Happy New Year! On this day, we mark a new Tangram chapter. We are delighted to unveil our new identity and brand as an artist collective, creating new theatrical work that centres on live music. As part of this re-launch, we also welcome familiar and new faces to the Tangram core team Claudia, Chang, PK and Mike, who will work closely with co-directors Alex and Rockey across our projects. We are so excited to reach new heights with this fabulous team and build on the last six years of Tangram.

Since launching in 2019 as a music collective dedicated to exploring diasporic Chinese cultures, we have been proud to collaborate with exceptional artists, researchers, composers and performers of Chinese and Western instruments. Our projects have covered performances of new commissions, an academic symposium co-hosted with SOAS University of London, collaborations with pop artist Emmy the Great and film composer Ben Frost to record his soundtrack to the Netflix series 1899, and premieres of new music theatre pieces by Alex and Tangram founding artist Beibei Wang. It was these latter forays into theatrical projects that we found particularly generative and rewarding. With our appointment as Associate Artists at LSO St Luke’s in 2022, we took the opportunity to explore how we could combine music with different disciplines including Chinese Opera, performance art, film, text and movement. Each project challenged us in different ways but as we became more familiar with the process of working across disciplines, we felt able to gradually scale-up our productions. This culminated in last summer’s premiere of Alex and Rockey’s 70’ music theatre piece Bound/Unbound, made in collaboration with acclaimed writer Xiaolu Guo and co-produced with the LSO supported by the Bagri Foundation and Arts Council England.

Tangram’s journey has taken many twists and turns, and we have constantly questioned what we do and why. We began by answering the need to address the lack of nuanced representation of Chinese identities. We were motivated further to correct the misunderstanding that Chinese and Western cultures are mutually exclusive. Central to this mission was our group of musical collaborators who each brought diverse and rich perspectives from different experiences of Chinese cultures. However, as we continued down this path, we increasingly felt to define ourselves in this way was reductive. It created a dynamic where we were explaining ourselves to the industry and, indeed, to ourselves. This instinct was a reaction to all the times we have been culturally marginalised both within our work and in our personal lives. On the other hand, to carve out a space defined by these experiences of othering only reaffirms the binary of ‘us’ and ‘them’; to explain our identities is to accept our place on the periphery.

How do we define Tangram? Is it the artists, the music, the performances or the audiences? We have realised it is the spirit of openness and risk-taking that marks Tangram. We actively ask questions of ourselves and our audiences, not simply to provide answers, but to invite reflection and dialogue on issues we care about whether or not they pertain to our cultural identities. It is with this in mind that we now refocus our energy.

Let’s Tangram!

Alex and Rockey, Tangram co-directors

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