Tag Archives: Southbank Centre

MARGARET LENG TAN: DRAGON LADIES DON’T WEEP

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Queen Elizabeth Hall

MARGARET LENG TAN: DRAGON LADIES DON’T WEEP at the Queen Elizabeth Hall

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“when the otherworldly music is allowed to flourish, the piece achieves some truly transcendent moments”

Dragon Ladies Don’t Weep is a musical autobiography of renowned Singaporean avant-garde pianist and multi-instrumentalist Margaret Leng Tan. A meditation on music and loss, the piece is an experimental one-woman show that seamlessly blends elements of biographical monologue, musical concert and performance art, written by β€˜dramaturg’ Kok Heng Leun using text from Tan’s diaries and recollections. Tan, a long-time collaborator of seminal American composer John Cage, channels all the experience of her six-decade career, which began when she entered New York’s Julliard School of Music at the age of sixteen, to produce a compelling and original performance.

Naturally, music is central, serving as catalyst and accompaniment for the recounting of some pivotal experiences of Tan’s life. Using the innovative instruments for which she is known, Tan creates a dynamic sonic palette that ripples throughout the performance, reaching instances of real beauty. Alongside a grand piano that she modifies on stage by placing nuts and bolts between the strings to produce a bell-like tone, she employs a child’s toy piano – her trademark – as well as the triangle, melodica, cymbals, and wind-up music boxes. The music made on stage transfers from the live instruments to a recorded soundtrack, allowing the solo performer to weave layered soundscapes throughout the show, performing music by composer Erik Griswold.

 

 

The staging is relatively spare, director Tamara Saulwick working with just the instruments, the performer and two visible displays, a larger screen upstage right and a central vertical column onto which patterns, and, occasionally text, is projected. Much as toy instruments are used to create ethereal music, from this minimalist set comes a fascinating visual spectacle. Video projections (Nick Roux) interpret the live musical performance and are central to the success of the work: intricate solo piano pieces elicit a moving tapestry of lines that teasingly form perfect shapes before quickly dissipating, defying our desire for patterns as the music subverts our expectations of obvious melodies. In one particularly effective passage, Tan uses multiple music boxes to recall her first meeting with Cage, when twenty Julliard pianists simultaneously played his composition β€˜Winter’. She remembers how it sounded to her like melting icicles, and this description is reflected through projections that evoke dripping ice.

Dragon Ladies Don’t Weep is marked by the absence of two guiding figures in Tan’s life, her mother and Cage, who are recalled both through her descriptions of them and video appearances on the screens. These images are ephemeral: footage of Cage and Tan in conversation has its audio unsynchronised, and a video apparition of her mother becomes clearer and fades with swells of music, suggesting that while art may bring us closer to the memory of those we love, it will never return them to us. This sense of loss is deeply affecting, as the work considers the transience of life and the imperfection of memory.

Some of the spoken passages, despite allowing Tan to demonstrate her wry sense of humour, are a little flat, including a lamentation on the predominance of mobile phones in contemporary society which feels particularly ill-fitting. These sections are brief, however, and, when the otherworldly music is allowed to flourish, the piece achieves some truly transcendent moments, illustrating why Margaret Leng Tan is such an important figure in twentieth-century music and beyond. When combining music and the personal experiences of the performer, the piece is at its best, dragon ladies may not weep but they are not unfeeling.

 


MARGARET LENG TAN: DRAGON LADIES DON’T WEEP at the Queen Elizabeth Hall

Reviewed on 24th May 2024

by Rob Tomlinson

Photography by Crispian Chan

 


 

 

Previously reviewed at this venue:

MASTERCLASS | β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜… | May 2024
FROM ENGLAND WITH LOVE | β˜…β˜…β˜…Β½ | April 2024
REUBEN KAYE: THE BUTCH IS BACK | β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜… | December 2023
THE PARADIS FILES | β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜… | April 2022

DRAGON LADIES DON’T WEEP

DRAGON LADIES DON’T WEEP

Click here to see our Recommended Shows page

 

MASTERCLASS

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Southbank Centre

MASTERCLASS at the Purcell Room, Southbank Centre

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“Rachel Bergin’s creative production packs a well-staged punch aimed squarely at the patriarchy”

You will recognise the stage set up from any β€œA Conversation With…” events you have attended in the neighbouring Royal Festival Hall. Two opposing casual chairs either side of a coffee table, prominent copies of a β€˜great work’, and a historically accurate cognac bottle: Ellen Kirk as set designer gets the tone just right.

However, the sincerity lasts for mere seconds before Feidlim Cannon and Adrienne Truscott start unravelling the form with silliness, physical comedy and rat-a-tat dialogue. Over the course of an hour they unpick the work of many of the greats stubbornly taking space in the literary and theatrical canon.

Feidlim Cannon plays the interviewer, entering the stage to smooth jazz (Jennifer O’Malley on sound design), ready to cosily interrogate a great man and his body of work. A moustachioed and body suited Adrienne Truscott is introduced as a writer, director and costume designer whose work allegedly surfaces themes of truth, gender and power, but as unrehearsed readings of one of his scenes demonstrate, are more often channels for misogyny and violence against women.

 

 

Quickly, the artifice is revealed, with Cannon’s seventies wig falling off during farcical movement sequences (well designed by Eddie Kay, movement director). This escalates throughout the piece as lines between the characters and the artists playing them are increasingly blurred; they appear to break scene to demand self-examination of themselves. In places the threads of the devising are still visible, though they are mostly welcomed (I am a sucker for a juxtaposed dance sequence). Costumes are shed nearly all the way; which as we are reminded is Truscott’s calling card from previous shows, and extensively examined.

There are some great one liners in the first half of the script from writers Cannon and Truscott, along with Gary Keegan of Irish theatre company Brokentalkers, which jab at well-known theatrical productions that have frankly audacious premises. The exploration of why genius and passion never seems to express itself in calm and considered behaviour when violence is available was another point persuasively demonstrated.

Then as the fourth wall fully breaks, we move into a fairly explicit lecture on feminism, allyship and taking up space. It feels like most of the flair disappears for too long before the ambiguous ending restores the playfulness that has underpinned the majority of the piece. I felt like the stripped back truth-telling felt a bit too much like a classroom and the commentary slightly too surface level to justify the lack of theatricality.

Despite this, the vast majority of Masterclass is creative, gnarly, and cathartic for many a practitioner. Rachel Bergin’s creative production packs a well-staged punch aimed squarely at the patriarchy.


MASTERCLASS at the Southbank Centre

Reviewed on 9th May 2024

by Rosie Thomas

Photography by Ste Murray

 


 

 

 

Previously reviewed at this venue:

FROM ENGLAND WITH LOVE | β˜…β˜…β˜…Β½ | April 2024
REUBEN KAYE: THE BUTCH IS BACK | β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜… | December 2023
THE PARADIS FILES | β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜… | April 2022

MASTERCLASS

MASTERCLASS

Click here to see our Recommended Shows page