The Silver River (review)

The Silver River brought together an ensemble of artists skilled in diverse modes of performance drawn from both the traditional and the modern, from both China and the West. The project was collaboratively conceived by composer Bright Sheng, playwright David Henry Hwang, and director Ong Keng Sen. They were joined by choreographer Muna Tseng and designers Christine Jones, Scott Zielinksi, and Anita Yavich. In The Silver River, the collaborators retell a beloved story from the Chinese tradition. In the tale, the mortal Cowherd falls in love with the immortal Goddess-Weaver, a daughter of the Jade Emperor. Using a multicultural cast and techniques from Western and Chinese traditions, this chamber opera was well suited to the programming of the 2002 Lincoln Center Festival, which took a particular interest in collaborative and intercultural music, theatre, and opera. Though a Singapore performance of this opera was reviewed in Theatre Journal 53 (2001), an English-Chinese bilingual production combining music in the Western tradition with that of the traditional Chinese pipa would interact differently with Lincoln Center Festival audiences than with those in Singapore.

Intercultural theatre has its greatest creative potential when it draws upon multiple modes of artistic training. The cast of The Silver River satisfied this condition. The production featured diverse artists such as actress Karen Kandel, flautist David Fedele, baritone Joseph Kaiser, and dancer Wen-Shuan Yang, the latter born in Taiwan and educated in the United States. Additionally, artists of traditional Chinese forms included pipa player Hui Li and Peking Opera performer Yu-Cheng Ren. The roles of the Cowherd and Goddess-Weaver were each portrayed by a pair of performers in different media. The flautist and the baritone shared the role of the Cowherd, while the pipa player and dancer jointly portrayed the Goddess-Weaver. As a potential triumph of intercultural music theatre, The Silver River had both the right personnel and an innovative concept. However, the production achieved only mixed success.

In the writing and staging of the piece, the distinctive communicative powers of each of the various art forms—acting, dance, vocal music, and instrumental music—were not effectively melded. Early on in The Silver River, it became clear that performance in English—whether the speaking of Kandel's Golden Buffalo or the singing of one of the Cowherds—would be special. The musicians held their own in acting their roles while playing their instruments. In fact, both instrumental musicians showed more expression on their faces than did their singing or dancing counterparts. However, far too often they either interacted only with one another, or did not interact with anyone at all. If each pair of performers is truly sharing a role, then each should interact significantly with both members of the other half of the couple. The second of the opera's two scenes displayed the greater success in this regard. In the first scene, the musicians did not get involved in the physical action. At times, they seemed more like costumed members of the pit orchestra. Perhaps a too-close adherence to the stage geography of traditional Chinese opera minimized their movement and physical activity. In terms of the music, composer Sheng skillfully fused the freer rhythms of the pipa with Western musical signatures. It was, however, the fusion with other art forms that proved more problematic.

Linguistic unevenness took on a more pronounced cultural dimension in the Peking Opera portions sung by Ren as the Jade Emperor. His portions were sometimes translated into English, and sometimes not. Aside from the difficulty of understanding his English lyrics, particularly after spending over an hour trying to understand untitled Chinese lyrics (rarely expected nowadays even among Peking Opera-goers in Chinese-speaking countries), the meaning of such a transformation is troubling. In a world of intercultural exchange, must English be the language of the new order? The Silver River implied that it must, which does...