might expect.

Hugh Cho: Yes, we try to incorporate our heritage and traditions, but we also deconstruct and play with them. We develop from these traditions rather than simply presenting traditional elements in our shows.

Tsukahara Yuya: I think you strike a nice balance between entertainment and experimental expression. This makes it easy for us to communicate and collaborate. We easily understand each other when we exchange ideas.

Hugh Cho: We talk, and then we do it. This is how our stuff is done most of the time.

Tsukahara Yuya: contact Gonzo is very different from TS Crew. We never had proper education in performing. I graduated from art history, and I'm now working with my college friend. We never take workshops; we just hang out, drink beer and spend time with friends. Many people ask about auditions, but we usually just work with friends. We don't have a formal process to recruit new performers.

Usually, we suggest ideas, laugh about them, try them out and sometimes get hurt in the process. Pain and hurting each other are some of the most important elements of our performances. It's like inventing a new game – there's always a physical risk involved. It's similar to how children learn their limits through play. People often ask us if it hurts or why we do it, but if you join us, you'd understand that the most painful part is often the most fun. We enjoy those moments in performances when accidents happen – they're the funniest things that can occur. We try to design our performances to allow for unintentional accidents. That’s the way of our choreographic process.

I’ve been a professional performer for almost 20 years and we're grateful that we’re paid, but we do it for fun as well. This is the most important to us. To have fun, you have to go beyond what you understand. If you do something to me and I could totally predict it, it's not fun at all. You have to surpass my expectations and kick me in the head, and then I laugh. This is the energy we need – to go beyond linguistic understandings, into chaos, flow with it, have fun with it and throw the chaos at each other. We give what we can. That's the funniest part.

How did our ideas develop?

Tsukahara Yuya: Earlier this year, we spent two weeks at Kinosaki International Arts Center in a residency. It is in Japan’s countryside, and there are a lot of onsen (hot springs) in the area. Arts centre and onsen. That’s it. So, for two weeks we were cooking, drinking beer, enjoying onsen and sometimes rehearsing. At some point we started playing football. Do you always carry football on your tour?

Hugh Cho: I brought a football with me because I love it and thought it would be good for warm-ups and team bonding. Most of our team doesn't play football, but that's part of the fun – they do unexpected things, and it’s good for team building.

Tsukahara Yuya: We split into two teams and spent a lot of time playing football in the theatre. At the beginning, we played football for two hours in the theatre every day, then we went to lunch.

Hugh Cho: Then I started to get worried.

Tsukahara Yuya: It was an interesting experience because I used to play football seriously. I realised that by watching people play, I could understand their mindsets and characters expressed in their movement. You might not be able to put it in words, but you can see his sense of space and timing and how he takes care of others. For example, there's a guy called Keigo in our team. When he plays football, there’s a 120% chance he will bump into you. So it's quite easy to understand what kind of person he is, and now I adapt this into the arts. So, through playing football in warm-ups, we start to understand one another. So eventually it became one of the scenes of the performance.

Hugh Cho: Now I understand what you mean.

Tsukahara Yuya: One day, Hugh suggested the idea of making a bridge. I found it really interesting.

Hugh Cho: My first idea was to have a bridge on the stage. I was inspired by the bamboo structures used in Hong Kong for building scaffolding. It's a very unique Hong Kong element but also typical. They still use it as a structure. When I am working in Cantonese opera, I play in a bamboo theatre. I can literally see through the structure, but I have to flip on it, so I find it very scary. We learnt the techniques to build the bamboo structures, and we used that knowledge in Kinosaki. We even cut bamboo from a nearby hill.

Tsukahara Yuya: There was a hotel with a huge backyard of bamboo trees. The hotel manager said, “Yeah, you can cut whatever you want. Are you really going to cut it? That’s so nice of you!”

Hugh Cho: They're very long, extremely long so we had to find a way to carry them down the hill and then through the town. All the people were watching us, and some of them thought it's already a performance.

Tsukahara Yuya: It’s a really small town. So, whatever you do, they will notice right away.

Hugh Cho: Later when we bought souvenirs in local shops, the owner said, “Oh, you're the bamboo guy. I will give you a discount.” Eventually we built a bridge on the stage and it looked nice, but it's actually quite dangerous and scary.

Tsukahara Yuya: We were thinking about incorporating the process of making this bridge into the show.

Why do we want to build a bridge?

Hugh Cho: The idea of building a bridge was inspired by my experience of moving to the United Kingdom (UK) in 2020. I find it hard to adapt to a new environment because the language and the neighbourhood are totally different. If you live in Hong Kong, very often you live in an apartment and you don’t know your neighbours. In the UK, neighbours are very friendly. Every time I see them, they will just stop by and chat with you for 15 minutes for no special reason. It’s nice. I'm getting used to it. So, the idea of bridge comes from people connecting with one another.

Tsukahara Yuya: A bridge has many layers of meanings. First of all, in any city or civilisation, before there are bridges, there are islands or a river separating two strips of land. Both Hong Kong and Japan are islands. I think we all have our own favourite bridge, and we can all relate to it.

We even interviewed people building a new bridge in Kinosaki. We were lucky to go inside and see the construction process. We saw really thick iron ropes – they use about 20 massive ropes to hold the bridge. Steve, a member of TS Crew, asked the officials where the weakest point of the bridge was if he wanted to destroy it. I was like “Really? You are a foreigner. Can you really ask this question?” And I thought to myself, the official didn’t have to answer. He said that’s impossible before they eventually pointed out where it would be theoretically probable.

This experience was interesting because in contact Gonzo and TS Crew, we often connect our bodies, touch each other, hold each other and push each other. This makes us feel related to the structure of a bridge in a way. We sustain each other, which is one of the reasons I thought this idea about a bridge would be really interesting for our performance.

I asked ChatGPT, “Is there any song about bridges?” And then ChatGPT replied Bridge Over Troubled Water by Simon and Garfunkel. It was a song that my dad played in his car on a cassette tape. It’s a song of the older generation. And my Hong Kong friends told me it has a very different meaning to them.

Hugh Cho: The song actually has a Cantonese cover version written in 1991. At that time there was serious flooding in mainland China. Many Hong Kong pop singers sang this song to raise donations for flooding relief. It's about bonding, about coming together and supporting one another.

Tsukahara Yuya: So I think a bridge can be understood in various ways – what to connect, who crosses it, what information passes through. I wanted to work on both the physical and conceptual elements of bridges in this new piece.

Hugh Cho: We're also using the bamboo wall-building technique from Hong Kong, which is unique to our culture. It's interesting to share it with others and use it creatively.

Tsukahara Yuya: The last part of our performance is more like a game with rules suggested by certain performers. We follow these rules in numbers or movements. The movements are improvised but also somewhat choreographed. We're all suggesting movements, taking care of one another, reacting and trying to connect to the next move. We have to connect our bodies like a bridge to sustain one another. Sometimes we fall, but that's part of it. We can see this as a childish game in a way. It's playful, but it also has deeper meanings. We're exploring ideas of connection, support and the unpredictability of human interaction.

We are already talking about several ideas, and we want to work on that in November. But one thing just popped into my mind last night. What if we start working on non-contact but act kind of physically with an interfering imaginary force? We’ve talked a lot about Hong Kong movies. In many Hong Kong kung fu movies, when actors get into a brawl, they don’t actually come into contact, but they react like they do. It's really comical. contact Gonzo has tried, and nobody died. We want to try it again.