Embodied Madrigals as Events: From the Renaissance, to the Renaissance of Performers as Interpreters

Abstract

This research concerns choral music performance in relation to embodiment, musical meaning, and performance as social action. I consider aspects of staging, production, movement, presentation in my analysis. This research is part of my on-going ethnographic research from 2016, to understand choral singing practice in Hong Kong. Through my points of view as a choral director and singer, I participate and observe experimental choral theatre performances that unfold musical meanings of choral staples through embodied actions. For choral music, a musical practice that uphold community, collectivity, and notion of empowerment, it becomes a site for participants to perform their understanding of self and ideal society. In Hong Kong’s context, with the intensified political tension since the Handover in 1997, art practitioners have sought to re-consider collective identity through rethinking the meaning of their routine repertoires and performances in relation to Hong Kong’s relationship with her colonial past as a British colony, its current sovereign Mainland China and other international stakeholders. This research focuses on the story of Singfest, a unique professional choir in Hong Kong established after 2000s. Among the choral community in Hong Kong, Singfest uniquely focuses on staple choral classics and explore their theatrical possibilities. Throughout the years, Singfest has established a reputation as an expert choral ensemble in repertoires by the Bach family, Monteverdi and Handel, which has been enhanced by their collaboration with Helmuth Rilling. This research analyzes selective Singfest performances and productions in 2017-2020, in which Singfest performed a semistaged version of English madrigals, which included multi-media and theatrical elements. Singfest gives a fresh touch to these staple repertoires with urban Hong Kong stories. I argue, Singfest negotiates their relationships with these so-called ‘foreign’ repertoires, and articulates their responses with embodied actions. These embodied actions are not metaphorical or representative so to speak, instead, these actions are physical bodily engagement and interactions with meanings and expressivity. The process of such negotiation constructs the production of self and collective identity on what it means to be a Hongkonger, a cosmopolitan, and reimagine the notion of foreign and local.