Monica Lim & Mindy Meng Wang
A unique live music performance that offers a cathartic experience through mourning rituals, reflecting on loss between life and death.
IntroductionOpera 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.
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 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.
Lead artists & composers/sound designersMonica Lim & Mindy Meng Wang
DramaturgOphelia Huang
Set & lighting designerJenny Hector
Visual designerRel Pham
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.