World premiere of musical collaboration on Chinese culture

Appearing in Gold Mountain Dream, (from left) Yu-Chen Wang, media artists Kenneth Newby and Aleksandra Dulic of the Flicker Arts Collaboratory, and Orchid Ensemble members Jonathan Bernard and Lan Tung.

Staging of Gold Mountain Dream takes place in Kelowna 

What: Gold Mountain Dream
Admission: Free
When: Tuesday, Nov. 29, 8 p.m.
Where: Kelowna Community Theatre, 1375 Water St., Kelowna

A musical collaboration two years in the making, Gold Mountain Dream has its world premiere in a free presentation in Kelowna Nov. 29. Gold Mountain Dream combines interactive media arts, live music and spoken word exploring the themes of Chinese Diaspora and culture.

The production is backed by numerous insightful interviews collected from life stories among generations of Chinese Canadians, starting with BC’s Chinese community and blending the shared experience of immigrants from different cultures.

A collaboration between the Flicker Arts Collaboratory and Orchid Ensemble, the evening of live entertainment is co-presented by UBC’s Okanagan campus Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies and the Irving K. Barber School of Arts and Sciences’ Minds and Music series.

Gold Mountain Dream embodies many of the hopes and dreams of the Chinese pioneers who came to Canada to build the settlements and cities that emerged from the Western frontier, says media artist Aleksandra Dulic, an assistant professor of visual arts at UBC and member of the Flicker Arts Collaboratory. Just like most Canadians, the artists are themselves different generations of immigrants from different lands. In this project, they examine the search for cultural identity and social acceptance in the four themes of water, fire, travel, and dream. Audiences should find Gold Mountain Dream to be moving and evocative.

The performance is a cross-cultural collaboration by students and faculty from UBC’s Okanagan campus, the Orchid Ensemble and the Flicker Arts Collaboratory.

Dulic and Kenneth Newby of Flicker Arts Collaboratory punctuate the theatre space with live and interactive media projections: images from Chinese calligraphy, landscape brush painting, dance, opera, and videos and photos from museum collections and historical archives. They lead an animation team of Creative Studies students to create and extend the pictorial and narrative representation of Chinese brush painting. The Creative Studies visual arts students involved in the project include Rankine Suen, Oliver Szeleczky, Michelle Wilmot, Nadine Bradshaw and Laura Gourley.

The Orchid Ensemble’s music combines Chinese and western musical languages for the cross-cultural instrumentation of erhu (Chinese violin) performed by Lan Tung; zheng (Chinese zither) performed by Yu-Chen Wang; marimba and percussion performed by Jonathan Bernard, while the Flicker Arts Collaboratory visuals extend the pictorial representation of Chinese expression in new media.

The production incorporates Asian traditions and contemporary expression with original scores by Canadian composers Jin Zhang, Ya-wen Wang, Dorothy Cheng, Mark Armanini, Michael Vincent and Lan Tung. The root of this project started with a collaboration with composer Ya-wen Wang in a CBC/BBC commissioned radio play on Chinese Diaspora in 2003.

While Gold Mountain Dream debuts in Kelowna, it will also be staged in Vancouver on Dec. 1. There are plans to tour the production globally.

Sponsors include UBC’s Okanagan campus Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies; UBC’s Okanagan campus Internal Research Grant; The UBC Minds and Music series; the Canada Council for the Arts; the BC Arts Council; SOCAN Foundation.

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