5 April 2024
Oakland, CA, USA

It’s been an entire two and a half months since I last visited home, but it feels far longer than that, considering how packed the winter and spring have been so far. Aside from finishing the new string quartet for Quatuor Arod, I’ve been preparing various projects for further performances, especially developing The Once and Future (2021) into a more mature direction in terms of staging and costumes- a must in advance of its European premiere in 2025 in Antwerp, Belgium. At the same time, some things have slipped in terms of completion, like sharing the Vivacissimo (2023) performance (perhaps not until May! though it will also very likely come to Europe later this year), and the online project for Hong Kong Ballet, which will probably only release in the summer. But I’m also well aware that good things can’t be rushed, and one is only remembered for ‘what’, not ‘when’.

This is a brief trip home; I’ll already be back in Hong Kong for the culmination of the academic year next week, and, indeed, Hong Kong figures into many of the upcoming weeks of spring. At the same time, I’ll be back in Myanmar towards the end of the month for a long-awaited (though brief) trip; my first, in December 2022, was fascinating and moving, with the country in the depths of a civil war that, now, seems to have only regressed. At the same time, the incredible and gracious culture and the dependence on any foreign visitors to support a famished population lends a particular urgency to a trip. It’s just impossible to predict where things will go from here, but the beauty of the place is eternal, and profound.

Turning attention away from merely planning things to creative work once more, I’ll finally be working on the music for an interactive project-collaboration with Jeffrey Shaw, Katharina Schmitt, and Christoph Wirth, which will, let’s say, ‘soft’-premiere in Hong Kong this autumn but will get a proper run in Germany in 2025 as well (it threatens to be an especially busy year!). Lots of news regarding future performances for the summer and autumn will come in the next update which, hopefully, will find me in less of a state of constant jet lag!