Billed as an opera, the Book of Mountains and Seas is not traditional in either the European or Chinese traditions.
Huang Ruo explores ancient Chinese myths which I expect were quite unfamiliar to most of the audience, certainly to me. This meant that at the end I had far more questions than enlightenment. Where were the mountains? There was a myth about a drowned princess seeking revenge on the ocean, quite ineffectively, I might add, but there wasn’t a snow-capped peak to be found anywhere.
I was perplexed by what was supposed to tie the myths together, so it seemed rather disjointed. And the narrative pace didn’t match the action on stage, the most glaring example where the archer god shot down nine of the ten suns in rapid succession without those victims experiencing a corresponding downfall, though they did eventually exit the stage.
Also publicised was that the production was to include puppetry; it did but had only a single giant figure running fruitlessly after the setting sun. Perhaps it was my inability to grasp the point, but I thought more words / surtitles of explanation would have greatly helped since I failed to grasp the allusion to the intended message about humanity’s complex relationship with nature.
The redeeming element of this was the performance of the Danish choir Ars Nova Copenhagen along with an ensemble of percussionists and puppeteers. So, two stars rather than one.
https://www.eif.co.uk/events/book-of-mountains-and-seas
