Pianos, ping-pong players and diplomats duel and duet in artist Ming Wong’s Rhapsody In Yellow
SINGAPORE – Singaporean artist Ming Wong comes full circle with his upcoming lecture-performance Rhapsody In Yellow at the Esplanade, as he returns to the Singapore stage where he started as a young artist.
The Berlin-based multimedia artist is better known today for his video and installation works – such as his Wayang Spaceship that graced Tanjong Pagar Distripark in 2022 and Empress Lawn in 2024. But the 53-year-old began as a prize-winning student playwright. He went on to write the book for hit musical Chang & Eng, which premiered in 1997 and subsequently toured in Bangkok, Beijing and Kuala Lumpur.
“My passion still hasn’t left the framework of what performance is,” Wong tells The Straits Times over Zoom from Stockholm, where he is in his final month as professor of performance at the Royal Institute of Art. He is, for example, concurrently working on “a science-fiction diasporic Chinese opera cinema project” linked to the Wayang Spaceship.
His latest show, however, is nothing like the song and dance fest in his 1997 musical about Siamese twins. Rhapsody In Yellow might serve up a musical duo – American composer George Gershwin’s famous Rhapsody In Blue and a Chinese classic, the Yellow River Concerto – but it is a serious comment on rising China-US tensions, Cold War diplomacy and the possibility of dialogue in global politics.
Rhapsody In Yellow plays at the Singtel Waterfront Theatre on Aug 16 and 17 as part of Esplanade’s The Studios season.
Wong worked with the music direction of Taiwanese-American conductor and composer Henry Hao-An Cheng, whose need to code-switch meant he understood the project immediately. They set out to combine and invent a score for “these two classical music monuments of the 20th century”.
The result is Rhapsody In Yellow – a marriage of different time signatures, rhythms and musical traditions, performed by two live pianos. The piece includes live cameras, spoken word and moving images of iconic figures – the historic meeting of US president Richard Nixon and China’s chairman Mao Zedong in 1972, for example, during the era of Sino-American ping-pong diplomacy.
Wong’s musical process is itself a metaphor for such tricky diplomatic negotiations. “We had to create a new space, a new time signature, in order to accommodate the two pieces of music together. To write them, we had to create our own notation and invent certain symbols.”
Wong, who has a Grade 6 in piano and played the piano solo versions of the two pieces when he was young, adds: “There’s some kind of talking back to my own upbringing, to my own musical education. In Singapore, we follow the British system of the Royal Schools of Music exams, which I always hated, but it was part of my education.”
Despite a tense global situation with multiple wars and diplomatic impasses, Wong thinks this is an optimistic work. It premiered in Graz, Austria, in 2022, amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and subsequently played in Berlin – a historic Cold War flashpoint.
“It is positive and optimistic – and not in a simplistic way,” says Wong, who adds that working on this piece during the pandemic gave his team a lot of encouragement. “Already we could see that this is something is bigger than all of us – thinking musically, creating new time signatures and creating a new musical language.”
It is, in his own words, an invitation to “a new way of listening”. In the Singapore premiere, he thinks the audience will understand the significance of the show in a different way.
“Everything has to do with me being from Singapore,” he says. “We play this role in the world – as the middleman who is necessary in order to broker this kind of dialogue and offer a possibility of space for these kinds of meetings to occur.
“I do want to make some changes to the piece just for Singapore. There is a kind of coming home and potential to add something very particular to Singapore.”
Might this be the possibility of Wong taking the stage? “So far, no. For Singapore, I’m not sure yet.”
However, he adds: “Doing this piece has reawakened something in me that I had experienced a long time ago. I think it’s also due to what we need in a screen-saturated society. It’s good to actually be present, to have a shared communal experience with art.”
Asked if he might return to writing for the stage and theatre again, Wong says: “A straight musical? I always start somewhere and then I find ways to break it. So, yes.”
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The Studios 2024 | Rhapsody in Yellow [Trailer]
"The world watches, the world listens, the world waits to see what we will do." – President Nixon, 1969. In turbulent times amidst rising tensions between the United States and China, artist Ming Wong presents a musical lecture-performance that traces the journey of Sino-American “ping-pong” diplomacy through a piano duel-duet. Rhapsody in Yellow: A Lecture Performance with Two Pianos by Ming Wong (Singapore/Germany) 16 & 17 Aug 2024, 8pm Singtel Waterfront Theatre at Esplanade Book Now: https://www.esplanade.com/whats-on/festivals-and-series/series/the-studios/events/rhapsody-in-yellow-a-lecture-performance-with-two-pianos Jointly presented by Esplanade - Theatres on the Bay and Singapore Art Museum. #esplanadesg #mydurian #thestudios2024
Posted by Esplanade Presents: The Studios on Monday, June 17, 2024
Book It / Rhapsody In Yellow: A Lecture Performance With Two Pianos
Where: Singtel Waterfront Theatre at Esplanade, 8 Raffles AvenueWhen: Aug 16 and 17, 8pmAdmission: From $40
Info: str.sg/6RWd