Speaking in Draft is an interview series in which Intermission staff writer Nathaniel Hanula-James speaks with some of the artistic voices shaping Canadian theatre today. In a mixture of lighthearted banter and deep dives into artistic practice, this column invites artists to share nascent manifestoes, ask difficult questions, and throw down the gauntlet at the feet of a glorious, frustrating art form.
Njo Kong Kie 楊光奇 loves ping pong. When I arrived at the composer and music director’s west-end apartment for an in-person interview, he ushered me to a large table with a removable net that serves as a dining table and workstation when not in use for rallies. He explained that, pre-pandemic, he would have people over to play all the time; less so now, on the other side of lockdown.
Njo didn’t start his career imagining a life in the arts. Born in Indonesia and raised in Macau, a special administrative region of China, he pursued a double major in music and computer science at the University of Waterloo, graduating in 1984. After moving to Toronto, he worked in the mailroom of an insurance company before being promoted to the accounting department. On the side, he kept his love for music alive by moonlighting as an accompanist for ballet schools and community theatre troupes. When the insurance company asked him to complete new training with a view to further promotion, Njo decided to make the leap to a full-time career in music.
Today, Njo is a Dora Award-winning artist whose works have toured the world and broken boundaries in Canadian theatre. His collaborations include Mr. Shi and his Lover 時先生與他的情人, which set a historical Cold War queer love story to song; Picnic in the Cemetery, a concert-theatre hybrid featuring music from Njo’s erstwhile band Day Off; The Year of the Cello, a tribute to 1930s Hong Kong co-created with Theatre Passe Muraille’s artistic director, Marjorie Chan; and the song cycle I Swallowed a Moon Made of Iron 我咽下一枚铁做的月亮, inspired by the poetry of Xu Lizhi 許立志 — a Chinese poet whose work described the dehumanizing routines of the factory where he worked, and who died by suicide in 2014.
At the ping pong table, eating pastries that Njo had thoughtfully laid out, I listened as this artist reflected on the back and forth of a career that’s bounced between multiple genres and disciplines.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Once you committed to becoming a professional musician, was there a moment in which you thought ‘Now I’m truly an artist?’
I have an uncomfortable relationship with the term ‘artist.’ Are you an artist only because you’re a professional, or can you be an artist in another way? In our vocabulary, I think when we say ‘artist,’ we mean a professional artist. Those two are not necessarily one and the same for me. I’ve managed to earn my living through art: I get paid for it as a professional. But I don’t know whether that makes me more of an artist. You know what I’m saying?
It sounds like you don’t want to exclude people who don’t make money from their art.
Yes, and also not exclude people who may not have the opportunity to be seen.
This feels like a healthy approach, and a more expansive one.
The advice I give myself, especially when things are not going smoothly, when phone calls are not coming, is that I don’t want to define my soul-worth by how much I’m seen. I’m still doing what I do.
You collaborated with the Montreal-based dance company La La La Human Steps from 1996 to 2012, before it disbanded in 2015. How did you first become involved with them?
How I managed to get to this place in my career, I really don’t know. I think a lot of it is happenstance — one thing led to another.
Back when Now Magazine was still in print, I would always check the classified ads at the back for available music jobs. There was an ad looking for a pianist for a dance company. I don’t think La La La Human Steps identified themselves. The ad just said: ‘Looking for a pianist who can play the harpsichord, both in contemporary and classical style.’
I got an audition and I prepared my stuff according to their descriptions. But on the day, they wanted me to improvise, which wasn’t what the ad had asked for. I was flustered. So I wrote them, and asked to come up to Montreal for another audition. We negotiated how much time I could have with [their harpsichord]. I did that, and then I got hired.
Sometimes a door opens but you still have to push through it.
At what point did you become their music director?
I went in as a substitute pianist. It was a short-term contract for only four months, in 1996. But then the pianist that I had substituted decided to leave the job permanently. I stayed on for the rest of the tour [the company was on]. It [was] only when they began a new show, Salt / Exaucé, that they brought me back as music director. It was a new musical team. There were now three people, including me, but the other two hadn’t been with the company before. We had a composer, but they were largely not present.
Was your job as music director to shape the music to the choreography?
Yes, largely by how we interpreted the notes. If the whole structure is leading toward supporting the dance, then everything exists to serve that. I would bring the score in and play according to what I thought the composer wanted, but often that wasn’t what the choreographer wanted. Early on we had arguments, like: ‘The music is written as piano!’ ‘No, but it doesn’t work. Try it 10 times louder.’
As a classically trained pianist, I of course struggled with that. But it’s also nice to have permission to interpret music in a way that may seem unconventional, but which has its own logic when it’s partnered with something else like dance. I stayed with La La La Human Steps for five productions altogether.
What was your entry point into the Toronto theatre scene?
I did Tapestry Opera’s composer-librettist workshop, which they call LIBLAB, back in 2004. There I met Anna Chatterton and a couple [of] other poets who were in the cohort. Through Anna, I heard about the Rhubarb Festival. She and I pitched a half-hour show, and we were accepted into the 2005 festival.
That piece was called Knotty Together. It was a comedy written around the time when same-sex marriage became legal in Canada. That’s how I was first introduced to another world where I could situate my musical-drama work outside of opera.
This might be my own assumption, but I’ve always felt that there’s a threshold to entering the classical music scene as a creator, especially if you haven’t gone an academic route. At a classical concert, the music is all you focus on. I find it easier to present music in a dramatic context, where it’s less likely to be analyzed to the nth degree. In some ways there’s a bit more freedom in terms of sound and aesthetic. You can redefine the rules.
At this point in your career, you’ve created such a wide range of work with regard to form and genre. Does one form feel more like home?
I don’t feel at home at all. I still wonder, sometimes, whether I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing. I may still be missing my calling, so to speak. There may be something that I’m really good at that I just don’t know about, right? I’m not saying that everything has to be easy, necessarily, but I wish it felt more comfortable.
People might like your work, but it has to be the right context. Most of my projects come from people that I’ve known for some time. For instance, I worked with Marjorie Chan on The Year of the Cello, but Marjorie and I had known each other for years. Until then, there wasn’t a subject or theme that both of us wanted to explore at the same time with each other.
Was Mr. Shi and His Lover 時先生與他的情人 a project that you initiated?
Not really. Through working on Picnic in the Cemetery and other pieces in Macau, this director who ran a small company there, Tam Chi Chun 譚智泉, invited me to collaborate. Around that time, somebody had given him a script of the play M. Butterfly, by David Henry Hwang. After reading it, we went, ‘This isn’t the script we want to work on.’
But you were still inspired by the source material: the true story of Chinese opera performer and spy Shi Pei Pu 时佩璞 and his relationship with French diplomat Bernard Boursicot during the Cold War.
We got into discussions about this incredible situation, in which the French diplomat claimed in court that he hadn’t known the sex of his lover for 20 years [and had believed him to be a woman]. It seemed a little far-fetched. Then we thought, what if we created a scenario in which the diplomat actually did know? We could ask the question: Why didn’t he expose his lover?
We talked to a playwright in Macau, Wong Teng Chi 黃庭熾, who the director knew. He went home and produced a script. The first version was actually very much a rewrite of M. Butterfly. We said no, we want your ideas, we want your thoughts!
Mr. Shi premiered at SummerWorks in 2016. That opened the doors for runs at Tarragon in 2017 and the National Arts Centre in 2018, and also to [a] Canadian Stage residency.
Mr. Shi was the first Chinese-language production at Tarragon, as well as at the NAC.
I guess it just happened at the right time. When we set out to make this work, the first thing we asked ourselves was what language it needed to be in. We knew early on that it wouldn’t be English, because of the context of the Beijing Opera. Of course that’s been done: M. Butterfly is in English, and the opera version adapted by David Henry Hwang is also in English. But it was our instinct to go in another direction.
We debated whether the language needed to be Cantonese or Mandarin. We decided it was more likely that the characters themselves would have spoken Mandarin and French to each other. Up to that point, I had never set any music to Mandarin before. The first few attempts, I kept falling into clichés of popular music that I’d heard as a young child in Macau.
In the end it became a contemporary music-theatre/opera piece, almost a third [musical] language: neither traditional Chinese nor European classical, but alluding to both because of the context of the story. For the French character, I made my own interpretation of what French popular song would have been like in the 1960s through the ‘80s.
A previous Speaking in Draft interviewee, Derek Kwan, played the role of Boursicot from the SummerWorks premiere onward.
We had already done workshops in Beijing and Taiwan with actors from Macau. Then, when it came to the SummerWorks presentations, the Macau actor playing the diplomat decided that he was no longer interested in the role.
I already knew Derek at that point, and I knew he spoke Mandarin. We brought him over to Macau and rehearsed quite intensely. We decided to utilize his strength in languages: In the middle of the show, the character switched to speaking French and English while talking about the role of a diplomat.
There were a lot of unknowns all the time in that process. Everything was very last-minute. In Beijing, I was rooming with the director in a very small hotel room, where there wasn’t enough room to put my keyboard. I remember bringing the keyboard down to the courtyard area of the hotel in the middle of the night to finish the song!
What are you working on these days?
Librettist Douglas Roger and I, who met each other in that first LIBLAB as well, have been working on a piece for the last 16 years. It’s finally done, and it’s going to come out in November. It’s a 14-part episodic opera web series called The Futures Market. We brought in Derek again, as our dramaturg, to utilize his experience as a theatre-maker, but also as an opera aficionado — and he’s also in the piece. The other performers are Teiya Kasahara, Keith Lam, and Wesley Hui. I don’t know if it’s been done before: an opera built especially to be episodic in form rather than one opera chopped up into 14 parts.
You can learn more about Njo Kong Kie’s work at musicpicnic.com, or on socials via @musicpicnicTO. The Futures Market will be available to stream beginning November 17.
WRITTEN BY
Nathaniel Hanula-James
Nathaniel Hanula-James is a multidisciplinary theatre artist who has worked across Canada as a dramaturg, playwright, performer, and administrator.
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