At ArtsEmerson, ‘Book of Mountains and Seas’ renders epic tales with intimacy
Based on ancient Chinese mythology, “Book of Mountains and Seas” is a new work of theater that aims big. As told through the impressionistic artwork of two celebrated creators — the choral music of Huang Ruo and Basil Twist’s innovative puppetry — the story ecompasses no less than the world’s creation and its destruction.
For such epic themes, the production, which runs for three performances this weekend at the Emerson Paramount Center, was inspired by a few square inches: a series of stamps the Chinese government issued in the 1980s, when Huang was a child. Those stamps commemorated Chinese mythology, including scenes from the “Classic of Mountains and Seas,” a story collection that has its origins in the fourth century BC.
“All the four stories I adapted were on those stamps,” says Huang. The last segment of the performance, the tale of Kua Fu, a giant who tries to capture the sun, looks very similar onstage to the figure on the stamp, he explains. “It shows how art imitates life, and life imitates art.”
Using a minimum of textures, the production leaves ample room for the audience’s imagination. Twist’s puppeteers manipulate paper lanterns, sheets of silk, and large fabrications that look like driftwood to suggest wind, water, the sun, moon, and stars, the Earth’s landscape — and the human forces that endanger the environment.
Huang, who’s been called “one of the world’s leading young composers” by The New Yorker, gives voice to the choir in a combination of ancient Chinese and an invented language that interprets the sound of birds, waves, and more. The singers are accompanied only by a pair of percussionists.
“Sometimes I think when people don’t understand something, they tend to listen more closely,” Huang says.
In hands other than his own, Twist says, the show’s staging might have looked very different.
“You can either go super epic, which these stories are, and involve CGI-level stagecraft. Or you go really poetic.
“The music is expansive,” Twist says. “You let it wash over you. The images need to be pure and strong, but there’s not an enormous amount of action happening. It’s really about creating an elegant stage picture that stays within the space of the music.”
Twist has worked on Broadway and with the Royal Shakespeare Company; in 2015 he was named a MacArthur Fellow. Known for working with existing compositions — his underwater work “Symphonie Fantastique” is set to the Berlioz work of the same name — he says this is the first time he has collaborated with a living composer.
“It’s amazing to see how somebody else thinks,” says Twist. “To see how the music is a revelation of what’s going on in his head. He’s very passionate, as I’m sure you can tell.”
Huang and Twist met a few years ago, at the invitation of a mutual friend, Nigel Redden, the longtime director of Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, S.C. (Redden is “great at being a matchmaker,” Huang says.)
“These stories, they come from [Huang’s] suggestion, his culture, his childhood,” Twist says. “They come from a very deep place. I was not familiar with those stories. ‘Book of Mountains and Seas’ is many, many stories. He chose the ones he liked. He’s very clear about what is important within the story.”
To Huang, his ancestors foretold our current climate crisis with the tale of Kua Fu, who represents human greed and imposition on the environment.
“It was always in my mind to tell the story but not in a traditional, predictable way,” he says. “I wanted to transform it to be not just regional, but to become universal, and also timely.”
There is an old Chinese saying, Huang adds, paraphrasing: “If nature is in one’s heart, you can hear the birds, even if you are not in the woods.”
The two principal artists will work together again on a new commission set to premiere with the San Francisco Opera in the fall of 2025. “The Monkey King,” drawn from an episode in another of China’s literary classics, will feature a libretto by the renowned playwright David Henry Hwang and will be directed by Diane Paulus, artistic director of the American Repertory Theater.
Huang and Twist share a similar artistic upbringing. From a young age, Huang understood that he would follow in the footsteps of his father, also a composer.
Twist calls himself a “thirdgeneration puppeteer,” though that lineage is much less specific: When he was a child growing up in San Francisco, his mother was part of a group of amateur puppeteers. His maternal grandfather, Griff Williams, a dance bandleader in the 1930s and ‘40s, sometimes entertained audiences with marionettes of famous bandleaders such as Cab Calloway and Paul Whiteman.
Around age 10, Twist was gifted his late grandfather’s beloved marionettes. Though he loved puppetry, it wasn’t until he matured into young adulthood that he knew he wanted to devote his life to it. He remains the only American to graduate from the Ecole Superieure Nationale des Arts de la Marionnette in France.
“Once I embraced it,” he says, “the world opened up to me, completely.”