Polyasporic Chinese Voices in the Opera Moon Spirit Feasting

Talks in Chinese Humanities

Composer Liza Lim and librettist Beth Yahp describe their opera Yuè Ling Jié (Moon Spirit Feasting), commissioned by and premiered at the 2000 Adelaide International Festival of the Arts, as a ‘Chinese ritual street opera’. The work is based on Lim and Yahp’s research in 1999 into street performances surrounding the ‘Hungry Ghost Festival’ in Penang, Malaysia. There, Chinese communities address and feed the ghosts that have been released from the underworld during the 7th lunar month of the Chinese calendar using street shrines of offerings and entertainments to appease unpredictable forces and renew social bonds. Lim and Yahp bring these ritual structures into a confrontation with the stories of an adjacent festival celebrating Chang-O, the moon goddess (Autumn Moon Festival), focussing on questions of subjecthood and more-than-human voicing to explode notions of ‘Chineseness’. The opera moves through polyasporic spaces wherein Penang street culture is re-imagined and literally transported to Australia, to Europe, Japan and back to Australia. Lim and Yahp will discuss aspects of the ‘polyasporic’ experience – travelling cultures and memory, ghostly autotopography, for example – in relation to the composition of the music and libretto as well as the work’s reception across the opera’s 6 seasons of performances (2000-2006).

About the speakers

Liza Lim, Professor, the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. She is an Australian composer, educator and researcher whose music focusses on collaborative and transcultural practices. Her works, and in particular four operas: The Oresteia (1993), Moon Spirit Feasting (2000), The Navigator (2007) and Tree of Codes (2016) explore themes around ritual, temporal slippage and the uncanny. Extensively commissioned by some of the world’s pre-eminent orchestras and ensembles, Professor Lim is Sculthorpe Chair of Australian Music at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. She was recently awarded an ARC Laureate Fellowship for the project 'Music and Multispecies Creativity' (2025-2029).

Beth Yahp, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, USYD. Originally from Malaysia, Beth Yahp is an award-winning author of fiction and non-fiction, whose work has been published in Australia and internationally. Her novel The Crocodile Fury _was translated into several languages and her libretto, _Moon Spirit Feasting, for composer Liza Lim, won the APRA Award for Best Classical Composition in 2003. Other publications include the collection of short stories, The Red Pearl _and _Other Stories and her travel memoir Eat First, Talk Later, which was shortlisted for the 2018 Adelaide Festival Award for Literature (Non-Fiction). She is currently working on a book of Small Pleasures for precarious times.

"Talks in Chinese Humanities" is co-presented by the China Studies Centre, the Discipline of Chinese Studies and the Australian Society for Asian Humanities at the University of Sydney and the UNSW Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture's Judith Neilson Chair of Contemporary Art.

Image credit: Yuè Ling Jié (Moon Spirit Feasting), ELISION Ensemble: Melissa Madden Gray, Oren Tanabe, Deborah Kayser, with Yan Jiemin; Hebbel Theater Berlin 2002, photo: Gerhard Ludwig.

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