Opera for the Dead 祭歌

Name: Opera for the Dead 祭歌
Start: 2026-01-15 19:00:00+11:00
End: 2026-01-18 14:00:00+11:00
Location: Bell Shakespeare, The Neilson Nutshell

Mindy Meng Wang & Monica Lim

Australia & China

Come alive in this grand sonic ritual of remembrance.

$49 Early Bird

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Description

Inspired by Chinese mourning rituals but speaking to universal truths of grief and remembrance, Mindy Meng Wang and Monica Lim’s multi-sensory journey surrounds you with sound, movement and light.  

Live musicians and singers weave ancient songs through electronic landscapes; ambisonics, 3D animation and shifting architecture create a world in constant metamorphosis. One moment, the space is a stage; the next, a cinema; then, a dance floor pulsing with energy. You are free to wander, to linger, to lose yourself in its shadows and illuminations.   

This is not an opera to be watched from a seat, but an experience to be entered, traversed and remembered. Created by two internationally celebrated composer-musicians – Meng Wang is a guzheng virtuoso; Lim, a boundary-pushing sound designer – Opera for the Dead 祭歌 reshapes tradition and finds unexpected resonances: between spirituality and materialism; the eternal and the ephemeral; between private grief and public performance.  

★★★★★ “Deeply engrossing and poetically moving.”

ARTS HUB

★★★★★ “A bold, strongly executed, and even dazzling display of Lim and Wang’s combined talents”

LIMELIGHT

Music Theatre Music – standing Immersive

Mindy Meng Wang & Monica Lim

Mindy is recognised for pioneering guzheng performance in non-traditional genres such as experimental, jazz, western classical, electronic and improvisation and has won multiple national and international awards such as the Australian Asian Leadership Award 2023, the 2022 Sidney Myer Fellowship and ‘Best Musician’ Music Victoria Awards. She was the 2023 Melbourne Recital Centre Artist in Residence – the first to play a nonwestern instrument. Monica is a composer and creative technologist who works in cross-disciplinary forms combining cutting-edge technologies in fields as diverse as computer vision, gaming engines and movement computing with sound. Teaching and researching at the University of Melbourne, Monica is the recipient of multiple scholarships and awards and was recently artist in residence at the Grainger Museum and the Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio. With Chinese and Malaysian-Chinese diaspora heritage, both Mindy and Monica are recognised as cultural leaders in the sector and have worked extensively in collaborative art-making and research to establish deeper and reciprocal musical connections between Australia and Asia.

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