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Hong Kong Theatre director Edward Lam has established close association with an ensemble of Taiwanese actors, collaborating on almost every production since Madame Bovary is Me (Baofali furen men, 2006) and touring to Taiwan, Hong Kong and Mainland China. This article examines Lam's unique working pattern through the analysis of Art School Musical (Successors to Liang and Zhu, Liang Zhu de jichengzhe men, 2014), the 54th production by the Edward Lam Dance Theatre (ELDT). Inspired by the famous Chinese legend The Butterfly Lovers (Liang Shanbo yu Zhu Yingtai), Lam created a postdramatic musical as a Bildungsroman in a format of classroom drama. The love story underwent a poetic transformation through the lyrics and music. The ELDT version of the Liang-Zhu legend carries Lam's criticism of the stereotypes assigned to young people in patriarchal societies and allows him to elevate the love story into an allegory of one's quest for the meaning of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses the phenomenon of Pan-Asian production from the perspectives of the Hong Kong and Mainland Chinese cinemas, two historically separate cinemas increasingly being integrated through economic cooperation and co-production, a process also facilitated by political imperatives. As Hong Kong's film industry has declined over the past ten years and more, apparently with no hope of recovering its 'golden age' of dominance, it has turned to Pan-Asian production and distribution methods to shore up its markets while trying to gain a foothold in the vast China market. What is China's role in the phenomenon of Pan-Asian production? This paper examines the phenomenon and its characteristics through the specific examples of Chen Kaige's The Promise (2005) and Peter Chan's Perhaps Love (2005), analyzing the interrelationships between the Hong Kong cinema and its Mainland Chinese counterpart and considering the extent to which Pan-Asian production is or is not able to realize the ideal of an Asian cinematic identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]