Latest news with #HuangRuo
The Herald Scotland
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
EIF: Book of Mountains and Seas is arguably not 'opera'
Composer Huang Ruo's collaborations with writer David Henry Hwang (M. Butterfly and the soon-to-open The Monkey King) are full-scale contemporary operas, but this piece is not just of a different size and style but arguably not 'opera' at all, as the Festival has categorised it. Perhaps 'staged oratorio' would be nearer the mark, as it teams chamber choir Ars Nova Copenhagen with two superb percussionists – Michael Murphy and John Ostrowski – on tuned and untuned instruments, and six puppeteers under the direction of Basil Twist. Ruo is his own librettist on four ancient Chinese myths from the collection of the title, stories of the origin of the planet and mankind, and of the responsibility of humans for the environment. Although they are distinct, the four parts flow into one another, culminating in a puppet giant Kua Fu chasing the single sun that the God of Archery, Hou Yi, has spared of the ten that originally lit the planet Earth. Read More: The 12-strong choir, directed by Theatre of Voices counter-tenor Miles Lallemant, sings in Mandarin and a vocabulary of sounds that Ruo has invented, and there are some magnificent solo voices among them as well as immaculate ensemble singing. The puppeteers, identically costumed in black velvet smocks, manipulate lanterns and the elements of the giant with flowing skill, and create seas and rivers with reams of white silk. Beautifully lit by Ayumu 'Poe' Saegusa, the theatre of the piece is organic and elemental and every bit as mesmeric as the music, the ingredients of which are more complex. Ruo's distinctive style blends his own heritage as a Chinese-born, U.S.-resident musician, using Eastern scales but also strikingly jazzy chords and rhythms. Mostly the music is very spacious, but there are sections of density as well as propulsive excitement, dialogues between the men and women's voices and between soloist and chorus. The two instrumentalists put in a power of work with long sequences on singing bowls and very fine six-mallet marimba playing at the work's climax. For festival tickets see here
Edinburgh Reporter
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Edinburgh Reporter
Edinburgh International Festival – Book of Mountains and Seas ⭐⭐
Billed as an opera, the Book of Mountains and Seas is not traditional in either the European or Chinese traditions. Huang Ruo explores ancient Chinese myths which I expect were quite unfamiliar to most of the audience, certainly to me. This meant that at the end I had far more questions than enlightenment. Where were the mountains? There was a myth about a drowned princess seeking revenge on the ocean, quite ineffectively, I might add, but there wasn't a snow-capped peak to be found anywhere. I was perplexed by what was supposed to tie the myths together, so it seemed rather disjointed. And the narrative pace didn't match the action on stage, the most glaring example where the archer god shot down nine of the ten suns in rapid succession without those victims experiencing a corresponding downfall, though they did eventually exit the stage. Also publicised was that the production was to include puppetry; it did but had only a single giant figure running fruitlessly after the setting sun. Perhaps it was my inability to grasp the point, but I thought more words / surtitles of explanation would have greatly helped since I failed to grasp the allusion to the intended message about humanity's complex relationship with nature. The redeeming element of this was the performance of the Danish choir Ars Nova Copenhagen along with an ensemble of percussionists and puppeteers. So, two stars rather than one. PHOTO Andrew Perry PHOTO Andrew Perry PHOTO Andrew Perry PHOTO Andrew Perry Like this: Like Related
The Guardian
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Book of Mountains and Seas review – puppets and percussion, Mandarin and a monkish chorus
There's no doubting composer Huang Ruo and director Basil Twist's ambition in Book of Mountains and Seas. Over 75 minutes, using six puppeteers, two percussionists and a choir of 12 – the excellent Ars Nova Copenhagen – they aim to create the world before our very eyes before nearly destroying it, twice. And all by manipulating some lanterns, a few swathes of silk and a handful of fragments reminiscent of flotsam. The action is measured, the sound world haunting, and the visuals, nimbly lit by Ayumu 'Poe' Saegusa, are effective, but it does take a while to get going. Ruo, who was born in China and lives in the US, writes assured, distinctive music, fusing east and west in a way that feels natural and authentic. Here, he deploys an array of tuned and untuned percussion instruments, some of them used in traditional Chinese orchestras, but most familiar to western ears. Gongs, finger cymbals, marimba and Tibetan singing bowls put in appearances, yet all are used sparingly. Vocally, too, there's a certain austerity, whether in sober chant or rhythmic chatter. Melismatic melodies and ululating choruses lend cross-cultural spice to Ruo's musical melting pot. The work tells four tales drawn from Chinese myths transcribed in the fourth century BC. Judiciously chosen, their contemporary resonances range from the climate crisis to the boundless hubris of humankind. In the first, the death of the hairy titan Pan Gu creates sun and moon, mountains and rivers, and finally humans. The second tells of a drowned princess reborn as a vengeful bird. The third relates how 10 over-enthusiastic suns are whittled down to one to prevent them burning up the planet, and the fourth how the dim-witted giant Kua Fu tries and fails to capture the sun that remains. The choir, robed like monks and with only their faces illuminated, tackle the intricate lines with confidence and a sure sense of pitch, singing in a combination of Mandarin and an unfathomable made-up language. The former appears now and again as surtitles, the latter does not. It is left to Twist and his puppeteers to tell us what is going on, which on the whole they do with craft and clarity. The imagery for tales one and two is a trifle plain: the story of the embittered bird and the ocean is told with little more than a crimson-fringed kite and a rippling white sheet. The propulsive fourth story, however, where the deconstructed fragments come together to create the sun-hunting giant, is visually arresting. But it's the stately progression of the 10 lanterns in the third tale, where graceful movement echoes music of piercing beauty, that lingers longest. At the Lyceum, Edinburgh, until 16 August All our Edinburgh festival reviews
Scotsman
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Edinburgh International Festival opera Book of Mountains and Seas
Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Book of Mountains and Seas ★★ The Lyceum, until 16 August The big question behind composer Huang Ruo's patience-testing, woefully ill-conceived Book of Mountains and Seas was: why? When there are so many composers doing pioneering, challenging, witty, provocative things with opera, what box did this particular work tick, or what thematic slot did it fill, to allow it to become the International Festival's second and final staged opera for 2025? There was, frankly, little about it that was convincing. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Book of Mountains and Seas | Andrew Perry Scoring the work for chamber choir and two percussionists is unusual but intriguing – it's less persuasive, though, when the singers of Ars Nova Copenhagen give a disappointingly approximate account, blurring over Ruo's intricate vocal decorations and sliding apart from each other in tuning. When Ruo's sparse, austere choral textures needed confident, committed delivery, what they got sounded unconvincing and unconvinced. Likewise, director Basil Twist's puppetry amounted to little more than rippling sheets for the sea and Chinese lanterns (what else?) on poles representing the ten suns of the work's ancient Chinese creation myths. Even the gigantic human figure that coalesced towards the work's conclusion felt ungainly in its limited movements. The subject matter behind the work offers fascinating insights into a little-known culture and history, though few of the contemporary environmental parallels suggested in the programme book. But what this overlong, poorly executed work is doing as part of the curated International Festival is anyone's guess. David Kettle
The Guardian
26-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Detained Chinese immigrants carved their anguish into a wall a century ago. Those words inspired a ballet
One sunny March day on Angel Island, a hilly landmass in the middle of the San Francisco Bay, a dancer with a 40-ft braid attached to her head glided across a narrow concrete walkway. The audience sat on chairs in front of a long wooden building: a former detention center where – from 1910 to 1940 – half a million people, the majority Chinese, were held for months, even years, in prison-like conditions. Sometimes called 'the Ellis Island of the west', Angel Island's immigration station is the unlikely setting, and inspiration, for an ambitious new work by the Oakland Ballet Company. It's based on the people from 80 countries who were confined to the the island's detention center, which was the result of the Chinese Exclusion Act and other racist laws designed to keep Asian people out of the United States. In response, the detainees carved over 200 poems onto the walls expressing their anguish and rage. As the ballerina moved, her braid stretched behind like the train of a gown while four other dancers shifted around her. One carried a wooden boat symbolizing the immigrant's journey from China to America. As the dance progressed, the braid seemed to change meaning. At one point, it was like a line of ancestry or memory connecting the woman to her home country. The next, it became a rope lashing the dancers together. When the woman tried to flee, it pulled taut, holding her in place. Then she wove it like a skein of yarn and cradled it in her arms. By the end, the braid was snarled around her body as she crumpled to the stage. The Angel Island Project premiers on 4 May at Oakland's Paramount Theatre, with more performances planned in the fall. The ballet is the work of seven Asian American and Pacific Islander choreographers, each interpreting a poem from Angel Island and other harrowing tales in Chinese American history. It's set to an oratorio by Chinese-born composer Huang Ruo, which will be performed by the Del Sol Quartet. Throughout, a choir will sing the words of the poems in Mandarin and English. 'Like a stray dog forced into confinement, like a pig trapped in a bamboo cage, our spirits are lost in this wintry prison,' begins one of the verses. 'We are worse than horses and cattle. Our tears shed on an icy day.' This poignant piece of theater has origins in the Covid pandemic. In 2021, Graham Lustig, Oakland Ballet's artistic director, was dismayed to learn that one of his dancers was subjected to racial slurs due to the rise of anti-Asian hate in the US. In response, he partnered with the Oakland Asian Cultural Center and launched the annual Dancing Moons Festival, becoming the first program to feature the work of all-Asian artists. In 2023, Lustig discovered Ruo's oratorio Angel Island, which was composed in 2021, and began developing a ballet about the detainment center. The project is expansive, an eight-part ballet exploring different facets of Pacific migration with 12 dancers, seven choreographers, a string quartet and 16-piece choir. 'It's the biggest project the company has ever taken on,' says Lustig. 'And at its root, I think it's a very compelling story about American history, which is less well-known. I think it deserves to be shone a light on.' This message has taken on even greater significance in recent months, as Donald Trump's administration has begun its aggressive campaign to arrest and detain immigrant residents in the US, raising alarming parallels with the dark history of Angel Island a century ago. Phil Chan, an author and choreographer who lives in New York but grew up in Berkeley, created two pieces for the ballet. Like many Bay Area residents, he went to Angel Island on field trips as a child, but the history didn't sink in at the time. It wasn't until this project that he absorbed the full meaning of the poems on the barrack walls. 'It has been really special to dive into this history, especially right now, and to ask some of those questions about who belongs here, who was allowed to be here, who wasn't,' he says. 'But at the end of the day, we're all Americans, right? I don't see it as just a Chinese American story. This is really an American story. It's part of how we, all of us, got here.' While European newcomers stayed only a few hours at Ellis Island, other immigrants on Angel Island were typically detained from two weeks to six months. The longest stay was almost two years. They were interrogated, separated by gender, exposed to poor living conditions, and forced to endure invasive medical exams. It was all part of Chinese exclusion, a series of restrictive immigration laws that started with the Page Act of 1875 and continued until China became a US ally in the second world war. The different choreographers provide varied viewpoints within a larger story about the immigrant experience. In the case of Seascape, the piece with the braid and boat, classical Chinese dancer Feng Ye was given the poem: 'The sea-scape resembles lichen twisting and turning for a thousand li. There is no shore to land and it is difficult to walk, With a gentle breeze I arrived at the city thinking all would be so at ease. How was one to know he was to live in a wooden building?' Ye explains she chose the braid because of its importance in Chinese culture, the belief that hair carries memories through time, and her personal associations of homesickness when she first moved to the US from China nine years ago. Working with a 40-ft prop presented technical hurdles for the performers, who risked tripping over or getting tangled in the braid. But, she adds, she embraced the risks as part of the dance. 'It was a very big challenge because there are a lot of uncertainties, things we cannot control,' Ye says. 'But it's an interesting part of it to me. That's like history. We don't know the next step. We never know. And you cannot control it.' In addition to the immigration crackdown, the federal government is also censoring artistic expression it deems DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) in an attempt to silence voices that don't fit in with the administration's narrative of America. It has eliminated arts funding for underserved communities and is rescinding grants previously awarded for creative and educational endeavors. In early April, the government terminated a $25,000 grant to the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation, which preserves and elevates the history of migration to the US through the Pacific. Executive director Edward Tepporn expects a second grant will soon be revoked, resulting in a loss of $100,000. 'Without this funding, it definitely hampers our opportunities and abilities to tell these often invisible stories,' Tepporn told CBS News. Given this, a ballet centering the talent of Asian and Asian American artists and depicting the painful consequences of history feels especially relevant. For example, a segment in the ballet entitled The Last Chinaman From the Titanic portrays the six Chinese men who survived the sinking of the ocean liner in 1912. One individual, Fang Lang, was found clutching a floating door, likely the inspiration for the well-known movie scene starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. However, when the survivors reached Ellis Island, they were barred from entering the United States and denied medical care. Chang Chip developed pneumonia and died in 1914. In the suite, ballerina Jazmine Quezada is hoisted into the air by the other dancers. As they turn, pushing her as high as they can, she lifts her arm skyward, reaching for something that she doesn't receive. There is nothing to do but drop her empty hand. Chan's finale for Angel Island Project focuses on waves: the dancers imitate the ocean waves bringing immigrants to this country, which turn into waves of people who come and keep coming, throughout the generations, despite exclusionary laws. There's resiliency and hope in the act of migration, even as other things are left behind. It's a message that rang true for many of the dancers, a mixed group from different backgrounds who brought their individual histories to the ballet. After the March preview on Angel Island, a woman asked the dancers if they had personal connection to the material. As the bay sloshed in the background, Quezada raised her hand. 'My dad is from Mexico and my mom's family is from Mexico, and they immigrated here. It's just bringing up feelings about how much they struggled to get here and create a better life,' she said, tearing up. 'I love them so much and I miss my grandparents. And I'm so glad for what they have done for me.'
