Sweet Clocks

Sweet Clocks embodies the fulfilment of a childhood wish to shove down a lot of candies at once, which was clearly forbidden by mum. It is also curious about the social reaction and interaction of collectively eating in the middle of a concert happening in a formal concert hall, a venue that usually does not permit eating. The journey starts from the perception of clashing candies within a limited space in mouth and the bursting chaos of flavour, then reveals a faint trace of nostalgia: the once ubiquitous candies have in fact become obsolete. As the tastes eventually fade, the remaining taste tells the untold memories like a Proustian Madeleine. Listening and tasting are bound together; time is traced through flavour, texture and decay. Beginning with the consumption of five distinct candies, biting, chewing and dissolving will trigger changes and transformation. The mouth not only enacts temporality but also propels the piece through sporadic gestures. What might otherwise be measured mechanically is here entrusted to unpredictable bodily processes and traced organically. The audience shares in this dissolution. With the same candies placed on their own tongues, each body becomes another clock, parallel yet never aligned. Beneath the sweetness lies a subtle undertone where the selection of Malaysian childhood candies gives the piece its private pulse, resonating with the hints in the score diagram formed by deconstructed Chinese characters 甜钟匿忆 (sweet clocks, hidden memories). While the connotative generational memories can hardly be associated in the same way, this interwoven thread acknowledges how time is lived differently by different bodies, at once collective and solitary, intangibly shared.