Translating Cultures

Arts & Ideas

BBC

Society & Culture

4.2 • 599 Ratings

🗓️ 28 March 2023

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Composer Alex Ho, novelist Xiaolu Guo, curator George Young and director Anthony Lau join Rana Mitter to discuss a Cinderella story Ye Xian which has inspired a new music theatre piece, a new Manchester gallery display of Chinese life and history, a Brecht play set in China which looks at love, hospitality and goodness and a memoir which describes ideas about love and what it feels like to be based in a new city.

Producer: Robyn Read

George Young is Head of Exhibitions and Collections at the Manchester Museum which has re-opened with new galleries including the Lee Kai Hung Chinese Culture Gallery which features on display a late Qing dynasty (1636–1912) ‘Manchu’ headdress decorated with blue kingfisher feathers, a 20-metre scroll showing Emperor Kangxi’s birthday procession through the streets of Beijing in the 18th century and a taxidermy milu deer.

Untold is a music theatre piece co-created by composer Alex Ho and creative director/choreographer Julia Cheng for premiere by Jasmine Chiu, Keith Pun, and Tangram at Concertgebouw Brugge in April 2023. Co-produced by Muziektheater Transparant, O.Festival Rotterdam, and Tangram, Untold won the FEDORA Opera Prize 2022 awarded at Opéra national de Paris.

Anthony Lau is director of a version of Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechwan with a new adaptation by Nina Segal on at the Crucible Theatre, Sheffield (Saturday 11 March - Saturday 1 April 2023) and then transferring to the Lyric Hammersmith (Saturday 15 April – Saturday 13 May). It is one of the first major revivals in the UK to have a creative team and company represented from the East Asian heritage where the play is set.

Radical: A Life of My Own is being launched by Xiaolu Guo at the British Library on April 13th http://www.guoxiaolu.com/

You can find other conversations about Chinese culture on the Free Thinking programme website and available on BBC Sounds and as Arts & Ideas podcasts. They include discussions about World Politics, Ink Art and Insomnia https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0015vns China, Freud, War and Sci-Fi https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0014grr Bruce Lee's Film Enter the Dragon https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0015l7z Africa, Babel, China https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0002h89 The Inscrutable Writing of Sui Sin Far https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000v9gl

Transcript

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0:00.0	Can I just say?
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0:14.2	It's right foot goes for goal.
0:16.7	And then enjoy even more podcasts full of analysis and reaction to the big stories.
0:21.7	The stat that is astonishing is they ended with the lowest amount of possession.
0:25.2	And she's had to live with that.
0:26.8	So if you love sport, a passion, it's almost like a religion.
0:29.7	Listen on BBC Sounds.
0:31.7	Sort of expecting that every week now.
0:35.8	BBC Sounds, music, Radio, podcasts.
0:39.5	Today, we cross cultures between China, Europe and America with music, drama and prose,
0:45.2	and a fierce range of Chinese radicals to keep things fizzing.
0:48.9	That's after this word.
0:54.1	The music swells and we're carried away on a tide of yearning, desire, regret, hope.
1:04.0	This is essential Rachmaninoff, a composer who, above all else, has the power to make us feel.
1:17.1	I'm Donald Beclad, and in the composer of the week podcast, I'm marking Rachmaninoff's 150th anniversary
	...

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