Yuè Lìng Jié
`Moon Spirit Feasting´
A Ritual Street-opera in seven parts
for three singers and nine instrumentalists
Yuè Lìng Jié
draws upon the Chinese story of the moon goddess, Chang-O.
There are many, often conflicting, versions of this story but its
basic outline is as follows:
Legend has it that the Archer King Hou Yi was given the Herb of
Immortality for shooting down nine renegade suns. His beautiful wife
Chang-O stole the Herb of Immortality for herself. Pursued by Hou Yi
she floated to the moon where she coughed up the herb-casing which
transformed into a rabbit. The Queen Mother of the West, a
demon-goddess, later turned Chang-O into a toad. In an ancient version
of the myth, Chang-O gives birth to twelve moons.
Our opera conjures up the figure of Chang-O to re-tell her story from a
number of different angles: Chang-O as a woman transformed into a
goddess; as a figure of psychic nightmare; as a wish-granting heavenly
creature. The stories can be understood as different projections of
aspects of a society's anima and in terms of symbolic interactions
between cosmic forces.
The structure of the work draws upon the sequence of rituals which take
place during the Chinese Hungry Ghost Festival. This is an annual
festival during which ghosts, spirits and demons roam freely upon the
earth. They have to be invoked, propitiated with food and other
offerings, entertained with performances of opera, movies, puppet shows
etc and then cathartically released back into the spirit world. The
ritual nature of the seven parts of the opera act as a series of
`tools´ or `instruments´ used to access different levels of story --
mythic, symbolic, comic and contemporary.
The libretto is in English (in parts colloquial Malaysian-English),
Mandarin and Cantonese.
Also see
Yuè Lìng Jié was commissioned by the Adelaide Festival and
the Melbourne Festival with the assistance of the Major Fesivals Initiative,
administered through the Australia Council.
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