Hong Kong: Mirror Concert Accident to Be Investigated

The Hong Kong authorities will examine why a big, heavy video display screen fell from the ceiling throughout a live performance by a well-liked boy band at a government-managed venue, injuring two dancers, officers stated on Friday.

The accident occurred throughout a efficiency on Thursday night time by Mirror, a 12-member band within the Chinese language territory whose reputation has grown throughout the coronavirus pandemic.

In footage from the live performance on the Hong Kong Coliseum, viewers members scream after the video display screen lands immediately on one dancer, apparently hanging his neck. The South China Morning Publish newspaper later reported that one of many two male dancers had suffered neck accidents and was in intensive care. It stated the opposite was in secure situation.

The coliseum is 23 meters, or about 75 toes, excessive, in accordance with the Leisure and Cultural Providers Division, the federal government company that manages the venue. The screens for the four-sided projection system put in on the middle of the venue are every 5 meters by 3.9 meters.

John Lee, Hong Kong’s chief govt, stated in a press release early Friday that he had requested the leisure division and different businesses to research the accident and “evaluation the security necessities of comparable efficiency actions.”

“I’m shocked by the incident,” Mr. Lee stated. “I categorical sympathy to those that have been injured and hope that they’d get better quickly.”

The Hong Kong authorities stated in a separate assertion that the federal government had contacted the live performance organizers on Wednesday — the day earlier than the accident — about “stage incidents prior to now few days.” It didn’t elaborate, and the leisure division couldn’t instantly be reached for remark.

On Tuesday, a member of Mirror, Frankie Chan Sui-fai, fell off the stage on the Hong Kong Coliseum throughout the second day of the band’s scheduled 12-day collection of live shows, The South China Morning Publish reported. He fell a few meter and was not severely harm, in accordance with the report.

Makerville, the live performance organizer, apologized for the Thursday night time accident in an Instagram publish early Friday, including that Mirror’s remaining live shows on the venue could be canceled. The band’s administration didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.

Mirror, a Okay-pop-style band that sings in Cantonese, a Chinese language dialect spoken extensively in Hong Kong, has supplied some reduction to residents of the previous British colony throughout a tumultuous interval of its historical past.

In 2019, town was consumed by months of mass protests triggered by a proposed legislation to permit extraditions to mainland China. Then got here a thicket of pandemic-related restrictions which have battered Hong Kong’s financial system, in addition to a sweeping nationwide safety legislation that has curtailed freedoms with breathtaking pace.

Mirror’s escapist lyrics have been a balm of kinds for an anxious inhabitants. The band has offered out live performance halls, accounting for among the metropolis’s solely large-scale occasions throughout the pandemic. Its members’ faces have been plastered on billboards, buses and subway adverts.

The coliseum the place Mirror was acting on Thursday opened in 1983, in accordance with the leisure division’s web site. It seats about 12,500 individuals, the positioning says, and meets native demand for a “world class indoor stadium.”

Zixu Wang contributed reporting.