"A Manic Ride Through Lollipop Hell" - Alice Ping Yee Ho

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! 🇨🇦🍁
Can’t wait to return to Canada tomorrow 🥹🧡

Thank you Houston for being such a warm audience. I’m so grateful to have finally premiered Alice Ping Yee Ho’s “A Manic Ride Through Lollipop Hell” for my horror-anime opera, “Labyrinth of Tears”. This project has been long in the making and here are some words I shared: 

“A Manic Ride Through Lollipop Hell” is exactly as the title suggests - cute and horrific. 

This piano suite is by the Canadian Chinese Composer Alice Ping Yee Ho, and draws from an opera that I wrote the story and libretto for “Labyrinth of Tears.” The opera follows the adventures of five magic school girls, “The Flower Club”, who enter into the mind, aka the “Labyrinth” of one of their friends, Kansa Nightingale, to save her from a coma. 

Within this world, you can imagine a kaleidoscopic universe of bizarre, uncanny, adorably terrifying characters  - from creepy animated sofas and singing rag dolls to unnervingly bewitching woman-child marionettes.

Ultimately, however, this is a story about the beautifully complicated nature of love and friendship. The girls want to understand and help their friend, but they run into the paradoxes of this age-old question:
How do we love?

How do we love someone who might not be wanting or receptive of that love. When are good intentions not enough? When is love a burden?

Some of my favourite musical numbers explore these universal themes, like “Understanding is (un)Happiness” and “To Love makes one Solitary”.

The middle movement, “A Sad Lullaby”, is from an especially touching moment when one of the girls sings to Kansa to calm her down from a panic attack, reminding her of the simple ritual they repeat together to find courage - the ritual of tracing the Chinese character for ‘human’ (Rén) three times in her own palm. “Human. Human. Human. I see you. I hear you. I feel you.” Something that grounds us. A touch. A sound. A connection with ourselves. With the present reality. I think it’s a reminder for us all. To repeat something that gives us courage. Something simple. Something tangible yet magical. Finding courage to trust, to love, to hurt, and to live again.

Here are some the libretto excerpts from Labyrinth of Tears. 

 “To love, makes one solitary”

Kansa
To love, makes one solitary.
To love, makes one strange.

I was not that girl
Worthy of your love.
The more i was loved,
The more i hated myself
“Why could i not just be happy?”
The more i was loved,
The lonelier and stranger i became.

To love, makes one solitary.
To love, makes one strange.

Taro
Hey, Kansa.
You are you.
You don’t have to be anything to anyone to be worthy of love.

Satsuki
The assassin, the courtesan, the child.
We’ve met them now. We’ve heard their stories.

Lacie
And we’ve embraced them all.
If anything, we love you all the more.

Sky
Kansa, I’m sorry for imposing my love.
I wished for your happiness.
But happy is not your obligation,
To me, yourself, or anyone.
Not an ultimatum, nor a demand.
Being happy is not a condition for being loved.
I’m sorry my wish became a burden.
What must I do, for you to believe me?
That my love, however naive, is real.

Kansa
Sky, i’m sorry too.
I pushed you away, because I was afraid.
I insisted on the impossibility of understanding.
I made you a stranger.
I, too, want to believe…

Sky
I guess i can only keep trying,
Trying to understand,
Trying to learn how to love you
In the way you need. 

“Let us Cherish You”

All 
Kansa, your pain is our privilege.
Let us stand guard over you.
Let us cross your path,
To try cherishing you again
A thousand times over.

Your wish is our promise.
Magic and truth.
Dare you to live.
Dare you to love.
Dare you to believe.

When you don’t believe in yourself,
Believe in us, who believes in you.
Let us cherish you.

“Understanding happiness”

Kansa
What is understanding?
Is it happiness, or unhappiness?
Does it bring us closer, or push us apart?
Perhaps it’s both.
A continuous process.
A beautiful, painstaking attempt
Towards moments of happiness.

Sky
so let us keep trying.
A lullaby, a bandage, and a cupcake
It takes just a little belief and magic,
To find a moment of understanding.

Kansa
A brief moment.

Sky
An extraordinary moment.

Kansa and Sky
Magic and truth.

Kansa (in guardian’s voices)
Can you believe?
“I understand”.
Do they?
Is that understanding? 
Could you be allowed that happiness?

Kansa
Yes. Yes. Yes.
Our messy attempts,
Are more than enough to believe in.
My lovely derps, I believe you.
You came into my maze,
And embraced all my pain.
You found me,
Time and again.

“Rosemary” 

Once you turned to me
With crumbs on your face, and say
“What a mess we made.”
I laugh between tears, and ask,
“Do you remember
That rosemary cake?”

Your wish is my promise.

Dare you to love.
Dare you to live.
Dare you to believe. 

In the mess,
There is magic and truth.

Remember your heart.
Remember your pain.
Remember my promise. 

In the mess,
There is magic and truth.”