It was much more “Little Mermaid”, right? Wanting to be human and letting go of who she was, and then having that struggle. When I wrote it, I was also very frustrated with the idea of heaven – the idea of it, the improvement, the pursuit of happiness. I’ve written this before: I lived in a government-subsidized home with a lot of cockroaches at the time, so I became fascinated with them and learned that, you know, they can release eggs all their lives. It’s a bit mind-boggling.
So just as “Zolle” got people thinking about immigration and belonging, “Cockroach” had funny moments but touched the audience differently. You can think of it as something about the female body, but I also have a Chinese version of it, and women in their thirties and forties were really crying when they saw it because of lines like “I want to be pregnant for love.”
Right. For all its lightness, it’s actually profound.
It’s very profound.
And I feel like if I’m on my own, each piece can be open to X and Y reading. But pairing them changes that. The “Tarantella” has so much hope and resistance, but if you follow him with the lonely afterlife of “Zolle”, it becomes devastating.
The public connects with this one anyway. But I want to mention that when we shot the digital short of “Zolle” for LA Opera and I narrated some of the parts, I got really emotional. I thought about Asian hate, and it really hit me because this piece was almost 20 years ago and it still sounds so true. There’s a rule for saying something like “I’m an immigrant, even in this haunted world.” Then I realized it’s something that I, you know, as an immigrant I will always carry with me. [Du was born in Shanghai and moved to the United States to study at Oberlin.]
What else do you feel when you look at these works again?
You know, this is the 20th anniversary season of the International Contemporary Ensemble. We feel 100 years old, but we are also moving into another era with George Lewis as the new leader.
But this was the first stage production the International Contemporary Ensemble ever did. So even though they move to other models and we bring in Satomi – I’m a big fan of Deerhoof – this feels like coming home. That’s fitting, because these pieces are really about coming home. Coming home, but also sending away.
