amilton de azevedo writes about HEAVEN FM, by Hong Kong Exile (Canada), presented in the 2025 Festival TransAmériques (FTA – Tiohtià:ké/Montreal). this text is part of a special coverage; the critic traveled to Canada at the invitation of the FTA.

Old radios, headlamps and human creativity. These are the basis of HEAVEN FM; and that is more than enough. Hong Kong Exile’s work is an astonishing ride towards the edge of the universe relying on retrotech aesthetic, performing some sort of a reverse shadow theatre as the light becomes the tangible matter to be seen – and such a wholehearted materiality.

Natalie Tin Yin Gan takes the stage in a first moment of HEAVEN FM (which is probably the one that one could recognize their own humanity being represented literally); she’s on focus, for the audience to see the presence of a human being. As she presents the work, local commentaries regarding traffic and weather brings people together and builds up community. Afterwards, introduction made, Hong Kong Exile will be continuously inviting us to take part in this sort of cosmogonical movement triggered by its own creation.

• Read more: access this link for more theater critics written in english
• Read more: follow ruína acesa’s 2025 FTA special coverage

For HEAVEN FM, in its entirety, relies on this movement of an inauguration of a logic that can only be sustainable by itself as it is being built and unfolded. The unpretentiousness of the work relies upon an artistic gesture that understands the densities of the discourses being proposed within the scene and the lightweightness of its own conduction. Hong Kong Exile manage to take themselves really seriously while jesting around their own doing.

So we see controlled car radios, baby radios whining, tuning statics operating like a seashell that can make us hear the ocean, headlamps becoming demiurges conjuring lifes, relations, loves; all sort of almost-non-human elements taking over the stage and bringing humanity at its finest. Light, in HEAVEN FM, is undoubtedly presence. For most of the show, the audience is not able to gaze at any performer face – exceptions be made for the funny pool scene – and yet we bear witness a blissful and soulful universe-building experience.

An ASCII Big Bang is the multimedia gift offered by Hong Kong Exile at the beginning. Paragraphs drop resembling, to some extent, a Star Wars opening, in an analog-vintage gesture, using a major projector which lines draw the misé-en-scene like lasers. Technology-relying seems to be an issue considered by HEAVEN FM, and one could read the criticism within its discourse, especially considering the humour that runs through it.

As we feel that we’re travelling through spacetime, pushing the boundaries of the universe, radio frequencies seem to be tying up everything together – what brings a whole other layer to the work. Dialing for a signal becomes a choreography. Old radios crossing the scene evokes some sort of longingness towards what existed and it is no longer there; HEAVEN FM does not directly speak of nostalgia, but the mere presence of such obsolescence redimensionates the work in the direction of what Tin Yin Gan mentions at the beginning: it is a piece that, among so many things, regards grief.

It is a beautiful composition: the presence of the absence is the raw material of HEAVEN FM. Humour, lightness: we, as audience, easily adhere to the logic being proposed by that universe-building gesture; and then the tricks, the illusions and the revealing of them starts to add up and at some point we realize that all that is being put into existence through such dispositives is also a remembrance of what is gone.

HEAVEN FM is ingenuously ingenious. It is so deep and at the same time it constantly reminds us that it is not taking itself very seriously. There lies the glare of it; the fading of stars, coming to be or ceasing to exist. As the projection is inverted at the end, what is left for us is an invitation and a possibility: throughout it all, there is always a constellation to be seen, remembered and cherished – if not, created.