29 December 2024
Oakland, CA, USA

The year has properly run out of days. And after a tremendously inspiring tour of Kazakhstan and a brief adventure on the Silk Road into the rather mysterious nation of Uzbekistan, it was a relief to come home. 2024 was not a big year of premieres or performances, though the autumn was full of performances and lectures. Projects still in development may have advanced, and those returning to the stage, like The Once and Future (2021) and Russia : Today (2020), will soon grace some prestigious venues in 2025 couldn’t have gotten there without the ‘errands’ put in through this year, but regardless- I suppose more could have come out of this year at least in a superficial sense. But so much of the work put in to a life in music remains perpetually unseen, and we rarely pick our moments.

2025 will begin with something that really should have been in the 2024 column- the digital release of Apparition (2023), the music video created for Hong Kong Ballet with my fabulous team of director Giorgio Biancorosso, musicians Anandi Bhattacharya and Joby Burgess, dancer Shen Jie, and choreographer Yuh Egami. I’ll be back in Hong Kong by then already, with the Academy of Music moving into an incredible new structure that truly symbolises the ambition and potential of the department. If not a fresh start entirely, I really hope 2025 might at least begin a new chapter.

Traveling on the Talgo train from Almaty to Tashkent just over two weeks ago, with icy mountains and endless plains out the window, the scale of the world somehow appeared as both vast and tiny- a few hours in any direction over the air completely changes climate, language, values, traditions, perceptions, and just simply life itself. But to slow oneself down to a slower pace, and even to simply remaining motionless and stationary, to smell the crisp air, listen closely to the wind rustling over the steppe, the faint winter sun fading behind the Tianshan Mountains. Ah, indeed, even that name, so incongruous in Central Asia when Chinese culture and language themselves barely reach across the deserts, is a reminder of moving between spaces and worlds, instantly and eternally. As the year changes yet again, I am thinking of that paradox of space-time and how crossing an ocean back in 2017 changed my life, too.