





囊谦县吉曲乡中心寄宿制学校

囊谦县吉曲乡中心寄宿制学校


囊谦县吉曲乡中心寄宿制学校

Lahore Fort, Pakistan, March 2018












Du Yun…bridged thousand-year-old traditions and modern sensibilities with deft, perceptive grace
Washington Post
“Our collective future interests me. What we are making is a lineage for the present. And this present, however challenging in all its splendor and all its agony, is our honor for many generations to come.”
FutureTradition is an initiative that illuminates the provenance lineages of folk art and uses these structures to build cross-regional collaborations from the ground up. Over the past 10 years, my collaborations include works with amateur poets and musicians in the United Arab Emirates, Istanbul, young children of traditional musicians from the Walled City of Lahore, Central Asia, and China.
This initiative was inaugurated in 2017. Since then, I have led a team of performing artists, scholars, documentary filmmakers, and visual artists, working closely together with local regional opera troupes, as well masters and amateurs of traditional art forms, to create new works. In addition to fostering new art, this platform illuminates existing traditional repertoires from different cultures by setting them side by side.
Tradition and innovation are not opposing forces. In fact, the evolution of culture has always been resilient and innovative. No matter the region, the next generation has the same curiosity about tradition. Cultural practices have developed new forms in circulation, and taken new paths by way of collision and deep integration.
FutureTradition is not about cultural import or export. Rather, it experiments with a new collaborative process, deeply rooted in an urgency for the traditions of our collective tomorrow. At its heart, FutureTradition focuses on developing new works through cultural dialogue by looking at an art form’s DNA and using that structure to build from the ground up, setting in motion more thorough research and a deeper understanding to nurture covalence.
This year, we continue our collaborations in Yushu, Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture.
— Du Yun, January 2020
Kandy, Sri Lanka
《“未来传统”畅想计划》
传统和创新皆非对立。我们常常以纯粹的传统文化自封,却忘记了文化传承中无时不刻的演变和融合。历史的传统可以是创新的思潮,文化的流传不断隽永而革新。
从纽约到玉树,从上海到费尔干纳盆地,未来的一代对“传统”有着同样的好奇心,传统在流传中发展出新的形式,在碰撞与深度融合中发掘新的未来。“未来传统”是艺术家们跨越地域,通过对“传统”的深入探索畅想出的世界:一个奋勇参与文化创造和不同传统交汇的未来。
普利策奖得主音乐人、跨界艺术家杜韵被公认为当今引领新一代艺术思潮的领军人物,2017年杜韵创立了“未来传统” 畅想计划,在中国浙江、宁夏、福建、青海,以及中亚、中东、巴基斯坦、南美洲等多个省市地区和国家的非物质文化遗产进行了深入的民间采风和考察。她与民间艺人,和来自上海、纽约等地的世界顶尖视觉、新媒体、纪录片艺术家合作,对传统曲艺和民间艺术进行采风和再创作,并在世界各地的社区、民间、艺术节和剧院分享和表演“未来传统”系列作品。“未来传统”畅想计划创造世界文化的开放连接与深度对话平台,通过艺术创作为全世界展现出非同一般的文化交融过程,创造人类共同精神世界的未来传统。
Media
“The barrier between us and the other must be shattered. In the same breath, the barrier between us and ourselves should also be re-examined. Deep collaboration is inviting people to let go of the insecurity of not knowing each other enough. From my practice, it’s always about letting go of insecurity in a way that opens conversation and invites all parties into a dialogue. For the spirit to grow, new ways of contextualizing have to happen and we have to risk our sense of self in the process.
Du Yun
Featuring the Chinese regional opera, a Diaoqiang opera singing
“To be a practicing artist is to position ourselves within our communities and unveil another layer of reality through the world around us”
Du Yun
projection by Hana Sooyeon Kim
Read more informations on this work here.
In the News
ed. by Rob Young
February 5, 2020
Read the full January 2020 Issue of OnCurating
What are the roles of the curator in the music field, and how does the work materialize? What kind of practices are involved? Defragmentation – Curating Contemporary Music was a project that attempted to highlight some of the problems and urgent questions that we find in today’s contemporary music scene. Within the frame of ideas around gender, diversity, decolonization and technology, Defragmentation looked at – and tried to understand – structures in various institutions of contemporary music. The ambition was to investigate how the urgent sense of fragmentation and disconnection that exists in the public sphere at the moment is materialized in the musical field.
This edition of OnCurating extends the findings of the original Defragmentation to investigate the unique challenges and issues of curation in the contemporary music world, with essays and articles by Heloisa Amaral, Patrick Frank, Kenneth Goldsmith, George E. Lewis, Kamila Metwaly & Katja Heldt and Du Yun.
Who Owns Asian Culture? Not Me.
I don’t really know what Asian Culture is. Who owns Asian Culture? Who can be its Ambassador?
Culture is an ever-evolving state of mind. My name and my background don’t give me automatic claim to ownership or authority. As an artist and curator, I’m not interested in import or export, but instead want to encourage deep collaborations—cross-regional ones.
I’m also tired of the saying “East meets West”—I would have thought we have met enough times throughout history. When land has been lost and land has been gained, someone else’s land dissipates. Despite people migrating from their homes, people migrating between countries and nations, and people being born into refugee camps, our cultural memory is something that persistently thrives and is not easily erased.
Our collective future interests me. What you hear and see is exactly the heritage of a future. What we are making is a lineage for the present. And this present, however challenging in all its splendor and all its agony, is our honor for many generations to come.
Cultural Ownership
Our children—from New York City to Fergana Valley, from Shanghai to Waghan Valley, from Tibet to Hindu Valley to Berlin—all have equal claim to their curiosity to all things that have been created before their time. We cannot suppress their curiosity by ‘purifying’ our traditions. Curiosity, by nature, means learning something by touching and making errors. And, most importantly, by being allowed to touch and experiment with such errors. There is no such thing as ‘pure traditions.’ In the case of vast ancient Chinese operas, it has always been a by-product of cultural and linguistic clashes and assimilations. In the case of ragas, from their historical provenance in the Pre-Islamic period, and subsequent migration through space and time (Arabia, Persia, Central Asia, Indo-Pakistani desert and the global South Asian diaspora), its migration through genres, forms, and techniques, by both genders and in settings both devotional and secular, has always manifested itself.
It often alarms me that we pride ourselves in saying this is a multicultural encounter, branding such multicultural hybridity into one umbrella of ready-to-sell products put on stage to create a dialogue through the act of curation. And curating can be a dangerous thing. It’s as if one is to operate a water-gate that allows energy to pour down on an audience. Oh, yes – that word is ‘gatekeeper.”
But again, we have also the rigidity of cultural sovereignty. In fact, a too-thoughtful plan will only sanctify ideas bred in a region. That which allows us our defense can also cause our bruises. Culture has a tremendous inertia. In some communities and societies, culture endured because it worked for the community. Yet sometimes, the inertia of culture strangles innovation in the crib.
It’s often a conversation about how to build on mutual trust and respect: taking into account the fundamental (and often impossible) knowledge of traditions, while still allowing a certain freedom to incubate new ideas and spirits, while not afraid to make mistakes or encountering a backlash.
Curating is a place of ever-growing confluence, conflict, assimilation, clash, and cultivating a land of what Homi Bhabha called ‘Third Space’ in his book The Location of Culture, referring to the interstices between colliding cultures, a liminal space ‘which gives rise to something different, something new and unrecognizable, a new area of negotiation of meaning and representation.’[1] In this ‘in-between’ space, new cultural identities are formed and reborn. It is the gap, the transgression, the break, the lacuna, that act as a foil to the narrative implicit in time. Existing in this nexus of perpetual becoming, the thought process is never on one polarity or another.

Monopolistic Values
Aesthetics are as subjective as the notion of art itself. Aesthetics and their subsequent context go in and out of fashion in every decade. Some artists are interested in violating the preciousness of the folk tradition as an equivalent to what might be considered an anti-heroic gesture. At the same time, the meticulous care taken through process, labour, time, traditional skills, technical virtuosity and formalism are just as, if not more, vibrant than what might be called ‘experimental music’. Despite investment in understanding and studying the folk tradition, we should be equally irreverent, disrupting it in many unorthodox ways. If we were to equate ‘beauty’ with ‘authenticity’, a subversive attitude – one that is open to contamination – would most accurately define our relationship to it.
Conceptually, metaphorically, and in terms of process, the contradictory nature of tradition is as much about accumulation as removal. Layers are built and abraded; paths are preserved, their history etched in the work itself. As folk traditions become stale, the contemporary transitions to antiquity. And so, these definitions are significant. How one defines what is ‘folk music’, what is ‘contemporary music’, and what is ‘experimentation’, in turn defines the work that claims a relationship to it. Examination of the canon and the discourse is critical. New ways of resonance will emerge.
The Tyranny of Contemporary Music
As part of re-examining the canon, we should also understand music is not just about scales, timbres, harmonies and textures. Music has long been used as a spiritual guide, a beacon for human activities and connections. By reducing music to only these bare theoretical bones, I don’t see music any more; rather, just the fragments of a beautiful whole. What if we study how people who live in a particular locale practise these arts? Make music? And (bear with me) keep experimenting with such practices?
Experimentation is a necessary part of exploring the humanity of tradition. Maybe sometimes mistakes should be encouraged. Risks should definitely be embraced and celebrated – risks that also include economically miscalculated ones, including outreach to the audience. Yet, when you actually do reach out, especially as an organization which does not usually represent a certain group of people, you are selling the stories to a community who might only resonate with a fraction of their cultural memory, but not their current life status. Current lives are often messy and never as wonderfully packaged as they may seem. A didactic, abraded representation can only be insulting, if not laughable.
When we have understood the lineage of an artistic practice, a dialogue can begin. Examination of the canon and the discourse surrounding what constitutes that canon is important. For the spirit to grow, new ways of contextualizing become necessary, and we have to risk our sense of self in the process.
Just as the definition of the West should be shattered, the tyranny of defining ‘contemporary works’ should be rejected. The European tradition of composed music emphasizes notation; hence the composer assumes a significant role. The audience for this tradition of music creation almost functions as a score follower; here, notation drives the experience of audience and performers alike. In many types of music rooted in oral traditions, the person documenting the music is invited into the process, creating the music together with the master musicians in the same place. The audience then becomes an inseparable part of the experience. To open the knowledge base to all is to open a wild vulnerability. The more artists and musicians involved in creating, experimenting, and sharing knowledge, the more one can peer over the precipice of creation into a thinly, but brilliantly illuminated locus as we risk our sense of self together.
This is why betrayals of body and mind that threaten to erase our character and memory remain among our most awful tortures. The battle of being mortal is the battle to maintain the integrity of one’s life: to avoid becoming so diminished, or dissipated, or subjugated that who you are becomes disconnected from who you were, or who you want to be. And cultural memory is included in the same thing. How we keep this integrity moving forward is vital to the human spirit.
Allowing for Experimentation
It is said that in China there are more than 300 regional opera styles. At the end of summer 2017, I brought a team with me to Xinchang, south of Zhejiang Province. Diaoqiang, one of the oldest Chinese opera styles dating back to the Ming Dynasty (around 1330 CE), originated there.
In summer 2019, I went to China’s Anhui province to visit the Huangmei Opera Troupe, and to interview the 92-year-old opera composer Shi Bailin, who invented the opera style particular to that region. The Huangmei style takes its name from the folk tunes of Huangmei County in Hubei Province. According to Shi, a Western orchestra was not available to him in 1950s Anhui. So he freely borrowed local folk tunes, pairing them with modern orchestration techniques that he learned on a two-year exchange programme at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, to be performed by orchestras comprised solely of Chinese instruments. The result was a spellbinding new opera style called Huangmei Opera that has been made into films. The Huangmei Opera has been massively popular in China because, though dialect-based, it is easy to understand in addition to satisfying traditional operatic form.
In travelling to places like Xinchang and the Anhui province in my home country, as well as Palestine, the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Mongolia, and Cambodia, I have often found that most traditional folk artists are eager to introduce their traditions, to showcase the sophistication of each style that they have learned for their entire lives, and to show audiences the hidden, secret meanings of its provenance. But it often stops at that introduction. How do we craft new works that reflect today’s world using these traditions?
In today’s world, where our sexuality, the dynamics of our geo-political boundaries, and clashes between economic classes have been shifted, the mould of gender practices, storytelling in gender roles, and ‘who gets to practise what’ are still quite rigid in many regions of the world. The barrier between us and others must be shattered. At the same time, the barrier between us and ourselves should also be re-examined.
One method of shattering these barriers is to encourage artists who are not from a particular region to create new works using regional practices and knowledge. No one bats an eyelid when Chinese kids play the piano, or when Korean composers write symphonies. The question, however, seems to remain: how do we encourage more people out of a particular cultural heritage to not only adapt, but create, as if that language is one’s own language?
How do we negotiate between being averse to taking the time for a deep introduction to a cultural heritage, and the guilt of creating something without fully belonging? How do we communicate such a need to the artists within a community? The artists who might think ‘you don’t understand’ or ‘you don’t get that nuance and subtlety’? The first phase of creating a hybrid language involves confronting these questions. And to do so, we need to think beyond scale and modality.
I used to think the Chinese language was not best suited for rap – rap was too tonal. Then, in 2000, it took one young kid, Zhou Jielun (Jay Chou) from Taiwan to experiment with the tones of the Mandarin language. Since then, rapping has swept the whole nation. In 2017, national TV broadcast the live show The Rap of China. The overtly powerful popularity of rap has become deeply embedded into today’s young Chinese generation. One very exciting example for me is that we begin to see regional rap battles where dialects meet, and artists keep experimenting with these dialects by using traditional poetic terms to paint a contemporary life lived in China. The hybrid arts gain such an organic fluidity, so that people encounter it as if it has always been there, rather than a practice that has recently entered the mainstream. There is no ‘pure tradition’. Pure tradition often reflects how people experience life within their community. The youngest generation will always make adaptations to their lifestyle, and with equal claim to their world.
Curating is Not a Tour Guide
Unlike many traditional music styles, I have often felt our music-making has looked away from the spiritual quest. Its own spirit is no longer aligned with the region of the people, like an outdated ‘Lonely Planet’ guide where one cannot find the appropriate entry point to the stories told, even for the local young generation. To an extent, in today’s classical music world, folk traditions have become ‘lost in translation’. Because folk music doesn’t have a composer, it seems as if the material is ready-made. Yet it is not the case that folk practitioners ‘don’t write music’. These traditions come from generations of people who write and practise music day-in and day-out. Nothing is ready-made.
Deep collaboration is inviting people to let go of the insecurity of not knowing each other well enough. In my practice, it’s always about letting go of insecurity in a way that opens conversation and invites all parties into a dialogue. In my experience, sometimes it takes many years of effort to make one idea happen.
In an article for The New Yorker, South African scholar and librarian Peter Van der Merwe attempts to address why the popular music of the twentieth century sounds the way it does. He notes it was often Islamic song traditions that acted as the connecting tissue in the history of music.[2] Just as people migrate, storytelling narratives travel with the people who carry them. These narratives are never clean, and should never be understood as abbreviated talking points.
I have collaborated with Ali Sethi, a Pakistani singer based in Lahore, on multiple projects. Ali was taught by both Ustad Naseeruddin Saami and Farida Khanum, both revered singers in Indo-Pakistani classical music. In conversing with Ali, we exchanged the idea of the Islamic principle of one god, the idea that ‘one’ is actually not a limitation, that ‘one’ is actually an invitation to eternity. When you envision a ‘one’ that accommodates everyone and everything, then you can find multiple interpretations and multiple truths within that ‘one’. So actually when you split it up into, say, two, or three, or four, that is when you get into issues of finitude – finite duality, or contradiction, or conflict, or assimilation. That this is Indian, or this is Pakistani.
Future Tradition
In experimenting with folk traditions, what if we invited a manifestation of the ‘one’ into our creative practice? It allows us to really explore our subjectivity. No note is false to the interpretation. Everything has a root to grow. For instance, the taanbura is a corruption of the original word, which is tambura. It has the same root as ‘tambourine’, with its origins in a Turkic instrument made from a pumpkin. But one thing I found very interesting is that the sound of tamboura is essentially not one sound. Its sound has so many complexities and layers to what seems like a single sound, to where its entirety exists between the affirmative one-ness born to complexity.
We have analyzed the overtones, microtonal systems, and the cloud of the ‘sonority’ as a composing tool. Nowadays in contemporary classical music, we composers can use the cent to notate and dictate the microtonal pitches in precision. But we have failed to examine why that cloud of sonority was used in the first place. Historically, it functioned as a means to the divinity, to understand the universe, to find the precision within the elegance of an energy that is larger than ourselves. That everything is existing in between this. And in-between-ness existed in this vast universe. In such a world, spirituality for me is really about awareness, vigilance; transcending partisanship by constantly questioning one’s own assumptions. Redrawing another space of the individuating techniques of the personal-is-the-political; the world-in-the-home.
In talking with collaborators like Ali Sethi and people who work in humanitarian crisis relief, I have learned that there is a difference between the words Muhajireen and Musafereen, where Muhajireen is ‘refugees, migrants’, and Musafereen is ‘travellers’. Those two words exist in Urdu as well, in exactly the same way, and this duality is what translates to performance and crosses boundaries.
To Ali, dualities shed light on how, through the very act of travelling and migration, through refugees and migrants – his ancestors were refugees from the Mongol invasions 700 years ago – we still live with these stories. His ancestors came through Central Asia, through Persia, and into the subcontinent, and his family still keeps this history very much alive.
Music has made Ali especially sensitive to these linkages, to the point of insisting that such linkages are vital. He told me:
‘They’re not just abstract linkages. They allow us to emotionally connect, and to find those parts of ourselves, either through philosophies, or through the travelling of motifs and language, or though sounds, physical instruments like the tamboura. The fact that this is shared history enables linkages in our present and our future. It makes the possibility of conversation more creative, allows you to be more creative in how you think of yourself as part of a community in the world. So, that moment for me when I thought, There are these ragas which are right now which would be classified as “Indian Classical”. But there’s already a complication with that because I’m Pakistani. I don’t belong in India. I don’t get a visa to go to India. So what am I doing with these ragas in the first place?’
Out of the conventional, and into the Indo-Pakistani subcontinent. But then the moment you think of that, it’s like, what is Indo-Pakistan? It’s made up of thousands of years – It’s made up! It’s made up of thousands of years of conquest, of interaction between the Dutch, the French, the British, Arabs, Persians, Turks. It goes back to the earliest of civilizations, so one is simultaneously inhabiting all of these disparate selves and communities. For Ali, ‘That assumption certainly, in my experience, comes from different kinds of audiences sometimes, so that those who think that I should be representing them have a certain set of assumptions about what I should be representing, and those who think that I am “other” also have a set of assumptions about what I should be representing or doing. What I’m seeing myself creating in this story of travel, of exile, of displacement, of many kinds of movement, is exploring not only what those words mean, but also updating the musical language. So I’m updating my own classical, Indian, Eastern, Pakistani musical self, and saying that it’s more dynamic than I have been allowed to think. It’s not conceptual for me. My musical tradition apparently does not belong to me because I am not allowed to go to India. India won’t accept me.’
So how do we embrace artists who practise the cultural means who are not from the region? Curating is not an process of ‘mix-and-match’, of branding under a theme and glossed ‘Instagrammable’ filter. Defy a theme and defy the myth of a concept. Defy the myth of curators’ ownership over their broad curatorial statements and their featured artists they select. It has to come from understanding the absolute necessity, understanding why every moment, every element should come and how they converse with each other. It should not just subscribe to a mode du jour, or fit into one man-made category, because then it just leaves you feeling good while being a tourist in someone else’s lineage, history and agony. These borderlines –whether aesthetic, political, economic, or social – are all man-made with the intention of examining the layers of history embedded within a cultural zone.
Not an Ending
What matters to me more as a practising artist is to connect with communities and other artists. To be an artist is to share the divinity of what makes us human, and to curate is to invite more people into dialogue, allowing that incompleteness of understanding to happen. And I believe just to know that is allowed to happen is also a huge freedom, a sense of humility, and submission to each other’s divine spirit. We are not here to find a panacea to cure us all. This is not about coming together, but to provoke – and to provoke us back too. Curating in today’s world should not be a doctrinal megaphone for an aesthetic and a trend. I never thought it should present us to them, because once you position yourself that way, you become that paradigm. And to be alive is to be appreciating that state of in-between-ness at all times, of being more than an animal, or plant, or more advanced animal capable of reckoning, but always being less than perfect. And that incompleteness is where all beauty, morality, struggle, and knowledge lie: all the highlights of the human experience are born inside that incomplete-ness. In our musical concepts and our social dynamics, it is essential to have incompleteness – a treatment versus a cure.
Without the blank space, you will never get the full picture. Such blankness, silence in thinking, acknowledging its inherent chaos, is a nod to mortality. There is a Chinese saying that being a human, unlike the trees, you have to move so you will thrive and it will be easier to see the roots. Folk-tradition art, no matter what the provenance, may seem on the surface to have many rules and restrictions; these limitations are often added later.
To me, these liminal spaces where experimentation happens are the most purified divinity that the human species has been hungry for, no matter where you come from.
Who owns culture? Not you. Not me. It is here, an ever-evolving presence to be created and lived together.
Keynote Speech 1
Du Yun: Creating A Living Heritage Together
By Ian Patterson
September 26, 2019

Multi-faceted artist Du Yun wears many hats. As a composer the Shanghai-born, New York based artist works in the areas where orchestral, opera, theatre, pop, electronics and visual arts coincide. A multi-instrumentalist and curator, this “indie-pop diva with an avant-garde edge,” as the New York Times once described her, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for her opera Angel’s Bone.
Technical issues meant a late start to the morning. Du Yun, however, was unfazed, and although she felt obliged to skip some slides, the message she delivered was a powerful one.
A major thread of Du’s speech was the notion that, even though cultural memory runs deep, ownership of culture is problematic. Rather than claim ownership, Du’s work is all about cross-cultural, cross-regional collaborations that illustrate and celebrate the fluidity of culture. She was dismissive of East-meets-West cultural projects, rejecting the simplistic binary.
Du shared a video of a trip to rural Tibet where a foundation she was representing was providing solar panels and electricity. Though the adults of the village were illiterate, it should perhaps have come as no surprise to learn that every kid in this village, situated at 4,000 metres above sea level, already possessed a smartphone.
One of the aims of the project was to encourage the children to preserve their traditional language and heritage. The children speak both Tibetan and Mandarin, and though it was left unsaid, the feeling that Chinese culture could totally absorb Tibetan tribal culture was never far away.
As the smartphones indicated, the ever-evolving culture that Du spoke of in her introduction, even in remote regions of the world, moves a lot faster than many on the outside can possibly imagine.
In the video, Du explained how a traditional heritage dance, full of color and movement, was the exclusive preserve of men, though the reason for the exclusion of women was not explained. In another segment a group of school children—the first generation of their community to attend school—were encouraged to share their songs. While the boys sang heartily, Du said that the girls were too shy to join in. Or, like the dance shown just before, it may be culturally ingrained that when the boys are “on stage” it is simply not their place to join in, but to remain as passive observers.
Du described how the boys won’t teach the girls, but when Du lead the way the girls joined her in song. This idea of providing agency—and encouragement— was a recurring motif of Du’s speech.
Tradition is not something pure, Du stated. Curiosity dictates that experiment happens naturally, and curiosity, she emphasized, should be encouraged.
Du highlighted Chinese opera and the Indian raga as examples of art forms whose traditions have been built on cultural and linguistic hybridity -the ever-evolving influence of geography and time. She could just as well have been talking about jazz. Culture, Du intimated, has always been about the embrace of new ideas. It was no contradiction in terms when Du called for both reverence and irreverence towards folk traditions.
Who defines what folk music is, what is traditional and what is experimental? Du asked. These are important questions, she stressed, as it’s these gatekeepers that define the cannon. Experimentation is essential, Du countered. Risk-taking should be encouraged and mistakes accepted as part and parcel of the process. Music, she surmised, is about much more than mere theory.
And, in a nod to curators and programmers, Du underlined that risk does not start and end with the composer or performer. She sounded a note of warning to programmers, as they are “presenting stories to a community which may only resonate with a fraction of their cultural memory, but not their current life.” Modern day lives, Du noted, are “messy” and any attempt to reduce an audience to a neat cultural package, or to patronize them “can be insulting if not laughable.” The audience should be invested in the experience.
Du gave an example of this sort of contract between performer and audience when she detailed her project titled Disruption as Rupture. In this project, created in conjunction with New York artist Shahzia Sikander , a group of boys and girls sang in front of Lahore Fort. The children were from diverse religious and economic backgrounds, representing different cultures and traditions, Yun said, that ordinarily “don’t talk to each other.” For the children, and their families and peers in the audience, this performance became a powerful symbol, not only of a coming together of different cultures, but of the pushing forward of traditions.
In the Q&A that followed, Yun reiterated the idea that culture continually evolves and that no-one can claim exclusive ownership of it. “I own the sound of David Bowie as much as you do,” Yun told the audience.
So rich and philosophical a speech surely merited a panel discussion with artists and programmers to dive deeper into the questions Yun had raised regarding ownership of culture, of cultural purity and authenticity, our relationship with traditional cannons and of the evolutionary nature of culture. Addressed through the prism of jazz, such questions would likely have triggered a fascinating conversation.

新昌调腔唱响洛杉矶爱乐乐团中国新年音乐会
2019年02月09日 09:34:32 | 来源: 新华网分享到:

新华社照片,洛杉矶,2019年2月8日 (国际)新昌调腔唱响洛杉矶爱乐乐团中国新年音乐会 2月6日,在美国洛杉矶,著名华人作曲家杜韵(左)与新昌调腔传承人王莺在表演前交流。 当晚,成立于1919年的洛杉矶爱乐乐团在庆祝百年华诞之际,在洛杉矶地标建筑迪士尼音乐厅举办中国新年音乐会。著名华人作曲家杜韵取材于中国国家级非物质文化遗产新昌调腔经典剧目的新作《渴》为整场音乐会掀起了一个高潮。 新华社记者李颖摄浙江网络广播电视台: 骄傲!走出国门,新昌这一“活化石”惊艳亮相美国洛杉矶!
骄傲!走出国门,新昌这一“活化石”惊艳亮相美国洛杉矶!
- 新蓝网·浙江网络广播电视台
- 2019-02-12 09:55
- Read here.
下载客户端:核心提示:这个春节,对洛杉矶的乐迷和新昌调腔剧团的部分演职人员而言,是十分特别的。这是新昌调腔首次走出国门,也是杜韵为庆祝洛杉矶爱乐乐团创团百年而创作的委约作品《渴》的全球首演。

这个春节,对洛杉矶的乐迷和新昌调腔剧团的部分演职人员而言,是十分特别的。来自地球两边的艺术家和爱乐人士第一次有了交集:在我县传承数百年的“戏曲活化石”调腔应邀参加美国洛杉矶爱乐乐团的新春音乐会,调腔第一次唱到了国外的专业音乐厅里;这也是西方观众首次身临其境聆听来自东方的古老非遗剧种。


美国·洛杉矶
2月6日晚,中国农历新年之际,成立于1919年的洛杉矶爱乐乐团在庆祝百年华诞之际,在洛杉矶地标建筑迪士尼音乐厅举办中国新年音乐会。著名华人作曲家杜韵取材于中国国家级非物质文化遗产新昌调腔经典剧目的新作《渴》为整场音乐会掀起了一个高潮。
新昌调腔是我国最古老的声腔之一,被称为“中国戏曲活化石”。在洛杉矶爱乐乐团的伴奏下,3位来自新昌调腔保护传承发展中心的艺术家把女性对自己身份的追寻和思考演绎得酣畅淋漓。
这是新昌调腔首次走出国门,也是杜韵为庆祝洛杉矶爱乐乐团创团百年而创作的委约作品《渴》的全球首演。



调腔传人· 王莺
此次洛杉矶首演女老生扮演者为非物质文化遗产调腔传承人王莺,女旦扮演者为青年花旦演员张婷芳。
首场演出结束后,王莺兴奋地通过微信向记者发来演出现场的照片。演出现场,雄浑壮阔的交响乐与高亢苍凉的调腔唱腔相辅相成、相得益彰。在答谢环节,全场掌声雷动,观众们展现出极高的热情。
“首次在国外演出,真的很激动,让调腔走向国际大舞台的梦想终于成为了现实,而且还是跟著名音乐家、世界顶尖乐团一起合作演出,无比荣幸,新昌调腔创历史首次走出国门,我也感到无比自豪。”
记者问王莺,这次出国演出,没能和家里人一起吃年夜饭,回家后会补上吗?她告诉记者,多年来,调腔剧团坚持送戏下基层,全团演职人员都已经习惯在春节期间出外演出了。
“回国后,我会回家看望一下父亲,他一直很理解我的工作,嘱咐我要以工作为重。”

延伸阅读
「调腔」小名片
调腔盛行于明、清之际,班社以杭州为中心,遍及杭、婺、绍、甬、台、温各地。抗战后,迭经战乱,加之乱弹、滩簧、越剧等兴起,由盛转衰,至今仅新昌一隅存演,并珍藏晚清抄本一百五十九本。
2006年,新昌调腔被列为首批国家级非物质文化遗产名录。剧目有古戏、时剧及目连戏三大类,古戏包括元杂剧、宋元南戏及明清传奇。南戏保留了明代四大声腔之一余姚腔“杂白混唱”、“以曲代言”及“不托丝竹、锣鼓帮扶、以板助节、一唱众和”的遗风,且是其唯一遗音。自明代起,调腔班社兼演昆腔,与甬昆合班演出。时剧多为清中晚期传奇,其中《碧玉簪》和《双狮图》被越剧移植而家喻户晓。调腔目连戏《女吊》、《男吊》、《调无常》等出目为其他声腔目连戏所无,曾因鲁迅先生的文章而扬名。2014年,绍兴(调腔)目连戏又被列为第四批国家级非物质文化遗产名录。
新昌调腔的守护者
王
莺
俗话说:“一枝独放不是春,百花齐放春满园。”然而,总有一些声腔、剧种因受到市场潮流的冲击而仅存下最后一支劲旅,继续在戏曲大环境中摸爬滚打,誓要留住这异常珍贵的春色。这些剧团常常被我们称作“天下第一团”,新昌调腔剧团就是其中的代表之一。可喜的是,新昌调腔剧团的当家老生王莺近些年来频频携戏亮相于省市级乃至国家级的戏剧艺术节上,让新昌调腔为越来越多的戏曲观众所知晓,所钟爱。而她,也被戏曲观众视作了新昌调腔的守护者,“天下第一团”的看家人。
↑ 王莺与恩师
张英正合影
←《闹九江》剧照
王莺 饰 张定边
《关云长千里独行》↑
王莺 饰 曹操
《程婴救孤》剧照→
王莺 饰 程婴
1987年,新昌调腔开办第六批训练班,王莺凭借着一副好嗓子被调腔表演艺术家张英正老师挑中,由此成为剧团唯一的女老生。4年后出科,她以一出调腔清传奇《铁冠图·煤山》摘得浙江省小百花优秀汇演奖。省内外的许多名团纷纷向王莺抛来了橄榄枝,想劝她择大团而居,其中上海越剧院的张派老生创始人张桂凤老师就曾力邀她赴上海发展,改唱“更有前途”的越剧。或许是对新昌调腔的热衷,抑或是难舍启蒙老师的挽留,王莺最终还是留了下来,在新昌一直坚守着调腔,这一守便是30年。
90年代的戏曲遭遇到了前所未有的冲击,古老剧种新昌调腔一度苟延残喘,当时王莺的月薪仅有100来块,众多师兄弟因难以维持生计而纷纷改行或下海,王莺却岿然不动,依然埋头于她所热爱的调腔艺术。她不顾嘲讽,甘于寂寞,每天坚持练唱腔、走台步,在舞台上塑造起了一个个鲜活的人物形象,如调腔元杂剧《汉宫秋》中的汉元帝、调腔明传奇《关云长千里独行》中的曹操、调腔时戏《闹九江》中的张定边、调腔新编历史剧《甄清官》中的甄完、调腔轻喜剧《挑水伯》中的挑水伯等等。无论是亡国舍爱的悲情皇帝,还是走街串巷的市井小民,她总能信手拈来。《铁冠图·煤山》饰崇祯
《挑水伯》饰挑水伯
《水浒记·杀惜》饰宋江
《汉宫秋·饯别》饰汉元帝
在剧团常年的下乡演出中,三天六场大戏,王莺往往要连演5场。带病演出也是常事,有时开演前几分钟还在医院打吊针,为了不影响观众看戏,她拔掉吊针就上台。去年3月份,在一次下乡圆谱大戏的演出中,她再次晕倒在了台上,观众也不禁为她捏了把汗。演出完毕后,她到医院进行了全面检查,医生给出的诊断结果是腰椎第五节股骨头坏死,建议她住院手术。而此时离新昌调腔剧团参加香港戏曲节演出已不到3个月,这是剧团时隔5年再度赴港,大戏《闹九江》、《挑水伯》都要她来担纲主角,若进行住院手术势必会耽误演出。因而她咬咬牙关拒绝了医生的建议,而是选择吃偏方、做理疗来坚持,暂时缓解身上的病痛。

2016年王莺演出《闹九江》时晕倒在台上
在接近知天命之年,她又扛起了振兴调腔的大旗。为了培养调腔接班人,她努力打造了青春版《白蛇传奇》、《大唐忠义》、《龙凤呈祥》等大戏,还与绍兴市非遗中心合作,联合创排绍兴(调腔)目连戏。为了督促青年演员成长,她甘当绿叶,默默地当起了配角。为了落实扶持政策,她多次奔波于上级主管部门,在新剧目首演前往往还要带妆迎接领导。在她的奔走呼吁下,新的大剧院已动工开建,新昌调腔剧团即将迎来自己崭新的团部。
Ali Sethi to feature in Times Square Christmas display
December 13, 2019
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Singer and writer Ali Sethi will feature in a special video display in New York’s iconic Times Square over the Christmas holidays.
Sponsored by the Beijing Century Foundation and Times Square, the ‘Future Tradition’ video celebrates the genre-bending work of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Du Yun and her global collaborators. In 2019 Sethi and Du Yun teamed up to create a classical work for New York’s Carnegie Hall, and the Times Square display will show a portion of Sethi’s performance, followed by other images from Du Yun’s ouevre.
“I feel honoured to be a part of this display,” said Ali Sethi in a statement. “I have always believed in our musical traditions, in their power to win hearts and change minds, and I feel so proud to represent them before the world.”
The display will run twice a day on 13 screens from December 15-21, 2019 with 16 sightings on Monday.
Imaginary Homelands
September 14, 2018
by Yasmeen Siddiqui, Alpesh Kantilal Patel
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LAHORE, Pakistan — Earlier this year, New York City-based Shahzia Sikander presented her work for the first time in the city where she grew up. Sikander is well known for how she transfigured the language of miniature painting, a form she learnt as a young undergraduate art student at the National College of Arts in Lahore. She has since mobilized the language of animated film, and one of these — “Disruption As Rapture” (2018) — was recently installed at two outdoor locations: the Lahore Fort and Alhamra Gardens. The work attests to Sikander’s strong interest, both in playing with scale as well as in collaboration across disciplines, from music to literature, with an eye open to theater. The installations were part of another first — the inaugural Lahore Biennale that took place this year from March 18–31.
Below are images of the installations along with descriptions of the work — often in Sikander’s own words. What will be clear is that the work (among other things) moves beyond the fixity of often timeless national categories towards an exploration of identity as something richer, more complex.
[…]Opening Performance at the Lahore Fort, Lahore Biennale 01.

The other location “Disruption as Rapture” was shown was the Lahore Fort, an expansive structure, significant architectural site, and major tourist destination in the northern section of this historic walled city. The base structure dates to the 17th century reign of Mughal Emperor Akbar, but has been expanded over the centuries. “Disruption as Rapture,” in this setting, was realized in collaboration with Pulitzer prize winning Chinese-American musician Du Yun and Pakistani singer Ali Sethi.

The reference to Sufi enlightenment and Hindu devotional Bhakti is explored though forms created from female hair as well as wings choreographed as particle systems that function as a connecting tissue while carrying the theme of strife and the struggle for truth.

The idea of a “particle system” is a practical device Sikander uses in her animations, that amplifies her intellectual interest in tracking the movement of iconography and ideas over time and space. This method of making animations is highly expressive and allows more freedom than conventional rendering techniques. The basic idea is allowing for controlled chaos to organize and animate a form that has the quality of smoke or other similar natural phenomena.

“Disruption as Rapture” refuses to be contained or straight-jacketed as an homage to heritage, instead it suggests new ways of artists working together across time and media.

…we decided to involve the girls’ choir and the children under training of the musicians of the old city of Lahore. The fort is within the old city of Lahore. The video is an animation and the visual vernacular and storytelling is of the region. There was immediate affinity with the work from the young musicians who through their participation also became part of the work. The context of the Mughal architectural site did not seem incongruous as the work itself was dissecting the ‘hidden’ plurality within the linguistic, musical, visual, religious and spiritual cultures of the sub-continent.
The role of audience in the realization of “Disruption as Rapture” begs the revisiting of questions about how participants from the public sphere should be documented and historicized when developing critical reception and art historical writing.