Inhabiting Differences in One Place
- Weida Wang
- 5 hours ago
- 13 min read
Chronicle 时•录: Heroines Among the Ghosts is a collaboration between Tangram and the UK choir SANSARA, co-commissioned with the Nederlands Kamerkoor and built on Yilin Wang’s translations of six women poets from ancient China. It was premiered at the Aldeburgh Festival in June and comes to LSO St Luke’s at the end of August. Ho and Sun composed music for three poets each. But the work was never conceived as six settings placed in sequence: the piece runs as a single arc in three parts, and music, dramaturgy, staging, props and design developed alongside one another rather than in the order a conventional opera commission would follow. The choir sings Wang’s English throughout; the classical Chinese appears above them, in surtitle.
Alex Ho and Rockey Sun Keting are the two co-artistic directors of Tangram, as well as composers. Born in the UK, Alex Ho founded Tangram in 2018. Rockey Sun Keting grew up and received her musical training in China before moving to the UK. The two come from different backgrounds and have had very different experiences of China, Chinese culture and identity. Yet these differences have never been something that needed to be explained or reconciled in their collaborative work. Instead, they have gradually become part of Tangram’s creative practice.
Rockey Sun Keting has long composed for contemporary dance and classical ballet, with a particular interest in physicality and space. Tangram initially emerged more as a contemporary music ensemble, focusing on the combination of Chinese and Western instruments, concert performances, and arrangements of Chinese folk songs. It has since evolved into an artist collective whose work spans music, theatre, dance, visual art, live painting, performance art and Chinese opera. The two composers are currently artists-in-residence at LSO St Luke’s.
In Conversation with Alex Ho and Rockey Sun Keting
WW=Weida Wang
RS=Rocky Sun Keting
AH=Alex Ho
“What we’re doing in Tangram has this beautiful sense of inhabiting differences in one place. It’s not that we’re trying to show how different our identities are.”
Two composers, six poets, three each
WW: Rockey, you grew up and trained in China before moving to the UK; Alex was born here. You have different relationships to Chinese culture and identity. When you approach the same material, does that produce different compositional instincts?
RS: Everyone writes music differently, and there are so many factors that shape how a person writes, culture is only one of them. But specifically for this project: we were working with Yilin Wang’s translations of six women poets from ancient China, and my way in came quite directly from how I read those texts and how I felt them. I didn’t come from a traditional choral background, so I wasn’t starting from the question of how a text should be set within the Western choral tradition. Alex’s approach is somewhat different to mine.
AH: In some ways it’s the kind of question we’re not best placed to answer, because we’re so focused on finding solutions. Historians or musicologists might be better at it. But part of what makes Tangram what it is is that Rockey and I have genuinely different experiences of what China and Chinese cultures are, and that shows up across all of Tangram’s work — including through our two designers, Ke Peng and Chang Meng, who bring their own experiences and interpret these stories in the ways that feel right to them.
For Chronicle we split the six women between us, three each, so we’ve created our own distinct journeys within our own three poets. That’s probably the best way to hear the difference: listen to each arc of three, and then to how the two arcs sit against one another.
WW: And how do the two halves join? Is there shared material between them?
AH: Our creativity is shared in different ways. There’s definitely a level of subconscious sharing, in that we know each other’s music very well at this point, so we trust what kind of fusing is possible from the outset. But also with the design, the dramaturgy and the narrative - these are elements we’ve created together from the start, even before the music was written, so that sharing is embedded across the process holistically.
Weida Wang: How well did you know these poets before you started?
RS: I knew Li Qingzhao very well, and I’d heard of some of the others. Several I had never heard of at all. It opened up my horizons on Chinese women poets, but it also showed how little we get from the textbooks - even growing up in China. That’s quite crazy, actually. I’m curious, did you know them?
WW: Some of the names were familiar to me, but the lives behind those names were much less familiar. And you’re already encountering these women through a translator’s framing, which inevitably brings another perspective to the material. Then the music gives you yet another reading of the same person. So in a way, you’re moving through several layers - the historical figure, the translator’s interpretation, and then the composers’ own response. I found that really interesting, because the person you encounter in the end is never simply the “original” person; she’s being continually reimagined through different voices and different forms.
Not six songs in a row
WW: Beyond providing the translations, what was Yilin Wang’s role?
AH: She didn’t just hand over texts. She picked the poets, she translated them, and because we had those translations, that was always going to dictate and change the arc of the whole piece in a really massive way. We had a lot of conversations with her about that journey. And there were learnings in both directions - the idea of choral theatre, of staging and dramatising a choir, was very new for all of us.
WW: What language does the choir actually sing in?
AH The choir sings in English. The original Chinese is in the surtitles. What was unusual was the process. It wasn’t the typical opera model, where you get a text, then that’s done, then you write the music, then that’s done, then you design it. For a long time we knew which design elements and props we were going to use, maybe even before the music was written, or partway through. The real work was figuring out how those threads come together.
WW: And the shape of the finished piece?
AH: It’s in three parts. The first is poems about war - how these poets lived through it and survived it. The second moves to the Tang dynasty and looks more specifically at the ways these women weren’t considered equal to their male literary counterparts. The last is around death and farewell, and what that means. Seventy minutes, for choir. There’s a lot of strife in the world right now, so there are probably natural echoes with certain conflicts - but we’ll see how audiences react.
From ensemble to artist collective
WW: Let’s step away from Chronicle for a moment and talk about Tangram itself. It started much closer to a contemporary-music ensemble — Chinese and Western instruments, concerts, folk-song arrangements. Now there’s live painting, performance art, Chinese opera, staging. Was there a particular project where you realised the group had become something other than an ensemble?
RS: Alex started Tangram in 2018. He and I were both composers, meeting on different projects, and we’d developed our own distinct languages separately. I’d been writing for contemporary dance and classical ballet, and I’ve always been interested in physicality and space. When I started co-directing Tangram with Alex, I proposed that the diaspora questions in Tangram’s work could expand beyond a purely musical point of view — into the space, and into what the audience actually experiences in that time and place. The starting point is still music, but we’re looking at much more than that now.
That’s not to say we’re rigid about having multidisciplinary artists in every production. That was never the set goal. You used the word “evolution” - I’m not sure it is one. I think it was just a process of Tangram’s growth.
AH: The crudest way to put the journey is: we developed from an ensemble into an artist collective. At the start it was very much a Chinese-and-Western-instruments approach, concerts in different venues, arrangements of Chinese folk songs. Then, as Rockey says, we developed an interest in a wider form of storytelling. By the time we came together on it, it felt very natural.
The other significant factor is LSO St Luke’s, where we’re associate artists. It’s a brilliant team, and the venue has real technical resource, not just the space format, but the expertise in the team to do something other than a typical classical concert. Without that partnership I don’t know if we’d have been able to try so many different things in a relatively short time: dance, live-action painting, performance art, Chinese opera, whatever it is.
Even this year alone, we started with a show about live comedy and Orientalism, then went into the philosophy of the I Ching and LED installations, and now we’re talking about Chinese poetry. That feels important to me. So much of the way China and Chinese cultures get presented in the West is as one thing — one idea, one culture, one single presentation. Doing very different projects is a nod to how plural it actually is.
I’m really tired of the narrative of East meets West
WW: Do you still find the binary between “Eastern” and “Western” music useful?
AH: My overriding feeling is that I’m really tired of the narrative of East meets West. It feels incredibly short-sighted and outdated and filled with colonial discourse. So I generally reject people presuming an East–West discourse, because so much of my experience is that these two things aren’t mutually exclusive. I’m not Chinese one day and British the other.
And that applies to how we work. I don’t think we’ve ever had a conversation, Rockey and I, where it’s like: okay, this bit is going to be Western, and this bit is going to be Chinese. That’s not how you make. It’s not really how people think.
WW: I feel the same way. But when the work is promoted — when the storytelling around a collective reaches an audience — people do simplify it. “Oh, that’s Chinese, that’s Western.” It may be outdated and colonial, but it’s still there, in the industry. How do you deal with the fact that it doesn’t go away?
RS: The binary is already a Western way of measuring things — it isn’t really in the Chinese language. What we’re doing in Tangram has this beautiful sense of inhabiting differences in one place. It’s not that we’re trying to show how different our identities are. There are so many layers to an artistic identity — backgrounds, tastes, aesthetics, philosophies — so internally there’s always this beautiful conflict, and those beautiful differences.
But how other people perceive us is a different thing. That’s more of a sociological problem, and it needs addressing in a bigger sense. Once you’re there, you’ve stepped out of art-making, out of music, out of what we’re doing internally as artists. It has so much to do with politics and with culture, and music — as one part of culture, and a very abstract form of art — can only speak for so little.
So, do I care how other people see us? Personally, I don’t really. If people see us as a Chinese collective within an East–West binary, that’s how they see it. We’re trying to do something artistically important to us, something we believe is worth talking about. We’re not trying to say a right answer, or to prove anything. It’s all about the process of discovering, the process of making, the process of exploring the world in front of us.
A recognisable “Chineseness”?
WW: When you work with a British institution like LSO St Luke’s, do you feel an expectation that artists with Chinese heritage should deliver a recognisable form of Chineseness?
AH: There’s probably a slight difference between the work Rockey and I do as solo composers and the work we do as Tangram. Looking back at all the projects we’ve done at LSO St Luke’s, I don’t think I’ve ever noticed any pressure from them to make a work about China. There are obviously subconscious factors that are really complicated, I’m not sure they’re relevant to go into in detail right now.
The distinction I’d make is between the creative process and the reflective process. When we make work, I don’t think we’re thinking that much about how to be Chinese. We choose topics that interest us at the time, then we choose the collaborators we want, and then we dive in.
I don’t think people should come to Chronicle just because it’s about Chinese women. That’s super reductive. It’s about what happens once people are in the room — whether they can be moved by this poetry, whether they can feel compassion for these women’s lives. Not because they’re Chinese, not even because they’re women, but because they’re people like the rest of us. So I’m slightly hesitant to keep talking about China, Chinese approaches and market influences, because I hold that very separate from our creative process.
Historical voices, without the history lesson
WW: Why do these voices feel urgent now? And is there a recurring pull towards history in Tangram’s work — from Bound / Unbound to Chronicle?
RS: Yilin is the person who should really answer why she chose which poem and which poet. But the project still feels very relevant, and it’s not because we haven’t talked about these problems enough. It’s about how those voices get heard at all. If they’re not sung by SANSARA, these voices might never be heard, might never be listened to. There are people still being muted, still afraid of speaking their own thoughts, still afraid of expressing themselves. That’s part of what made these texts interesting to me when I read them.
AH: The translations speak for themselves in terms of their relationship to today. These women all write with a sense of autobiography — you can see very clear links between the poems and their lived experiences and the situations they found themselves in.
WW: And when you look back at your recent work, has history consciously become important material?
RS: Now you’ve said it, it does seem to be quite important to us. But at the time we don’t think, “this is something we must do” — there’s no strong sense of purpose, of we must tell women-in-history stories. It’s not like that. Things just surface as we go and discover the interesting or unspoken or untold stories. We’re a collective and we’re storytellers, so by telling other people’s stories there’s a sense of: what can we learn from them, what can we learn from history, and what are we expressing about ourselves through those lenses?
AH: Definitely not planned. Yilin chose the poets and the poems — we didn’t give her a brief saying she had to choose Chinese women, she just went and did it. What is deliberate is the collaboration. With Bound / Unbound we had an opera singer and a Chinese sword dancer, and it was the first time Rockey and I had worked that closely together, with the same designers, Ke Peng and Chang Meng. It’s the same team again this time, so it’s been really nice to build on that — on how we can make theatrical musical work. Obviously this time it’s for a choir rather than an ensemble with a singer and a dancer, which is quite new for us.
WW: Do you worry that audiences without the historical background won’t get the story? Is there a cultural barrier?
AH: Well, hopefully we make a work that makes sense. [laughs] But it’s worth pointing out that we’re not creating a biography of these women. We’re not trying to lecture people, and we’re not trying to show the history of China in a seventy-minute piece for choir. If audiences come out not understanding exactly Li Qingzhao’s life story, that doesn’t mean we failed. If they come out not understanding anything but having been moved by the experience — why is that not a successful reaction? I’d be happy if they simply just enjoy the music.
All in all, it’s the choir singing
WW: There is staging, there are props, physicality, visual design. How would you describe the form?
RS: It is a choir. There will be some exploration of the physicality of a singer, and we have a theatrical setting — we have our staging, we have our props, we have our visual aspects, and we have those multiple things going on. But all in all, it’s the choir singing music from me and Alex.
WW: This is your first collaboration with SANSARA. Did working with a choir that already has its own identity shape the piece — or was the writing largely settled before they came in?
AH: SANSARA joined really early. We approached Tom Herring, their artistic director, to ask whether they’d want to collaborate on a choral theatre project — and that was all the information they had, because that was all the information we had at that point. No subject matter. We didn’t even have our writer yet.
To find a choir so well-versed in a very particular tradition — the Western Anglican choral tradition — who will do something like this is really unusual, and it’s definitely a risk they took, because it is different to the kind of choral work you generally see in this country. Rockey and I did a one-day mini-residency with some of the singers at Britten Pears Arts, where we heard them sing and learned about their process and their interests. After that it was more about fleshing out the sound world and the theatrical world for ourselves, knowing there was going to be a choir in there — rather than having a very specific sense of what SANSARA were going to bring as a sound. There’s always that give and take: you write for a specific ensemble, but you also write for yourself when necessary.
WW: When theatrical, textual, physical, sonic and visual elements all coexist, how do you want people to watch a work like this? Is there a best way to take it in?
RS: What would your answer to that be?
WW: It’s a trend now — on London stages especially, music isn’t always music any more; it becomes sound, visual effect, media art, many things at once. Sometimes I don’t know which element to grab. And audiences arrive from completely different backgrounds — literature, visual art, music — so they can all be interested in the same work for different reasons. I suppose I decide what kind of work I think it is, and focus accordingly. Which is a real difficulty for creators.
RS: That’s really interesting to me, actually. I honestly hadn’t thought about it that way. What we do talk about is predicting what the audience sees at certain moments. As creators we’re cautious about that: when you have multiple disciplines on stage in one space, you can’t have everything going at the same time. You should always be leaving space for each other, for each element, so the audience has a focus point.
Different people will come with different interests — some more interested in the history, some in the music, some in the visual. That part is up to them. What we can do is carefully craft each moment so that it gives the audience a clear sense of what we want them to focus on right then.
When I go to something and find myself not knowing where to focus, I don’t think the creators’ intention has been delivered right, and I’d rethink the process. So I can’t tell you which point to focus on — but I can say we were careful, making this, about the different elements.
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