On a darkened stage at Sydney's Carriageworks, Rainbow Chan (陳雋然) sings an a cappella song in Weitou, an ancient Cantonese dialect.
The melody lilts and wafts through the theatre. It's soothing — akin to a lullaby — and yet there's something haunting about it.
In English, the title is Fish Song Bird Song and the lyrics translate to:
"The flat-headed catfish hides in a dark corner. The scaleless eel is all alone. The pond loach swims in turbid waters. This is how I feel now."
The Sydney-based musician and multidisciplinary artist was born in Hong Kong and moved to Australia when she was 6. Weitou is her matrilineal mother tongue. It means "walled village language" and has been spoken for more than a millennium by the Weitou people, the first settlers of Hong Kong.
Chan has been learning Weitou for the past five years through folksongs, which were traditionally sung by women at festivals, weddings and funerals. They were passed down orally, as the women weren't taught to read or write.
Fish Song Bird Song is a wedding song, sung by brides before marriage. But, as the lyrics suggest, it's not a celebration, it's a lament — and the refrain for Chan's debut theatre show The Bridal Lament.
The bridal lament
In Weitou culture, marriages were arranged between villages. Young women spent years learning the bridal laments, which they would perform for family and friends as part of a pre-wedding ritual that would last up to five days.
In an episode of ABC RN's Earshot, Chan explains that the bride would sing and weep as a way of bidding farewell to her sisters and aunties, before a group of men from the groom's village would come to collect her.
"The bride was piggybacked out of her family home and lifted into a sedan chair and then she would be carried off to the new husband's home and leave forever.
"This was the way of village life for women. Always the property of someone else. You'd be born somebody's daughter and die somebody's wife."
Chan's The Bridal Lament is the headline act for Performance Space's 40th-anniversary Liveworks Festival of experimental art, which opened at Carriageworks this week. It's a one-woman song cycle — with songs in Weitou, Cantonese and English — that reimagines the traditional laments.
Chan has composed and solo-produced the music for the show, which is a celestial blend of pop electronica and Weitou melodies. She has also written her own lament, sung in English and "broken Weitou".
"All the songs have been deeply influenced by the traditional laments, but I've [also] written these new songs as English adaptations of traditional lyrics," she says.
"Some of them are like meta laments, where I am singing about the world of the lament; in others I'm embodying the bride-to-be, embodying the voices of my mum, of my ancestors, of myself, and … meeting these songs as a contemporary artist."
Five years in the making
The show explores the complexities of Chan's ancestral lineage and intergenerational perspectives on the bridal laments. She weaves personal and historical anecdotes together through live performance, narration and animated projections.
The show is the culmination of a five-year research project born of a desire to learn more about her mother's culture and language.
"It's the biggest thing I've ever done."
Growing up, Chan spoke Cantonese and English at home. She recalls her mother speaking Weitou, but she never learned it.
"When my mum was a child, Weitou culture was looked down on. At school, she had to speak Cantonese," Chan says.
Today, Weitou is considered endangered.
"It's a kind of post-colonial residue."
The desire to learn the language came in 2017, after Chan had completed her Masters in Art and Design at UNSW. Her thesis focused on the effects of capitalism and globalisation on intersecting issues of race, class, gender and identity construction.
"I had started to think about these things that could get lost in the machine, things like oral culture that die when [the people speaking it] die … and how you document something that isn't written with digital culture, print culture and screen culture."
It inspired her to have a conversation with her mum, Irene.
"It really began with a simple question: 'Mum, can you teach me your language, your mother tongue?' And she was just like, 'Oh, you're interested! Okay!' She was quite taken aback," Chan recalls laughing.
"She taught me a few phrases but then [said], 'I think, as a musician, you'll pick it up a lot quicker if you learn it through these songs [the laments] … and I think I know the people who you should contact.'"
What happened next would take Chan to Lung Yeuk Tau, a village community in Hong Kong on the border of Shenzhen.
Discovering cultural roots
The village is home to the Tang clan, the oldest and largest of the five major clans to settle in Hong Kong during the Song dynasty, which spanned 960–1279. Allegedly, they are also the descendants of a Song dynasty princess, Chan adds excitedly.
Chan's grandmother became a Tang when she married into the Lung Yeuk Tau village, although she passed away when Chan was still a baby.
Chan's aunty (Irene's best friend), Choi Lin Cheung, also married into the village and was working in its community centre on a language conservation project in 2017. It was the perfect introduction for Chan.
She told Earshot: "This was the start of an epic journey to rediscover my Weitou roots."
Chan travelled to the village with her mum and aunty in 2017 and returned a year later on her own. Over those two trips, she forged a deep connection with some of the elders in the community, whom she affectionately calls "the grannies". There are nine in total, all Weitou women in their 80s and 90s, and they are the last generation of brides to have performed the bridal laments.
"The connection that I've built with the grannies gives me goosebumps," she says.
Chan recalls their first meeting: "The Weitou women greeted me with the biggest smiles. They had hearty laughs and told dirty jokes. They even put a Weitou farming hat on my head and said I was one of them."
The grannies embraced Chan and started teaching her Weitou songs, including the bridal laments, sharing stories and recipes along the way.
"What was initially a language endeavour suddenly became this lifelong research project into not only forms of kinship, especially amongst women and how women look after each other, but also cooking and recipes that are so connected to the food that they grow … that are removed from more Western capitalist notions," says Chan.
"There's so much richness to these Indigenous knowledges and systems of being, of caring for the land and waterways — and that has a lot of resonance on stolen [Aboriginal] land as well."
The complexities of tradition
The focus of Chan's research has been on matrilineal knowledge systems, folksongs and traditions — but Weitou heritage is actually patrilineal, which she has complicated feelings about.
"My mum married a city man, my dad is not Weitou, which technically means I'm not Weitou," she says.
"If you're born a girl, you are kind of like a temporary resident of your village, and you are expected to always marry out into another village and become someone's wife. That is where you belong."
Traditionally, women couldn't marry men from their home village, because they were considered to be related to them. Those who remained unmarried were considered "shameful" and would have to move into a separate dwelling outside of the village.
While these practices are obsolete now, Chan says "some of those sentiments still linger in contemporary ways".
"Village identities are generally quite complicated in terms of where [people] sit on the party line. It's still very dominated by men."
In developing The Bridal Lament, Chan thought deeply about the importance of continuing oral traditions and the voices she most wanted to uplift.
"Women's voices have always been marginalised in the community, but also in mainstream Hong Kong, who know nothing about the bridal lament or this rich history," she explains.
"And so I was thinking not necessarily about a specific group but the feeling of the marginal and how it resonates not only in this specific context, but across [cultures]."
In the show, Chan positions the bridal lament as both an expression of grief and an act of defiance.
She tells the audience that grooms were often referred to as the "king of hell" in laments and that the aunties from the village say that "to marry is to die".
There is an implied defiance to the storytelling in the show, which is guided by Chan in conversation with her mum, who narrates in Cantonese and Weitou.
"That is another reason why this project is quite subversive in a way, [because it's] challenging those notions of authenticity [and] of who can be the right storyteller."
In conversation with the past
Chan's desire to both preserve and subvert tradition through the performance captures the complexity of the diasporic experience.
"It's so easy for people to see a person of colour as an ambassador [and think] they know everything; they're the knowledge holder. But that process is such a struggle, especially from a diasporic perspective," she says.
"You are doing so much grappling with what it is to belong, but through that struggle, and through those imperfections of translation and trying to connect, you generate so much dialogue and richness, and shed things that no longer serve society. But how do you still hold on to the things that do?"
Speaking to the audience, Chan offers something by way of an answer.
"The past isn't static. We are always in conversation with it."
Her attitude to the onstage world of The Bridal Lament is similar — it will continue to evolve with time. After its Liveworks premiere, the show will tour to Adelaide as part of OzAsia Festival, with Melbourne to follow next year.
"It's very porous, very liminal," she says.
"It's also a show that's about the future and how these songs will move on and [how we] ensure that these old melodies aren't forgotten and continue to resonate for years to come."
The Bridal Lament is at Liveworks Festival until October 22, and OzAsia Festival November 1–2.
https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMiaWh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvbmV3cy8yMDIzLTEwLTIxL3JhaW5ib3ctY2hhbi10aGUtYnJpZGFsLWxhbWVudC1saXZld29ya3Mtb3phc2lhLWZlc3RpdmFsLzEwMjk4NDMwMtIBKGh0dHBzOi8vYW1wLmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvYXJ0aWNsZS8xMDI5ODQzMDI?oc=5
2023-10-20 20:13:58Z
CBMiaWh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvbmV3cy8yMDIzLTEwLTIxL3JhaW5ib3ctY2hhbi10aGUtYnJpZGFsLWxhbWVudC1saXZld29ya3Mtb3phc2lhLWZlc3RpdmFsLzEwMjk4NDMwMtIBKGh0dHBzOi8vYW1wLmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvYXJ0aWNsZS8xMDI5ODQzMDI
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