Opera for the Dead 祭歌 - Sydney Festival

Opera for the Dead 祭歌

The Neilson Nutshell

Opera for the Dead 祭歌, (Sydney Festival) created by Mindy Meng Wang and Monica Lim, announces itself not as an opera in the conventional sense, but as an immersive rite - part installation, part concert, part collective act of remembrance. Inspired by Chinese mourning rituals yet deliberately porous in its meanings, the work unfolds as an abstract meditation on grief, ancestry and impermanence, inviting audiences not to follow a story but to enter a state.

From the outset, the experience resists fixed vantage points. As we enter plastic mandarins bounce on upside down sound speaker’s innards – the piles of fruit are gradually added to by subtle assistants who later add bells to the mix. Audiences are free to wander through a space in continual metamorphosis: a stage dissolves into a cinema, which in turn becomes a series of shadowed ritual chambers. Ambisonic sound, 3D animation and shifting architectural forms conspire to destabilise orientation, producing a gentle but persistent sense of flux. This is a work less concerned with spectacle for its own sake than with atmosphere -an enveloping field of sound, light and motion that asks for surrender rather than scrutiny.

At the heart of the piece is the music, where Wang’s guzheng and Lim’s electronic soundscapes interlace ancient musical forms with contemporary textures. The score breathes with a living tension between the archaic and the emergent, its timbres oscillating between intimacy and vastness. Ritual chants and melodic fragments surface, dissolve and reconstitute themselves within electronic landscapes, creating a sonic environment that feels devotional and is insistently modern.

Chief vocalist Yu-Tien Lin delivers a performance of extraordinary presence. Lin navigates the score’s demands with commanding assurance, moving seamlessly between registers, styles and embodied traditions. Their technical virtuosity is undeniable, but it is the performative intelligence that truly astonishes: each vocal shift feels dramaturgically precise, emotionally charged and spiritually grounded. If one can embrace this environment it is this sound that opens a fissure between worlds.

Design elements play a crucial supporting role in shaping the work’s affective power. Leonas Panjaitan’s costumes ingeniously repurpose Chinese operatic and mourning garments, lending the performers a ceremonial gravitas. Video design by Nick Roux and lighting by Jenny Hector is all deliciously over the top, absolutley compelling, and contributes to the sense of ritualised excess.

What makes Opera for the Dead 祭歌 particularly powerful is its refusal to resolve meaning. This work neither explains nor reconciles tensions between cultures, fractured understandings and lived experience. Instead, it holds life and death in suspension, allowing grief to remain at once private and communal - spiritual, material, eternal and fleeting.

This is unmistakably a “festival work”: ambitious, immersive and unapologetically experiential. Yet beneath its technological sophistication lies something profoundly human- a recognition that mourning is not linear, that remembrance is performative, and that ritual can be reinvented without losing its power. Opera for the Dead 祭歌 is not an opera to be watched from a seat, but a space to be entered, traversed and carried with you long after you leave.

Review by Kate Gaul