FUTURE host
a speech opera
CHINA PREMIERE PERFORMANCE DATE
Sep 8-9, 2018, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing
Saturday, September 8, 2018 – 7:30pm
Sunday, September 9, 2018 – 2:00pm
Sep 15-16, 2018, Ming Contemporary Art Museum, Shanghai
Saturday, September 15, 2018 – 7:30pm
Sunday, September 16, 2018 – 2:00pm
[ ticket links coming soon ]
Future Host [noun] is an epithet commonly bestowed to children in officially socialist countries. They are the agent, product, and site of a speculated future, for which they must always already be ready—a command of absolute urgency and ecstatic optimism.
The future is here. Future Host keeps stumbling into the present via an involuntary inheritance of the past.
Inspired by Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge, Future Host: A Speech Opera features a multichannel sound installation composed of vocal recordings, and live improvisational music by a children’s marching band. The physical absence of actors enhances the irreducible presence and immediacy of human timbre. An ambulatory audience moves freely in space.
Written by Tingying Ma, Future Host adopts the ancient Greek form of the amorphous, pre-individual chorus to gather disembodied linguistic fragments—idiomatic expressions, ideological detritus, consumerist slogans, and second-rate lyricism—into a landscape of infinite conflict and recombination. Through collective listening in the theater, the audience encounters an obscured history and a time yet to come.
Site-specific in nature, Future Host’s China tour will showcase the latest version of the work, featuring a new textual rendering and musical composition created specifically for the Chinese audience.
The ensemble Future Host was founded by Tingying Ma and Kang Kang in New York in 2016. Through writing, performance, and choreography, they reconceptualize contemporary Chinese experiences to activate alternative possibilities of subsistence and resistance.
Tingying Ma 马汀滢 (playwright, director) is a theater artist and choreographer living and working in New York. Her work has received commissions and presentations from the Knockdown Center, Signature Theater Studio, Movement Research at the Judson Church, The Dixon Place, The Current Sessions, Chambers Fine Art, Museum of Chinese in America, as well as TPAM Performing Arts Festival in Yokohama, Japan. She was a Chez Bushwick Artist-in-Residency of 2017/18. She graduated from the Central Academy of Drama (BA) and later Columbia University’s MFA Program, where she was mentored by David Henry Hwang, Charles Mee and Ongkeng Sen.
Kang Kang 康康 (dramaturg, producer) is a New York-based writer, editor, and translator. Since 2016, she has collaborated with Tingying on performance research and creation. Her criticism and writing appears in ArtReview Asia, Artforum China, The Brooklyn Rail, LEAP Magazine, Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, and an upcoming anthology titled Ritual and Capital from Wendy’s Subway. She received a BA in Comparative Literature and Society from Columbia University in 2015, and worked extensively in editing and book publishing at the Brooklyn Rail.
C. Spencer Yeh (Composer) is recognized for his interdisciplinary activities and collaborations as an artist, improviser, and composer, as well as his music project Burning Star Core. He has recently presented work at the Whitney Museum, MoMA, and MoMA PS1 in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and Empty Gallery in Hong Kong. In 2015 he was an Artist-in-Residence at Issue Project Room, New York.
Chatori Shimizu (Live Music Director) is a Berlin-based composer, shō performer, and sound artist. He obtained his MFA in Sound Arts from Columbia University, and received his BA from Kunitachi College of Music, Tokyo. As the First Prize Winner of Malta International Composition Competition, he will premiere a new orchestral work with Shanghai Philharmonic Orchestra in December 2018.
Gus Callahan (Technical Sound Director) is an audio engineer, composer, and sound designer between New York and Los Angeles. His current work focuses on recording and documenting spatial music in diverse environments. Gus received his BA in Music Technology from NYU.
Kamron Saniee (Spatial Sound Production and Composition) is an electronic musician and producer based in New York. He graduated from Princeton University, and has presented electronic compositions and techno live sets, and performed his multichannel spatial sound works across North America and Europe.
Chorus: Quan Xiao 全笑, Evageline Jiayi Zhang 张嘉懿, Yaxuan Hu 胡雅萱, Maya Yu Zhang 张宇, Bao Dai 保岱, Taole Zhu 朱陶乐
Choir: Bo Cai 蔡博, Xiangting Feng 冯襄婷, Tianyi Lu 芦天翊, He Huang 黄河, Lu Lu 卢璐, Elsa Sun, Tianyang Xu 许天阳, Yi Yang 杨易, Zixiaofan Yang 杨子小帆, Lipei Yu 余力培, Kun Yuan 袁琨, Yunkai Zhai 翟运开, Liaoran Zhang 张了然
MORE ABOUT US:
See the Documentary shot by a friend Ruslan Fedotow
See our trailer