Chronicle 时•录

China has a rich history of poetry that spans millennia. We shine light on six female poets dating back to the 7th century BC and stretching over a thousand years to the 13th century AD: Xu Mu’s Wife, Cai Wenji, Yu Xuanji, Xue Tao, Zhu Shuzhen and Li Qingzhao. For these women, poetry was a vehicle through which they reflected on their lived experiences, giving voice to the profound challenges they faced in war, exile and displacement that still resonate with the world around us today.  

Our show combines these six women’s voices as a single arc, paying homage not only to their beautiful texts, but also to their formidable strength to endure hardship. Working with English translations by Yilin Wang, we explore the emotional and dramatic depths of twelve poems. Each poem is set to new music for choir that has been composed by me and my co-director, Rockey Sun Keting. We have also been working with Tangram’s designers, Ke Peng and Chang Meng, to create a visual dimension combining video projection and staging using charcoal. In doing so, we draw out an elemental quality that we feel speaks to the rawness inherent in the poetry, as well as creating a work that leans into the theatrical potential of choral music, an idea we call ‘choral theatre’. 

It has been a joy collaborating with LSO St Luke’s as Associate Artists since 2022. One of the brilliant things about the venue (and the team!) is the technical resource and expertise available to create theatrical productions that go beyond the typical concert experience. In the last few years, Tangram have presented work combining music with live action painting, visual installation, Chinese Opera, Chinese sword dance and live comedy. Tangram had never worked with a choir before and so this felt like an exciting place to start. Fortunately, SANSARA and their artistic director, Tom Herring, were very open to our ideas. We started from question: how can we create a show that theatricalises a choir? From there, we brainstormed different possibilities, whilst bringing in our collaborators across text and design to start growing the project holistically. We eventually arrived at a point of working with poet-translator Yilin Wang who researched, selected and translated the set of poems we are bringing to life. 

Xu Mu’s Wife, Cai Wenji, Yu Xuanji, Xue Tao, Zhu Shuzhen and Li Qingzhao all lived through difficult circumstances shaped by societies that refused to treat women as equal to men. One of the important ideas behind our show is to question what it is to survive. For these women, poetry was a form in which they could express their thoughts and process their life struggles as they were invariably overlooked. Since then, their poems have received recognition, albeit comparatively less than their male counterpoints. For us as creators in the 21st century, we remember these women through their poetry in light of this patriarchal dynamic and its legacy, leaning into the precariousness and fragility of cultural memory and its survival. 

Check out Rockey’s playlist that give a sense of some of our inspirations! I was introduced properly to choral music at university when I sang ‘choral evensong’ within the Anglican church tradition three times a week. The repertoire spanned the wide history of Western classical music, from Renaissance polyphony to dozens of commissions by living composers. It struck me as quite incredible how the Anglican liturgy could inspire such a diverse catalogue of music, and being exposed to this repertoire has definitely shaped how I write for voices as a composer. Perhaps unsurprisingly, choral music inspired by Chinese history is not something I came across, and so part of my excitement for this project was to ‘re-appropriate’ the language of European choral music to explore these poems. There are also two moments in Chronicle 时•录 where I use Chinese folksong and reimagine them for choir. In both cases, the use of the folksongs was inspired directly by the poems themselves. Cai Wenji wrote the poem The Eighteen Songs of the Hujia, which was then turned into a folksong that appears at the end of the second movement. In the final chapter, Li Qingzhao’s poem names the folksong ‘Farewell to Yang Pass’ to depict an emotional scene of farewell. I reworked the folksong to shift in and out of music in different guises, eventually disappearing as the poem ends.  

Why don’t you see if you can hear these folksongs in our performance? See you there!