Theatre

Male singers of Deishui Naamyam are called gu si (blind songster). Born in 1910, Dou Wun began learning Naamyam in the early 1920s. When the civil war broke out, he moved from Guangzhou to Hong Kong, where he earned his living by singing. Dou improvised his singing on current affairs topics in the RTHK radio programme Dou Wun’s Naamyam in the 1950s. In the 1970s, Naamyam went downhill and became a lost art amidst the prevalence of European and western music. In 1975, Professor Bell Yung came to Hong Kong to make recordings of Dou’s performance. To fully reflect the artistic merits of Dou and to be truthful to the originality of Naamyam, Yung made the live recordings in Fu Loong Teahouse. The outcomes became a treasure. In 2019, Zuni restores the recordings of Dou using audio and imaging technologies of the theatre to relive the audio-visual space of Deishui Naamyam.