How Hong Kong choreographer turned a Japanese novel into an English opera
- Carolyn Choa’s adaptation of Yasunari Kawabata’s 1964 tale Beauty and Sadness will premier in Hong Kong next month
- Renowned director David Pountney and Oscar-winning set designer Tim Yip are among the international collaborators
When Carolyn Choa was about 13, she read The Dancing Girl of Izu, a short story by Yasunari Kawabata, the first Japanese author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Choa herself was a dancing girl of Hong Kong. As a child, she’d begun studying ballet at Carol Bateman’s school in the Helena May club. Later, after studying drama at Hull University and attending the London Contemporary Dance School, she would become a choreographer.
That first Kawabata story – a 1926 tale of performance, desire, release – stimulated Choa’s appetite for more of his “incredible” work. Still, she didn’t read his 1964 novel Beauty and Sadness until she was in her early 40s. She remembers thinking that she didn’t quite understand it. But when it re-emerged, during a bookshelf sort-out nine years ago, she gave it another try. Immediately she thought, “This can be an opera.”
Beauty and Sadness premieres in Hong Kong in April. Like the title, it pairs the unexpected. The production has impressive heavyweights – renowned opera director David Pountney did the libretto, and the set and costumes are by Tim Yip, who won an Oscar for his work on Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon – and younger, rising stars such as Hong Kong soprano Etta Fung. It is both international – the composer is Elena Langer, born in Russia, the conductor is Gergely Madaras, born in Hungary – while six of the nine singers are from Hong Kong and only one of the 22-player orchestra isn’t based here. Set in Japan and with a Hong Kong debut, it will be sung in English.
Choa, unusually, is its director and its choreographer. She has already had experience with one opera set in Japan. Her husband was the late Anthony Minghella, Oscar-winning director of The English Patient and, in 2005, they worked together on a production of Madam Butterfly for the English National Opera (ENO), considered so “ravishingly beautiful” (The Times) that the ENO has revived it six times.
In a Guardian interview during those rehearsals, Minghella remarked of their collaboration that “it is Carolyn who will have the verbal or visual flourish. I make the mess, Carolyn tidies it up.” Choa, for her part, described her husband as “the architect” and added, “I come in with the colour swatches and the furniture – I make the rooms useful.” The Guardian thought this sounded “self-deprecatingly wifely”.