Stages

Program Notes

For solo percussion with text from Lucy Corin’s One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses, dedicated to Bonnie Anne Whiting with great admiration. 

This work was composed through various stages of collaboration and conversation between myself and Bonnie Whiting. It started from our memories as teenagers: growing up in China, I played snare drum in marching band as a Communist Young Pioneer, waving plastic flowers in ceremonies to honor leaders. And Bonnie suddenly had to position herself between family and religious extremism. Our shared experiences of unspoken confusion and struggle at the same age motivated the themes and subtexts of the piece. This work explores and unveils deeply hidden stages of consciousness and moves fluidly between them using sounds, bodily movements, vocalizations, and text recitations, while also employing familiar objects such as pot lids, infant music boxes, radios, solo cups, thermal sheets, etc. It is storytelling without being about one single narrative, and it moves between detonation of emotions and cool abstraction. The work invites the audience to imagine and interpret in multiple ways, and is filled with both restlessness and exhaustion.

– Wang Lu