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.

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.

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.