BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE
In 2021, Victoria Pham wrote an article in Decolonial Hacker about the problematic representation of “Asianness” in the Australian music industry — the “worn-out productions that use Oriental culture for the sole purpose of nostalgic spectacle”.
Now, the composer has launched a new response to these themes in the form of a concert experience that celebrates artists with Asian heritage who live in Australia. Her event Threshold, co-curated with Backstage Music director Lamorna Nightingale, showcases talent working across film, spoken word, sound, and music.
Featuring talent such as Gloria Demillo (poet and playwright), Flora Wong (violin), James Nguyen (filmmaker and artist), Nicholas Ng (erhu), and Chloe Chung (dizi/flute), this event “seeks to invite audience to listen at a cross-cultural threshold”.
Victoria (pictured above with James) tells CutCommon what Threshold has in store.
Victoria, thanks for taking the time to chat with CutCommon. Let’s start with the title of your upcoming performance: Threshold. What is the threshold you’re meeting — or breaking through — with this event?
The concept of Threshold first emerged over a year ago when I was first approached by Backstage Music, Lamorna Nightingale. The entire project was inspired by a poem by Vietnamese poet Ocean Vuong called Thresholds. His words were beautiful, and seemed to pulse to the rhythm of cross-cultural histories.
Extending from this emerged our musical-performative take on Threshold as a concept. Rather than breaking or shattering anything, this event seeks to invite audience to listen at a cross-cultural threshold.
We have five incredible artists and musicians — Gloria Demillo, Chloe Chung, Flora Wong, James Nguyen and Nicholas Ng — who will each reflect on their idea of Threshold: how we sit within many cultures and can thus be influenced by different modes of storytelling and sound-making to express art and narratives. Instead of their being a singular threshold, the concert expands into a multiplicity of forms.
If we’re breaking anything, it’ll be any assumptions that reduce such a variety of practice to ‘contemporary Asian’. Perhaps come along and listen with open ears to the remarkable performances and works of these local artists.
This program largely came out of your article about the “orientalist spectacle” of people of colour in opera. How did this perception and representation of Asian talent in opera drive you to curate a new event that would showcase diversity in the Australian music industry?
In many ways, this event was one of many projects that emerged from my published critique on the treatment or characterisation of people of colour in traditional Western opera. Too often, when we witness the performance of “Asianess” in opera, the audience is only invited to see very specific stereotypes such as the subservient and domestic model-female – in works ranging Madama Butterfly to its more modern counterpart, Miss Saigon – and sexualised images of geishas and exoticised belly-dancers.
From this, Threshold was a direct response to these outdated modes of representing people of colour. Instead of maligning artists of Asian heritage to reductive performances of ‘ritual’ or ‘ceremony’ or whatever a Western-art conception of ‘Asian sounds’ is, we hoped that Threshold instead showcased the incredibly vitality of contemporary practices operating across Australia.
It also wished to counteract the notion of ‘Asianess’ as a single entity and, instead, make space for any modes of performance, poetry, and filmmaking that are being created by Australians who, like myself, happen to be of Asian heritage.
The event is all about “celebrating the stories, voices and practices of artists with Asian heritage living in Australia”. What are some of those stories that audiences will get to hear or see when they attend Threshold?
There are a variety of stories, amplified via voice, film and music, that Threshold showcases. Without giving away too much, some of the works range from new experiments – such as dizi and flautist Chloe Chung’s Songbeing, which is her personal contemplation on time, freedom and rhythm – expressed through her two experiences of performing the Western flute and Chinese bamboo flute, through to Flora Wong’s Rice Wash (2022) that invites audiences into the intimate, intricate sounds of rice itself as if interacts with her violin.
These two examples showcase the sonic activation of materials often associated with consumption of Asian foods and dishes. Rather, works such as Rice Wash subvert expectations and make music out of the small.
Beyond this, Nicholas Ng and Gloria Demillo explore narratives of mythology and labyrinth — but more on those two performances later.
Why was it important to you to feature artists working across everything from music to film?
For both Backstage Music and myself, we have long thought about how we could play with or disrupt the traditional codes of practice behind concert programming. By this, we were particularly invested in avoiding the usual audience-faces-stage format with one set. Technically, the event is billed as a concert – but why can’t a concert include other forms of listening? After all, Backstage Music was an organisation that championed experimental performance practice, so why not expand this into multi-form art presentations?
So, featuring spoken word artist Gloria Demillo, and filmmaker James Nguyen, added to the sound-world that Threshold wished to invite audiences to. Not only was experimental music a central theme, the event expanded an experience of sound to the human voice – first through Demillo’s intimate poetry performance and premiere of her I am, and Nguyen’s intimate artist films of each of the artists.
In particular, it was significant to commission Nguyen’s work as was another dimension to breaking the traditional boundary between on-stage performer and audience. His films weave between and before each ‘set’, setting the tone for an evening of immersive sound-making.
Let’s come back to that concept of “mythology and labyrinth”. What’s behind it?
Labyrinths was a secondary theme or, in a way, narrative arc that emerged once all the artists started to come together around September 2022. One of the joys of curating an event like this is opening up the possibility of collaboration between the five artists. Instead of working separately and organising the event as one set or work following another, we chose to highlight collaboration.
Out of these conversations where we developed the form and rhythm of the concert as a whole, one of the artists, Nicholas Ng, brought forth the idea of labyrinths and associated mythologies relating to the ‘labyrinth’ in Chinese history. He wished to highlight movement, stories, and contemporary musical works that interwove with this concept.
His development, in turn, inspired spoken word artist Gloria Demillo’s work I am, which starts off the evening which then revolves back to Nicholas who will close the night, alongside other Threshold performers, with Labyrinth.
And if you attend the event, you might even notice some of the staging by James Nguyen and Liam Mulligan, and projected video during Nick set by myself, giving further nods to labyrinths.
What final words would you like to share before the event?
I hope you come along and prepare for a full-body immersive experience. Not only does this event showcase some of the most exciting local musicians, artists, and performers from the East Coast of Australia, but it seeks to break the boundary of a ‘traditional’ concert. There are commissioned films by James Nguyen, listening deeply to rice, spoken word all the way to projections on moving bodies. We hope you come along with curious ears.
Experience Threshold at 7.30pm March 4 in Woodburn Creatives, 82 Cope St Waterloo. Book tickets and learn more about the program.
Read next: Artists discuss Threshold in Liminal
Images supplied. Featured image courtesy James Nguyen.
