Thirst (2018)

Soloists
   Laosheng Style: 女老生 (the woman who played the old man)
   Nvdan Style: 青衣 (the young woman who played herself)

Composer note
It is said that in China, there are more than 300 regional opera styles, the more well-known Peking opera is one of them, so is the Diaoqiang opera, featured in this piece. At the end of summer 2016, I brought a team of researcher, scholar and filmmaker with me to Xinchang, a locale south of Zhejiang Province. Diaoqiang, is one of the oldest styles from Ming Dynasty, (around 1330 AC).

The Arias you are hearing in the piece are based on two of the oldest arias, from TieGuanTu and Mulian Jiumu.

In the traditional operas, the performers are cast into their roles from an early age. Our lead performer, Wang Ying, for example, was trained only as an old man at the age of 17. She has to learn to sing, act, walk, kneel, and personify the old man in her daily meticulous training at the opera troupe academy.

As a creator, I often wonder about our projected role in our society and furthermore, our gender roles presented in the literature and theatrical works. So I experimented with giving her back to her woman identity at the end. In today’s world, our gender becomes more fluid and laden with complex layers. Who says a strong woman with a broader shoulder and a deeper voice cannot be cast a woman? The problem? The problem is we need to create new works for these traditional performers.

Based on the traditional text, I rewrote the lyrics to reflect this experimentation. The lyrics are about a sense of despair, and finding one’s own identity.

This is part of my initiative, FutureTradition, Revamping Disappearing Folk Arts and Regional Operas Project in China, leading a team of documentary filmmakers, visual artists, researches, playwrights with local regional folk opera troupes, regional theatre artists and scholars to make new works integrating the musical languages with a new narrative framework. This is also an effort to engage local communities with the power of their own dialects, examining the migrating languages.

— Du Yun