Song of the Female Textile Workers – An Audience at Last

After many months of development, notes, meetings and rehearsals conducted entirely online, another rehearsal of Song of the Female Textile Workers was finally ready for preview by invited audiences on the 21st and 22nd of September 2021.  

Opening to coincide with the arrival of undergraduate and postgraduate students in Leeds, the first cohort to be welcomed since the loosening of COVID-19 restrictions.

Stage@Leeds hosted a pre-recorded open-rehearsal performance of the entirety of Song of the Female Textile Workers. With an introduction from Artistic Director of Stage@Leeds – Steve Ansell, and the project’s Principal Investigator Dr Haili Ma, audiences were invited to watch the full story and, furthermore, to provide their thoughts and feedback afterwards in a Q+A session with both.

Steve Ansell  and Dr Haili Ma, addressing the audience in their post-performance discussion.
22nd September 2021. 

The performance itself, while still in the developmental stages, not quite yet a final product, represents a key turning point towards completion, a manifestation of the significant cumulative efforts of both the British and Chinese partners. The data gathered from the responses and interactions with the audience proved that through performance there can be a shared language, fostering a collective understanding through story, despite some potentially significant cultural differences.  

Video data collated will serve the research aims of the project, enabling an increased understanding of the shared tastes of audiences across UK-China and furthering their understanding of the processes in which these forms of cultural exchange are created and the challenges that come with creating them across a digital landscape.  

The final scene of the performance can be seen in rehearsal here on Stage@Leeds’ Youtube channel, with bespoke choreography designed and performed by star performer of the Shanghai Yue Opera House, Wang Rousang alongside digital effects created especially by Human Studio from Sheffield, UK. 

 

A link to the event page, as hosted by Stage@Leeds, can also be found below:

 

Alongside the performance, exhibition materials in the form of documentary footage from both Shanghai Textile Museum and Leeds Industrial Museum were shared around Stage@Leeds to emphasise the shared heritage between Leeds and Shanghai, manifesting in the experiences of working class women in the textile industries.

Story synopsis: 

Lu, a UK-based gaming executive, was unable to attend her mother’s funeral due to the Covid-19 pandemic, but in Summer 2021 she returns to Shanghai to scatter her mother’s ashes. Arriving in her mother’s apartment, the ghost of Lu’s grandmother appears to her, questioning why she left Shanghai and why she no longer sings yueju. Lu’s mother’s belongings then prompt memories of the last conversation which she had with her mother: Lu’s mother, once a Shanghai textile model worker, had been made redundant, along with 500,000 female textile workers, during Shanghai’s economic transition in the 1990s, at which time Lu was determined to ‘grasp the opportunity to see the world’. Overcoming years of deeply buried guilt and misunderstanding, Lu gradually re-finds her voice and movements in the all-female yueju Love of the Butterfly. 

Song of the Female Textile Workers tells the story of three generations of women and their intertwined love and passion in pursuing their careers, set against an individual historical socio-political background. The story presents a hundred years of China’s socio-economic and political transition: from the pre-1949 rise of the textile industry and yueju as China’s first female working class’ own art form; Mao Zedong’s era of nationwide textile industry and yueju expansion; to the new millennium post-industrial economic transition of textile industry heritage, whilst yueju remains China’s second largest and most popular opera form and the cultural symbol of the past and present Shanghai female working class. 

Creative Team: 

Producer and Script Writer: Haili Ma 

Script Consultant: Mary Cooper 

Artistic Director: Steve Ansell and Haili Ma 

Lyrics: Shu An 

Music: Jianyao Ye 

Digital Team: Nick Bax and Abby Hambleton 

In partnership with: 

Shanghai Yue Opera House 

stage@leeds 

Human VR

Shanghai Textile Museum 

Leeds Museums and Galleries 

Funded by UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council 

Leeds Industrial Museumexhibition: Song of the Female Textile Workers