1 Lepecki, Andre, ‘Choreopolice and Choreopolitics: Or, the Task of the Dancer’, TDR: The Drama Review, 57, 4 (2013), pp. 13–27, here p. 19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 The official five demands were: (1) full withdrawal of the extradition bill; (2) an independent commission of inquiry into alleged police brutality; (3) retraction of the classification of protesters as ‘rioters’; (4) amnesty for arrested protesters; (5) dual universal suffrage, meaning for both the legislative council and the chief executive.

3 Lee's full comments on water's formlessness are as follows: ‘Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves … Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.’ Quoted in Matthew Polly, Bruce Lee: A Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2019), p. 285.

4 For a fuller account of the 2019 protests, as well as the history leading up to them, see Devabhaktuni, Sony and Mansbridge, Joanna, ‘Democracy's Dislocations: Spaces of Protest and the People of Hong Kong’, Public Culture, 34, 1 (2022), pp. 99–121CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Since the pro-democracy protests was a youth-driven movement, the local and central governments have identified education as the primary mechanism through which dissent was propagated and also the primary mechanism through which it will be eliminated. In the past three years a number of measures have been taken to ensure ‘national security awareness’ among students. First, the introduction of a patriotic curriculum in schools will teach students the concepts of ‘succession’, ‘subversion’, ‘terrorist activities’ and ‘collusion with foreign forces’, all activities deemed illegal under the NSL. Second, liberal studies – a subject aimed at fostering critical and pluralistic thinking – has been replaced with ‘citizenship and social development’ – a subject that emphasizes loyalty to authorities and to the nation. Third, the establishment of a National Security Awareness Day on 15 April teaches the public about the role of the police – or the ‘disciplined forces’, as they are called – and invites children to role-play as police by driving mini police cars and firing toy guns.

6 Greater Bay Area, Hong Kong SAR Government, at www.bayarea.gov.hk/en/home/index.html (accessed 9 May 2023).

7 For example, on 23 August 2019, thousands gathered along the city's harbourfront to form human chains in a sign of solidarity. Other creative acts of collective expression included flash-mob singalongs in malls; hundreds of Lennon Walls composed of colourful post-it notes expressing encouragement, hope and humour; and 10 p.m. nightly chanting from apartment windows across the city's districts. Many of these actions were inspired by past protest movements in Chile and the former Eastern Bloc. See ‘100 Days In: Ten Creative Ways Hongkongers Sustain Their Protests Away from the Barricades’, Hong Kong Free Press, 16 September 2019, at https://hongkongfp.com/2019/09/16/100-days-ten-creative-ways-hongkongers-sustain-protests-away-barricades (accessed 2 November 2023).

8 Bach Is Heart Sutra took place on 23–4 April and 8–9 May 2021 at the Cultural Centre in Tsim Sha Tsui. The theatres were open for four months. Otherwise, they remained closed for almost three years, from early 2020 to late 2022. Previous iterations of Bach Is Heart Sutra were staged in 2009, 2018, 2020 and 2021, each involving a different dramaturgy and different collaborators.

9 Berlant, Lauren, ‘The Commons: Infrastructures for Troubling Times’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 34, 4 (2016), pp. 393–413, here p. 394CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Lauren Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2022), p. 20. I follow Berlant's definition of ‘life’ as ‘a technical scene of animated and dynamic embodiments’ and ‘world’ as ‘the sensed, physical, and extensive context for social being and collective life that is saturated by norms of the relation among action, effect, institution, and event’. Ibid., p. 123. There are inevitably internal frictions between these two modes of existence, as we aspire to be in life even as the world resists our possession.

11 Ibid., p. 22.

12 Ibid., p. 76.

13 Ibid., p. 7.

14 Ibid., p. 151.

15 Ibid., pp. 106, 28.

16 Ibid., p. 28.

17 Ibid., p. 28.

18 Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China, 1990, Constitutional and Mainland Affairs Bureau, Hong Kong SAR Government, p. 84.

19 The Fraser Institute has named Hong Kong the freest market in the world since 1985, and despite the political changes and the implementation of the NSL, the city retained its spot in 2022. See the Fraser Institute, Economic Freedom in the World executive report, at www.fraserinstitute.org/sites/default/files/economic-freedom-of-the-world-2022.pdf (accessed 22 May 2023), p. 8.

20 ‘About Us’, Zuni Icosahedron, at https://zuni.org.hk/new/zuni/web/default.php?cmd=about&locale=en_US (accessed 21 January 2023).

21 Hui, Yuk, Art and Cosmotechnics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021), p. 50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Mathias Woo, ‘Mindfulness, Technology, Art’, Zuni Icosahedron, at https://zuniseason.org.hk/en/z-live/mindfulness-technology-art (accessed 9 October 2022).

23 Ibid.

24 Hui, Art and Cosmotechnics, p. 205.

25 ‘About Us’, Zuni Icosahedron, at https://zuni.org.hk/new/zuni/web/default.php?cmd=about&locale=en_US (accessed 11 October 2022).

26 Victor Fan, Cinema Illuminating Reality: Media Philosophy through Buddhism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022), p. 7.

27 Thich Nhat Hanh, The Other Shore: A New Translation of the Heart Sutra with Commentaries (Berkeley, CA: Palm Leaves Press, 2017), p. 20.

28 Ibid., p. 45.

29 Ibid., p. 45.

30 Ibid., p. 109.

31 Buddhist teachers often use the analogy of waves and water to explain emptiness and the co-presence of the world of distinguishable forms (conventional reality) and the dimension of formless relationality (ultimate reality). When we see a wave (a form), it seems to have a definable shape and a beginning and an end; however, if we see with the eyes of emptiness, we see that the wave is indivisible from the water from which it emerges and into which it extinguishes.

32 Hanh, The Other Shore, p. 76.

33 The Buddhist concept of signlessness evokes Jacques Derrida's writings on the sign and différance, which assert that signs always refer to other signs, ad infinitum, and that there is no ultimate referent or foundation. Signs, in both Derridean and Buddhist thought, are at once emptied of a singular meaning and connected to a whole system of signs. We might also hear in Buddhist teachings on emptiness and formlessness echoes of New Materialist theories, which see a world of entangled, lively matter, rather than of discrete subjects and objects.

34 Hanh, The Other Shore, p. 97.

35 The psychology of flow state, made famous by the psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi and his 1990 book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, describes a state of deep concentration, a sense of mastery, a lack of self-consciousness, and an emotional buoyancy when performing an action.

36 Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People, p. 76.

37 Ibid., pp. 7, 24.

38 Ibid., p. 3.

39 Recent attempts by the government to ban the protest anthem ‘Glory to Hong Kong’ from the Internet and to weed out ‘soft resistance’ suggests that it is not simply the violent aspects of the protests that pose a security threat, but any words, sentiments or actions that run counter to national loyalty.

40 As Berlant writes, ‘Infrastructure, then, is another way of talking about mediation – but always as a material process of binding, never merely as a material technology, aesthetic genre, form, or norm that achieves something. Mediation is not a stable thing but a way of seeing the unstable relations among dynamically related things.’ Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People, p. 22.

41 Berlant, Lauren, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 2Google Scholar.

42 Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People, p. 150.

43 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, p. 2.

44 Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People, p. 75.

45 Ibid., p. 77.

46 Ibid., p. 95.

47 Ibid., p. 106.

48 Ibid., p. 33.

49 Ibid., p. 25.