Next Mobility Creative Lab | Opera For The Dead

Monica Lim & Mindy Meng Wang

 
  • Lead artists
    composers/sound designers
    Monica Lim & Mindy Meng Wang
  • Date 10.22.Tue. 7:30pm
  • Rating 00 and over
  • Venue Arko Arts Theater, Small Hall
  • Duration 30min
  • Premiere 2024 Seoul Performing Arts Festival
  • Tickets 균일석 가격미정
  • Cooperation Australia-Korea Foundation, APAM, Asia TOPA
  • *This performance is part of the Seoul Performing Arts Festival 2023-2024 Creative Lab ‘Next Mobility’ project, funded by the Australia-Korea Foundation and produced in partnership with the Australian Performing Arts Market (APAM).
  • guide *This performance is a Work in Progress and will be followed by an Open Talk with the participating artists after the performance.
    *This performance includes loud sound, music, darkness and intense lighting.

 

Cathartic experience through an invitation to mourning rituals, between life and death.

A unique live music performance that offers a cathartic experience through mourning rituals, reflecting on loss between life and death.

Introduction

Opera for the Dead (“OFTD”) is a multi-artform performance inspired by rituals and beliefs surrounding ancestor worship, death and afterlife in Chinese and Chinese diaspora culture. It combines new/digital media, physical installation, performance culture and live music to create a contemporary experience of grief that allows audiences to reflect on how they would like to live by rehearsing death through reimagined mourning rituals.

Synopsis

In 2015, Mindy lost her father. As an only child, the weight of responsibility for organising his funeral fell on her shoulders. First-hand, she experienced the comforting structure of rituals and tradition which had been passed down for thousands of years, colliding dissonantly with contemporary life. While dealing with shock and grief, the funeral was filled with socially expected, performative elements. OFTD explores these dissonances - the contradiction between spirituality vs. materialism in the ritual offerings made to ancestors in the afterlife, the contradiction between the eternal vs. digital convenience as funeral rites start to incorporate QR codes, LED wreaths and digital offerings, and the distinction between grief vs. the performance of grief for public consumption and display. Although we arrive at these through the lens of Chinese culture, these rituals of mourning and their adaptation into contemporary society are universal. All of us have imagined losing a loved one, or imagined leaving our loved ones. OFTD invites our audience to journey through these imaginations in a performance that provokes rethinking about the connection between life and death - how we celebrate life and those we love, how we want to be remembered, how we wish to live. Many of us are still experiencing some form of grief post-pandemic. OFTD offers a platform to reflect on loss, to rehearse mourning rituals, to participate in connecting with our common mortality.

What A multiform performance where a black box is transformed through modular set and digital design to create a series of changeable spaces. Musicians, live performers and audiences move in the spaces to explore different aspects of grief and loss. Examples include: • A virtual digital altar where audiences are invited to upload offerings for their loved ones which are then projected onto surfaces. Inspired by the traditions of burning offerings such as paper money for loved ones so that they manifest in the afterlife. The digital surfaces then rupture/dissolve as a metaphor for the membrane separating life and death, allowing the audience to step into another space where the virtual altar manifests as physical installations; • A wailing section inspired by the Chinese practice of hiring professional mourners (with its resonances with keening and laments in other cultures) where musicians and audiences cry or sing into a microphone, which are amplified and echoed by a choir of speakers and digital screens, making grief public, performative, largerthan-life, and a communal, cathartic experience; • A melting wax performance, where the visceral touch of melting wax on skin explores transformation from one form to another, accompanied by digital chanting machines (often used in funerals to replace actual chanting) that have been hacked and transformed sonically into drum machines.

Lead artists & composers/sound designers

Monica Lim



Monica Lim is an Australian sound artist and pianist with Malaysian heritage whose work spans installations, performance art, contemporary dance and new-instrument-making. She is interested in cross-disciplinary genres and forms as well as combinations of new technology with music. Her work has been presented at Arts House, Science Gallery Melbourne, White Night, Liquid Architecture, Melbourne Fringe, Arts Centre Melbourne, Asia TOPA, Sydney Dance Company and WorldPride as well as international symposiums such as ISEA and NIME.
Monica is currently undertaking postgraduate research at the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne in movement-led composition and new technologies. She is part of the research team at VCA Dance's Motion-Capture Lab and the University of Melbourne's Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Ethics. Monica was a 2023 Artist-in Residence at the Grainger Museum and the Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio.




Mindy Meng Wang



Mindy Meng Wang is a Chinese/Australian composer and world-leading guzheng performing artist merging traditional and contemporary practices. She is recognised for pioneering guzheng in non-traditional genres such as experimental, jazz, western classical, electronic, and improvisation. She has performed extensively internationally and nationally and is recognised as a cultural leader in the sector. Mindy has won many national and international awards including the 2022 Sidney Myer Fellowship, “Best Musician” Music Victoria Awards, and the 40 Under 40: Most Influential Asian-Australian Award. Mindy is the 2023 Melbourne Recital Centre Artist in Residence - the first to play a non-western instrument. Mindy's work promotes and advocates for cultural diversity and inclusivity in the sector. She aims to create a strong voice for young female composers and particularly artists of Asian heritage with a vision to establish deeper and reciprocal musical connections between Australia and Asia.

Credits

Lead artists & composers/sound designersMonica Lim & Mindy Meng Wang
DramaturgOphelia Huang
Set & lighting designerJenny Hector
Visual designerRel Pham

Next Mobility Project(2023-2024)

Supported by the Australia-Korea Foundation (AKF), SPAF has carried out a joint project of Next Mobility with APAM for the period 2023-2024. Next Mobility is a project delving into what the exchange and mobility of the performing arts would look like in the pandemic/post-pandemic era. The project explores changes in mobility, focusing on trends such as digitization, hybrid exchange, concept touring and green mobility which have influenced the creation and distribution of performances as a whole since the onset of the pandemic. Its major research themes have been centered around these questions. What do we want to tell people through international mobility? What needs mobility and why?
In 2023, they did exchange-based research which gave support to the initial development of a performance from the perspective of Next Mobility. In 2024, they will unveil the performance produced through such research at SPAF and share the process and relevant discourse of the project during an open talk session at PAMS. Producer Jin Yim is collaborating to run the project.

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