You Millions, I Embrace You! (2017) from Alex Yiu on Vimeo.
《擁抱吧，萬民！》姚少龍的參與演出
‘You millions, I embrace you!’ A participatory performance by Alex Yiu
策展人：陳子澂
Curator : Andre Chan
You Millions, I Embrace You!《擁抱吧，萬民！》(2017)
You Millions, I Embrace You! (2017) is a participatory performance in which an audience is led through a formal choral rehearsal by the artist. Drawing on five years of choral experience from his university training, the artist conducts participants through a section of Beethoven's Ode to Joy (An die Freude) in its original German, using Kodály hand signs to teach the solfège intervals physically before the participants encounter the score. As Slavoj Žižek has described, Ode to Joy functions as an "empty container" — a text of European universalism that has been mobilised by virtually every political formation from the European Union to authoritarian regimes precisely because its claim to collective joy admits no specific content. By placing this text into the bodies of a non-specialist, international audience through the muscle memory of rehearsal, the performance asks what it means to physically encode a European universalist tradition into bodies that did not inherit it.
At the end of the rehearsal, the artist takes away the scores and burns them one by one while the participants attempt a final performance from memory. What the body has retained is only the melody; the German text, which most participants could not read in the first place, is gone. The performance recorded here was presented on 29 June 2017 at 100ft. PARK, Sham Shui Po — two days before the twentieth anniversary of the Hong Kong handover — and concluded with the artist singing Auld Lang Syne, the Scottish song of farewell and collective memory that was played as the British flag was lowered at the 1997 handover ceremony. The audience, stripped of their scores and holding only the melody of Beethoven in their bodies, were left to find their way into a song about remembering what has already been lost.
《擁抱吧，萬民！》You Millions, I Embrace You! (2017) 是一件參與式演出，由藝術家帶領觀眾進行一場正式的合唱團排練。藝術家本人擁有大學時期近五年合唱團的經驗，以此為基礎，引導參與者以德文原文演唱貝多芬《歡樂頌》(An die Freude) 的選段，並運用高大宜手號 (Kodály hand signs) 在接觸樂譜之前，先以身體動作教授唱名音程。正如斯拉沃熱・齊澤克（Slavoj Žižek）所描述，《歡樂頌》本質上是一個「空洞的容器」——一段歐洲普世主義的文本，恰恰因為其對集體喜悅的宣稱不含任何特定內容，而被幾乎所有政治陣營從歐盟到威權政府廣泛挪用。透過排練的肌肉記憶，將這段文本植入一群並非音樂專業、來自不同背景的觀眾身體之中，演出追問的是：將一種歐洲普世主義傳統以身體方式銘刻入那些並非其文化繼承者的身體，究竟意味著什麼。
排練結束時，藝術家逐一取走參與者的樂譜並將其燃燒，與此同時要求他們嘗試憑記憶完成最後一次演唱。身體所保留的，只剩下旋律；那些大多數參與者本就無從閱讀的德文歌詞，已隨樂譜消失。這場演出於2017年6月29日在深水埗100呎公園呈現——距香港回歸二十週年僅兩天——並以藝術家演唱《友誼萬歲》(Auld Lang Syne) 作結。這首蘇格蘭告別與集體記憶之歌，正是1997年回歸典禮上英國國旗降下時所奏響的旋律。失去樂譜的觀眾，懷中只剩貝多芬的旋律，被留在那裡，在一首關於銘記已逝之物的歌曲中，各自尋找自己的方向。
