French May Arts Festival 2024
Hong Kong
Continuing our mission to touch everything and be everywhere for everyone, the 2024 French May Arts Festival is packed with cultural events that celebrate the illuminating power of exchange and savour the joys of French heritage.
Our East–meets–West festival facilitates cultural exchange on a grand scale with collaborations like The Hong Kong Jockey Club Series: Noir & Blanc — A Story of Photography, a first–ever partnership between French May and M+. Featuring hundreds of black and white photographs from the collections of Bibliothèque nationale de France and M+, the exhibition spotlights more than a century’s worth of photographic icons from Europe and Asia.
There’s no shortage of collaborations in other mediums. In music, France’s Thierry Maillard and friends team up with local virtuosos Eugene Pao and CY Leo for two nights of exhilarating jazz. In theatre, playwrights Nicolas Kerszenbaum and Wu Ho Fai close their two–year project, Let the Mirror Speak, with the Asian premiere of two original works. In dance, breakdance crew Compagnie Käfig shows down with French and Hong Kong orchestras in Symphony of New Worlds, timed for the debut of ‘breaking’ at the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics.
Our unique, multi–genre line–up offers audiences and emerging local talents many opportunities to step out of the spectator’s seat and into the action. Alongside its presentation of Emanuel Gat’s fashion–fuelled eighties tribute LOVETRAIN2020, Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels hosts choreographers Ola Maciejewska and Christian Rizzo for workshops with local art students. For the French Rendezvous@Tai Kwun, Compagnie XY follows its acrobatics show Möbius in May with family–friendly circus workshops. Food lovers returning to the French GourMay can supplement their gastronomic tour of Southern France with interactive tasting workshops.
Nearly a hundred programmes to choose from, there's bound to be something for everyone at our thirty–first French May!