Xi Xi’s women find their voices in new chamber opera

Some of the ancillary events of Hong Kong Arts Festival (HKAF), which begins on Feb 21, have been running since January. One of these is the Cattle Depot Creative Hub project. From January to March, artists from Hong Kong, the Chinese mainland and beyond have been gathering at Cattle Depot Artist Village in To Kwa Wan, to work collaboratively on developing new productions commissioned by HKAF.

Daniel Lo, a local composer and a lecturer at the University of Hong Kong’s Department of Music, is full of praise for HKAF for backing his project, Two Ladies. He has been collaborating with artists from various fields. Lo is trying to hone a piece of literature into a form suitable for stage adaptation through a series of rehearsals, workshops and excerpt demonstrations.

Lo has received commissions from both local and overseas agencies to create stage shows based on contemporary music and operas on earlier occasions. He says in most cases the production schedule is goal-oriented and artists often do not have sufficient time to develop and polish their works. Cattle Depot Creative Hub, however, aims to optimize the creative process and provide a “freer” platform for artists from different fields to work and share with each other, says Lo.

The six-set chamber opera, Two Ladies, is inspired by two short novels by Xi Xi, one of Hong Kong’s most internationally renowned authors. Lo has adapted a number of Chinese short novels and modern poems written by Hong Kong authors into music pieces, including the choir-based work Mary’s Chalk Circle, also based on a short story by Xi. The piece premiered in 2017, sung by the local choir group Hong Kong Voices. Lo also wrote the English chamber opera A Woman Such as Myself which premiered at the Ostrava Centre for New Music in the Czech Republic last summer.

In Two Ladies, Lo and the librettist Wong Yi combine two of Xi’s short stories — A Girl Like Me and The Cold — to create a two-hour opera about women. This is the first time Xi’s work has been adapted into Cantonese chamber opera. Also to have local artistes singing in Cantonese in an opera based on a Hong Kong author’s work is a rarity.

Written in the early 1980s, both stories are informed by the same idea: how urban women might achieve their personal goals and a sense of identity even as they try to strike a balance between the traditional and modern value systems.

“At first the two stories seem to talk about love, marriage and family,” says Lo, who believes a closer read reveals that they are more than just love stories. What impressed the 32-year-old composer most about them is that in the end both female protagonists reject negativity and muster up the courage to plan their futures the way they want.

The social realities of the 1980s in Xi’s stories still resonate with the present time. Women looking for personal freedom is a universal theme and viewers today will probably find it more relevant than ever.

Cattle Depot Creative Hub project also includes the innovative Cantonese opera Journey to the West, created by playwright Kong Chunkit, composer Kam Shing-hei and director Donald Chung, and the immersive theater piece, You Are Absent and What Does That Mean, performed by Onnie Chan.

Until March, Cattle Depot will serve as a happy meeting ground for singers, composers, theater directors and writers — a space where new performance art is created.