A Chinese Home receives its world premiere at Carnegie Hall on November 3, with Kronos Quartet and Wu Man. Conceived by David Harrington, Wu Man, and Chen Shi-Zheng, the director and visual designer. Chen Shi-Zheng discusses his vision for the work:
When I came into this project at the beginning, David and Wu Man had already talked a lot about the music that would make up A Chinese Home. We spent a week going through all the music together, making selections, and trying to make sense of the story behind it all. I realized in this process that the music that David and Wu Man collected and liked was really about China in the 20th century. David was fascinated by the revolutionary music and 1930s Shanghai music, as well as traditional music, so I thought that we could create a suite, putting all the music together in chronological order in four parts. We start at the beginning of the 20th century—timeless, traditional China—then move to urban China of the 1920s and ’30s. Then we enter the era of Mao and the emergence of Red China, and end with modern China.
I went to China to shoot the video and collect the images. While shooting the video, I thought about this piece like a travelogue, where we bring you to the old China and then come back, leading you through 20th-century China through the images. What you see is a montage of artifacts produced in the 20th century: old movie footage from 1930s Shanghai, The East Is Red spectacle, Maoist opera.
Wu Man and I are from the same generation, and I feel that this piece is quite close to how we grew up in China, how much we remember—especially the Cultural Revolution. That period is very vivid. The same songs were constant for us, the soundtrack of our lives. And Mao’s image was predominant, the only thing we knew, and so in Part III of A Chinese Home, Mao’s voice overrides all the music and his image dominates. I wanted to give a sense of what you would have faced if you lived through that period.
Wu Man is the person on stage that embodies the process of change in China. She starts as just a presence, in a robe like everybody else, and then she develops into a Shanghai lady, and then she changes into Red Guard. Her presence is very important in order for our audience to realize what’s changing in Chinese history—not just through the costumes, but also by the attitude, the persona, and the body language, all in relation to the music. We want to give you a sense of Wu Man and Kronos revisiting a certain period of China, to give an understanding of how they behave, how they play the music, how the music sounds in relation to the film behind you.
What I do mostly now is create new works, so I quite enjoy working with artists like Kronos and Wu Man. They’re always trying to create something new, trying to break a certain kind of formality and convention. We are trying to find a new way to tell a story, to link all this fascinating music. In that process, A Chinese Home has become a kind of composition, something that we hope has momentum and emotion and impact.Related events: November 3, 2009 Kronos Quartet / Wu Man
