Divine Intimacies

I’ve been working with Tangram since 2024 and so to lead this show feels like the culmination of years of collaboration and shared growth. 

Being of mixed Chinese and Welsh heritage and growing up in Canada, exploring Daoist philosophy and practice has been a way for me to connect deeply to my Chinese ancestry. One of the many teachings in Daoist philosophy is the integration of seemingly opposing forces — the understanding that there is an undifferentiated unity between opposites. In a sense, that is also the foundation of what Tangram does: bringing East and West together meaningfully in the context of contemporary music and art. This philosophy is what underpins Divine Intimacies.

I first explored integrating the I Ching with music in 2023, using improvisation to respond to readings of the divination text. When Tangram approached me to pitch a new idea, this was the first thing that came to my mind. Rockey and Alex were immediately receptive, and have been extraordinary co-curators — helping to build the programme and performance design into something beyond what I had originally imagined (in a good way!).

The I Ching, also known as ‘The Book of Changes’, is one of the earliest texts of Chinese philosophy and dates back 3,000 years. It is used as divination text, where practitioners interpret the I Ching to seek knowledge and guidance on particular questions.

The philosophy of the I Ching is based on two opposing forces: ‘Yin’ and ‘Yang’. Yin represents ‘Earth’, whose forces are dark and passive. Yang represents ‘Heaven’, whose forces are bright and active. According to Chinese philosophy, everything is made up of the complementary forces of Yin and Yang. However, the balance of these forces are dynamic. They may change and transform.

The I Ching would later inspire the philosopher and polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who drew on its binary structure as a foundation for what eventually became modern coding and computing — a thread that connects ancient China to the architecture of the modern digital world.

Divine Intimacies explores the binaries between Eastern and Western musical traditions and ancient and contemporary music. Our performance also integrates a newly commissioned LED installation created by Tangram designers Ke Peng and Meng Cheng. This installation visually represents the I Ching, using its symbols, called ‘hexagrams’, to create patterns that will inspire improvised music throughout our performance.

The hexagrams symbolise different phenomena from the natural world like fire, water, wind and thunder, which provides vivid imagery to stimulate the musical imagination and direct the flow of improvisation. The practice of collective improvisation for me is a practice of deep listening; to listen to what sound wants to emerge from silence, merging individual expression and collective unity together.

Alongside our improvisations will be music by an eclectic range of composers including Kaija Saariaho, John Cage and J. S. Bach, a medieval chant by Hildegard von Bingen, ancient Chinese ritual drumming, and works by Yang Yong and Toshio Hosokawa. Whilst the range of this music is vast, separated by time, geography, style and approach, for me they all share a sensitivity to resonance, stillness and the subtle forces that shape the world around us.

It is difficult to choose a favourite but two highlights for me are River Song by Yang Yong, a duet for erhu and cello, and Hildegard von Bingen’s O vis eternitatis. With River Songs, it is the first time I am duetting with an erhu and I really love the combination of the instruments and their soundworld that reimagines Chinese folk melodies. With O vis eternitatis, I love how we have taken this ancient chant and adapted it with the instrumentation we have, reinterpreting a beautiful Western melody for Chinese and Western instruments.

We have a brilliant line-up! Daniel Shao is on flute, Peng Cheng on erhu — the two-stringed bowed instrument central to Chinese classical music, myself Garwyn Linnell on cello, and finally Beibei Wang on percussion, including traditional Chinese percussion.

This is the first time I have ever seen this ensemble of instruments together and aside from the unique quality this combination has, for me what is more exciting about it is the players themselves. Everyone brings not only their amazing skills but phenomenal openness and capacity for listening which makes for very exciting music making!

The installation was an aspect of the performance that really brought the idea of the project to a new level. Ke Peng and Chang Meng took my initial ideas and brought them to a place I could not have dreamt of! The installation adds greater immersion and depth to the performance that makes it something very special; much more than just a concert, but a really unique experience I hope will stay in the memories of our audience. 

In short, the LED installation surrounds the musicians on stage, and across our performance the LEDs will randomly light in different patterns, mimicking the process of reading the I Ching. The patterns will direct us to specific hexagrams and their associations with specific natural phenomena, which will then inspire our improvisation.

This performance sits at a threshold between concert and contemplative practice.

For our improvisations, the I Ching doesn’t offer the musicians a score — it offers a question. Answering it honestly, together, in the moment, asks for a quality of attention that improvisation demands of anyone willing to practise it: full presence, not to what was prepared, but to what is actually unfolding between the people in the room. This kind of presence tends to cross the space between performers and audience, a shared experience of being with the unknown.