OzAsia Festival. Odeon Theatre. 5 Nov 2025

 

’Twas a dark and scary night. Really dark. Thunderous roaring filled and air. The whole building seemed to be vibrating. The Odeon Theatre had become a vast chasm which once had seen stairs accessing the mighty bleacher seating. Now, just a high wall with the sound box way up there. Now, just a ceiling latticed with lighting rig. Now black curtains and darkness but, oh, the jingling and tinkling coming from spotlit bowls of artificial mandarins dangling and dancing from aloft. Vivid. Lovely.

 

The audience shuffled cautiously into the space, instructed to move around freely but not to touch the props or take flash photos. It was a world of shadowy figures and sensory sound. For fifty fascinating minutes people stood or meandered as performers materialised within black-veiled box-tubes as moveable stages. It was eerie, light-scapes of forest materialising in the boxes. And Nils Hobige’s bass cello strings imposed a visceral intensity of sound and sensation. It was overwhelming and satisfying and transcendent, as, indeed, this OzAsia production is intended to be. It was the ambisonic call to the dead, the poems of the end, the echoes of mourning, of the desolate songs of eternity. And, in the traditions of Chinese opera, vocal shrilling emanated from dazzlingly white-costumed characters once illuminated in their platform boxes. And the audience crowded around them, leaving a “backstage” world of blackness where the hanging mandarin bowls gently moved with the electronic sound vibrations. Shadowy characters glided around. One could tell they were cast members because of their posture and grace. They were Wu Chang, deities which escort the spirits of the dead. And the dead cried out and the musicians, with jewelled tears on their cheeks, powered the air and the audience wandered and wondered. Those moving stages. That dramatic lighting from aloft and beneath and yet, that sense of intense and enveloping darkness. Oh, the thrill of percussion. Oh, the funereal finality of the giant bass drum. And as climaxes rose to cacophony, the beautiful mandarins bounced and jangled and fell to the floor from their hanging bowls.

 

This commissioned work by Monica Lim and Mindy Meng Wang, is described as a “cyber opera” reimagining the connection between life and death. It is intensely experiential and sophisticated high-tech music theatre. It delivers a voyage into the otherworldly while vividly reminding one that this, the so-called real here-and-now world, is also exactly that, a shivering bowl of beautiful impermanence.

 

Samela Harris

 

When: 5 to 6 Nov

Where: Odeon Theatre

Bookings: Closed