Poetry, classical music and … live-streaming? How Hong Kong show Spirits was able to continue despite Covid-19 restrictions keeping pianist Yen Chun-chieh out of the city
- Pianist Yen Chun-chieh played at the Taishin Tower in Taipei, Taiwan, and Sylvia Chang Ai-chia narrated at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre’s Grand Theatre
- Despite the physical distance, the combined talents of the duo were enough that the colour and the poetic nuance of the work and storytelling were not lost
Before Spirits began on October 24, Mathias Woo Yan-wai took to the stage to explain how the Taiwanese production almost never made it to the city.
Though the technical solution added an extra, interesting dimension to the production, it presented the company with new challenges too.
Spirits is, in essence, a piano recital. The programme is made up of five classical pieces: Sergei Rachmaninoff’s piano arrangement of a movement from Felix Mendelssohn’s score for A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Maurice Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit; and Franz Liszt’s arrangement of Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre; Années de pèlerinage – Deuxième année: Italie; and Lenore.
In between these classical compositions, Chang, who created the show, would recite poems – originally written in English and French and translated into Chinese by music critic Chiao Yuan-pu – on the themes of desire, longing and unrequited love.
Despite Yen being an excellent pianist, watching him perform on a screen for much of the two-hour recital would not have been engaging for an audience, and it was something the company needed to overcome. To that end, Woo used the Grand Theatre’s large stage to his advantage by having Yen (and sometimes text) projected over a number of mobile screens, and employed lighting and video effects to enhance the visual impact of the performance.
As the artists were not going to be physically sharing the same stage, there was also concern that there would be a lack of connection between Yen and Chang.
Fortunately, Chang is a skilled and powerful actor and Yen is a fine and lyrical pianist, so the colour and poetic nuance of the work and storytelling were not lost despite the distance. Lenore, the closing work of the evening, had great dramatic tempo – accentuated by the amazing rapport between the two artists, the piece left me breathless.
Spirits, an adaptation of the 2019 stage production Before the Sunrise, is not about ghosts or the supernatural. Rather, it is an attempt to combine poetry with classical music that Chang hoped could – as the show’s literal Chinese translation says – “charm, or cast a spell over” the audience.
Spirits, Zuni Icosahedron, Hong Kong Cultural Centre – Grand Theatre. Reviewed: October 24, 8.15pm
