Monteverdi’s Vespers
Friday, September 19, 8.00pm
Saturday, September 20, 8.00pm
Sunday, September 21, 3.00pm
Cutler Majestic Theatre at Emerson College

To purchase tickets, visit Telecharge.com or call 1 800 233 3123.
Tickets may also be purchased at the Majestic Theatre's box office at 219 Tremont Street in Boston, starting at 10.00am prior to each performance.

Director’s Notes
By Chen Shi-Zheng

In the winter of 1998, when I was rehearsing in Shanghai for The Peony Pavilion, a friend from Paris brought me a CD of Monteverdi’s Orfeo. She thought that someday I should stage a Monteverdi opera. After a long day's rehearsal, I would switch from Chinese opera to Monteverdi's music and find another whole world of beauty. I fell in love with his music.

Once, in Taos, New Mexico, I visited a temple where Mexicans there had created extraordinary artifacts of their own Virgin Mary. In a small, stuffy adobe house they lit candles; many went into a trance. I was fascinated with what the power of inner vision could do to individual human beings.

When I visited Indonesia several years ago I found a photo of an old Indonesian woman running away from chaos with only a porcelain statue of the Virgin Mary carried upon her head. It reminded me of images I had of villages in the Chinese countryside, where there are peasants who also worship this Virgin Mary, and did so in secret when the government disallowed it. My staged version of Monteverdi’s Vespers is a modern ceremony from an Asian perspective in which the Virgin Mary is celebrated as an icon of universal love.

I met dancers Eko and Restu in 1997. I admired their dancing and hoped to have a chance to work with them. Monteverdi’s music brought me images of their movements, and they were a natural choice when I thought about casting this piece.

In this production, a rare and beautiful mix of traditional dance forms from Asia—Javanese court dance, Balinese Lagon, and Chinese martial arts—are used as a starting point to create a contemporary dance ritual. Each of seven young Asian dancers brings their own world of happiness, despair and loneliness in her search for love onto the stage. We see these dancers–their very existence, their parallel lives, their longing for love, their images of purity–in relation to their vision of the Virgin Mary.

The ornate gestures and delicate movements of these classically trained Asian dancers mirror the intricacy of Baroque music. Though from opposite worlds, the music and dance exist in harmony.

Love is the subject of the Vespers. The music is Monteverdi’s enchanting love song to the Virgin Mary. This is mine, to his.

-Chen Shi-Zheng

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