Beneath

Beneath is a production based on the music and program notes of Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique, interwoven with shadow puppetry and mime into a tapestry of desire and despair, hope and agony, passion and rejection. The incredible tension between subconsciousness and reality is paper-thin, veiled and easily torn apart. The massive orchestration of the symphony is reproduced with a powerful and intimate nine-piece ensemble, while all the drama is amplified through the artistic integration of theatrical elements like shadow puppetry and mime. The Symphonie Fantastique is echoed, responded to, and expanded with Ysaÿe’s Sonata for Solo Violin, and original music from America’s leading contemporary composer Ljova and his five-piece Kontraband. Breaking free from the traditional concert format, this music and theater collaboration creates a new synergy of performing arts. It offers a journey into a landscape filled with turmoil, vulnerability, and spirituality – a space between dream and waking, surface and beneath.

The dazzling rendition of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique arranged for chamber ensemble premiered in Newfoundland as part of the Gros Morne Summer Music with the Dark by Five ensemble. The production was brought together in 2017 through a robust international collaboration at the BenFeng E Warehouse in Tainan, Taiwan. A 30-year-old former automobile part assembly line transformed into a black-box theater, the BenFeng E Warehouse was awarded the Outstanding Arts & Business Award by the Taiwan Cultural Ministry in 2020.