Collaborating in a crisis
With Alvin Ong in front of paintings from ‘We Will Meet’, 2016.
As a fairly ‘extroverted’ writer, there are few aspects of the writing life that I enjoy more than collaborating with friends in other art forms or media. While in the UK, I had the privilege of working on a chamber opera (and then another!) with Daniel Bonaventure Lim, a series of pilgrimage poems and paintings with Alvin Ong (who did the cover for Giving Ground), and a brand new musical with my dear friend Peter Shepherd – who was also my neighbour in college – right in the middle of our final year.
These continued in Singapore: a new essay with Alvin, and a hybrid performance at The Arts House with Yvonne Teo, responding to the Rohingya crisis. To my surprise, instead of putting a stop to such collaborations, the onset of the pandemic has made room for some new reflections, and new works.
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The first two of these came via my friend Alex Ho, a brilliant composer who was also at college with Peter and me. The song cycle Letters from Home was commissioned by the Royal Opera House as part of its New Works series, and we began discussing the piece in January, when the so-called ‘Wuhan virus’ was still a shadow on the horizon. As the situation grew increasingly dire, the position of international students (already a fraught one in a Trump/Brexit world) hung in the balance, and we wanted to capture the sense of distance and alienation that a relative back home might feel:
II. BERMONDSEY
I looked it up on the map,
the address you gave me
SE16 4QD.
No. 5, Paradise Street –
nearest station: Bermondsey.
What kind of place
has a name like Paradise?
It must be beautiful […]
For a page poet, writing a sung text like this is always a refreshing exercise, as it forces me to leave my comfortable iambic world behind and think about pace and rhythm quite differently. Apart from my own experience as an international student (albeit in quieter times), I found myself falling back on every scrap of music theory training I received ages ago – wish I’d paid more attention in class then!
A second commission came soon after, for the National Opera Studio’s “12:42” series. This time, Alex and I worked on an aria with Shengzhi Ren, the tenor who would later also perform the work. The process took us across languages and time-zones (with me translating between Mandarin and English on long-distance WhatsApp calls!), bringing together Shengzhi’s deep knowledge of classical Chinese poetry with the stark realities of our current, COVID-stricken world.
What emerged was a bilingual libretto that juxtaposed a T’ang-era poem of exile against the lockdowns that we were facing: myself in Singapore, Alex in London, and Shengzhi travelling between the UK and China. Part of it drew on my own (admittedly rather free) translation of Du Fu’s poem 登高 (‘The Climb’), and spoke to how I imagined it would feel to experience quarantine abroad, in a distant country:
艰难苦恨繁霜鬓
潦倒新停浊酒杯My temples too are white with years of regret:
The wine’s untouched. The heart still yearns.
The heart still yearns. It’s not a word he uses,
only a sense – 潦倒 – of being weighed down.
There’s nothing quite like it, and no-one else
would know how it feels. I’ve become an island
far from the shore, and whatever happens now
there’s no way home, or to put roots down
in this country that I’ve found […]
A third and most recent collaboration has been with another composer, Jonathan Shin, whom I’ve known for more than a decade. We began work on a children’s opera in July, and were able to reflect on how pandemic had worsened prejudices of race, class, and citizenship across the world throughout the first half of this year. The Bright-Eyed Otter tells the story of someone who’s bullied by his classmates because he’s different – but wins them over in the end through his selflessness and sacrifice.
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Of course, the pandemic has also meant that not all of these works can be performed as initially intended. Alex and I have been grateful to the team at the National Opera Studio for pushing forward with recording our aria, and also documenting our creative process through digital means (watch this space)! All of us, naturally, are hopeful that these pieces will reach a wider audience. But if anything, the collaborative process has already shown how the many questions thrown up by the pandemic can be tackled, in some small way, by joining forces with other creatives – especially at a time when the world we share seems to be growing further apart.
Some closing thoughts. What does it take to be a good collaborator? Flexibility, the ability to work to deadlines, and not being overly wedded to your ‘original’ work: the real work, after all, is what emerges from the process. In a more general sense, too (and here reflecting on other collaborations, especially among ground-up and NGO teams during this time): a stomach for compromise, perhaps, and patience to wait for something better. But above all – and I can’t say this enough – finding friends you trust, at the end of the day, to put things in the best possible light.