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co-created by Carmen Lee & Chun Shing Au, directed by Carmen Lee

Theatre du Poulet, SummerWorks Performance Festival, A Space Gallery, 401 Richmond Street West, Toronto

August 14–16, 2026

Writing for Intermission, Liam Donovan has described “physical storytelling” as central to this year’s SummerWorks. Indeed, the body has been a motif that kept resurfacing during the festival. Bodies have been exposed and tested, trapped in depersonalizing routines in Retina Manoeuvre, pushed towards new possibilities in Collision Project, or reconsidered through the audience’s own sentient presence in Blood Brothers.

GPO Box No.211 offers the reverse. For much of this interdisciplinary performance, the human body recedes while objects take its place. Under co-creator, director and lighting designer Carmen Lee, performer and co-creator Chun Shing Au animates scraps of paper, discarded letters and, eventually, a model prison that becomes almost indistinguishable from his own body.

As we enter the white room of A Space Gallery, crumpled sheets of paper litter the floor, each animated by a tiny electronic device that makes it twitch and scuttle, producing a scratchy, metallic rustle as they writhe. Au, also dressed in white, wanders among the audience seated around the space. From an overflowing bin, he retrieves crumpled sheets and silently offers them to us one at a time. Written in traditional Chinese with English translations beneath, these are discarded drafts of letters to Siu Ming, the pseudonym of Au’s friend, who was imprisoned after participating in Hong Kong’s 2019 pro-democracy protests.

For the audience, reading them becomes an exercise in textual archaeology. We notice crossings-out, rewritings, abandoned thoughts, and recurring lines across the different versions — and what stood out to me is the phrase “As long as my mind is free, I am free”. The revisions expose a negotiation between what can be said and what must remain unsaid, shaped by the possibility that the authorities might intercept the correspondence.

While we piece together Siu Ming’s story from the pages scattered around us, we almost forget about Au’s body. At the far end of the gallery, he is absorbed in assembling an angular model of a prison — once again, white. Eventually, he vanishes beneath this severe, vaguely Brutalist structure, his face buried under its geometry and his body wrapped in enormous sheets of white board folded into sharp planes. What crosses the room now looks less like a performer carrying an object than a strange hybrid in which performer and prop have become almost indistinguishable.

For all its intrigue, Lee lingers on the image for too long — nearly 15 minutes. GPO BOX No.211 would benefit from greater compression; in its current form, the performance risks slipping into stasis. That stasis extends to the audience. The programme describes the work as something spectators are invited to explore, yet its dramaturgy often feels too fixed to allow that exploration to happen fully.

The final sequence breaks the monochrome. Still buried beneath the white structure, Au remotely controls a toy truck carrying M&M’s towards spectators, recalling one of the mundane details of prison life mentioned in the letters: “I heard the news recently that the supply of M&Ms to Hong Kong prisons has been limited to 37g”. The sudden flash of colour is jocose and unexpectedly affecting.

In the end, GPO Box No.211 feels overlong. Its arresting images are too few and held for too long, soon becoming repetitive over the course of an hour. Yet, its best images linger. The performance reverses the usual relationship between performer and prop, giving physical form to a correspondence defined by censorship, distance and absence. In doing so, it brings a welcome perspective to the political focus of this year’s SummerWorks, which curator Michael Caldwell has tellingly titled “Fight / Flight”.

Alessandro Stracuzzi

Photo: Chun Shing Au. © 2026 Thomas Lenden.

For tickets visit summerworks.ca.