Heritage | Historic neighborhood tours come alive with poetry and performances

Guided tours through the heritage neighborhood of St Lawrence are to be held this Saturday and Sunday evenings, with performances and poems presented by local artists along the route.
Titled “Heritage Stroll With Poetries,” the program is being organized by the Macao Heritage Ambassadors Association. After preparing, creating, and rolling out community activities in the timespan of a year, the program is coming to the finale of its third edition.
“Before our guided tours were basically relying on speaking, but today anyone can easily find the information online; simply reading out the explanation is also hard to arouse visitors’ feelings and emotions. Thereby we started to use arts to tell the stories of the heritage sites and express the human feelings towards the neighborhood,” introduced the program’s producer, Ms Chloe Lau.
The guided tours will start from Lilau Square all the way to Sir Robert Ho Tung Library, through the Mandarin’s House, St Lawrence Church and some alleys in the heritage neighborhood. Different forms of artistic expression will be presented along the route, including dances, poems and a play.
“This year our theme is the city’s roots in water, including the city’s relation with the ocean and wells. We also want people to look back at the strong human touch characterized in the old Macau, as today the population [structure] has changed and people are estranged while being busy in their own lives and materialistic pursuits,” said Ms Lau.
The organizer also acknowledged that today “it’s hard for people to take two or three hours strolling through the route,” and the performances were not all perceived as successful when launched three years ago.
By day, the streets are too busy and crowded for performances that need to be appreciated in a peaceful setting; whereas by night, the neighborhood needs to remain quiet. The organizer then found a solution: offering earphones for performers and participants to stroll the route “in silence.”
Ms Lau explained that the program is carried out by a hundred young volunteers, in collaboration with a group of local poets, dancers, musicians and artists. In the first nine months, volunteers descended on the neighborhood to visit the stores and residents in a mission to seek out stories and items with themes such as “childhood” or “ the ocean” in mind. Artists and poets then picked inspirations from those stories and tales.
“Those messages will then be delivered through the guided tours and performances to the audience, and conversely, the audience may resonate with or be reminded of their childhood. We expect such interactions in the cycle,” stressed the coordinator.