We just received a Canada Council Arts Abroad - Touring grant for our 2024 “Dark Tales” tour!
So grateful and excited for this opportunity.
Details coming soon!
Project Proposal
Art forms. "Dark Tales" is an immersive violin-piano concert experience combining the arts of written, visual, and musical storytelling. The project brings to life an original macabre fairytale with music by contemporary Sri Lankan-Canadian composer Dinuk Wijeratne, Chinese-Canadian composer Alice Ping Yee Ho, Turkish composer Fazil Say, and Japanese composer Joe Hisaishi as well as classical Czech composer Leoš Janáček and Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev. This project will be presented by Montreal-based violin-piano duo, Canadian Chinese pianist Tong Wang and American Indian violinist Maitreyi Muralidharan, in collaboration with host organizations and cultural ambassadors from Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania - Olah Vilmos, director of the Hungarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and Georgiana Fodor, university lecturer at the Gheorghe Dima National Music Academy.
This program brings to life Japanese Studio Ghibli animation film scores alongside new music depicting Newfoundland and Labrador's ghost stories based on Tom Dawe’s book “An Old Man’s Winter Night”, as well as classical masterworks that highlight the dark and surreal sides of fairytale stories. Moreover, the performance will showcase innovative artistic research by exploring the dark-cute aesthetics in music and the science of embodied experiences, thus intersecting modern topics of musicology and music performance science research being pursued by the lead artists. There will be additional audio-visual components that will aid the storytelling process– original picture book illustrations, nature soundscape recordings, and short animated videos. These components will form an immersive concert experience that will elicit embodied reactions in the audience, which will be measured by interactive features built into the concert scheme, including word and body maps. This tour’s unique design combining various art forms strengthens the relationship between new music, science, and aesthetics, presenting Canadian musicians and composers at the forefront of interactive classical performance.
Activities. We will be traveling to Budapest, Hungary on May 1, 2024 to spend the first week with our host, Olah Vilmos, networking with local artists, presenters, embassies, and planning projects for future collaborations. From May 6-9, we will give a workshop at the Central European University and perform 2 concerts at the Vajdahunyad Castle and the Károlyi Castle. On May 11 we will travel to Slovakia to perform at the Bela Castle, and return on May 13 to perform at the University of Debrecen. Then, we will travel to Hunedora, Romania to perform at Corvins' Castle on May 15.
In the second half of our tour, we will be hosted by Georgiana Fordor and Christophe Alverez, professor and lecturer at the Gheorghe Dima National Music Academy in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. From May 18-22, we will give a masterclass and concerts at the Academy, the Ethnographic museum, and then travel to Bran to perform at the Bran Castle, a Gothic fortress associated with the legend of Dracula. After the concerts, we will stay in the capital, Bucharest, to meet with various embassies and plan for future collaboration and exchange projects with Romania.
Tour reasoning. The issues of diaspora populations’ representation of their culture and identity is increasingly relevant. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, I have presented various anti-racism and political themed concerts around Canada. In 2023, I toured my solo album “Us” across Europe, featuring works by living Chinese, Indian, Turkish, African, and Ukrainian composers to celebrate diversity and foster more compassionate cultural communication. On this tour, I encountered further challenges and setbacks of discrimination and racism due to European populations’ traditions, prejudices, or even subconscious reactions stemming from a deep rooted fear of the unknown and unfamiliar. These reactions were particularly prominent in eastern Europe, including Austria and Hungary. Thus, I am motivated to continue embracing the challenge of building pathways to facilitate open-minded and open-hearted listening in a time of increasing turmoil and darkness, specifically in eastern Europe, a challenging yet important territory to charter in advocacy for our mission to represent the diversity of Canada’s artistic potential and outputs. This project again reminds people from vastly different circumstances and backgrounds of the connectedness in our shared humanity through music and storytelling. We will represent the diversity of Asian-Canadian heritages and cultures, and pave a path towards future collaborations that is rooted in respect, humility, and kindness. Artistically, we have also chosen eastern Europe specifically for the mysterious and unique setting of medieval castles. Presenting this eclectic selection of music in spaces dating back to the 1500's will shed a new light on contemporary Canadian music, combining the old and new in strange and bizarre ways that are at times playful and sweet, at times dark and surreal.