JAMES STRECKER: If you were asked for 50 words for an encyclopedia to summarize what you do, or have done, in the arts, what would you say?
NJO KONG KIE: A picnic and ping-pong enthusiast, Njo Kong Kie is also a composer, mostly for dance, opera, theatre and occasionally film/TV and new media. His music theatre work Mr. Shi and His Lover is the first-ever non-English presentation at the National Arts Centre English Theatre and the Tarragon Theatre.
JS: What important beliefs do you express in or through your work?
NKK: If the internet is to be trusted, Edgar Allan Poe said: “With me, poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.” I think it is a little bit like me with composition. I didn’t set out to write music professionally, but I have always doodled. It has just always been something that I do. I didn’t necessarily think I was composing. I was just playing – making things up. I didn’t feel the need to say anything with it. I did it because I felt like doing it. That is still true today. But it is a little different now of course, since I work with text a lot.
I am sure there are common threads among the subject matters I cover in my stage work – knotty together is an operatic rom-com about same-sex marriage; La Señorita Mundo explores our obsession with the beauty in youth; The Futures Market deals with the ethical dilemma of organ transplants; Mr. Shi and His Lover explores topics surrounding gender identity, intimacy and the complexity of nationhood; I swallowed a moon made of iron (work in progress) is set to poems of Chinese poet Xu Lizhi who wrote about his life making electronic parts on an assembly in a factory.
But basically, I make work for the joy of putting something together, for the chance of actually creating something beautiful. I hope my work can give the audience some comfort and joy and can solicit empathy in all of us, even the ones who already have an abundance of it. We can never have enough empathy.
JS: Name two people, living or dead, whom you admire a great deal and tell us why for each one.
NKK: It is cliché of course, but I do genuinely admire my mother. She just knows how to let her children be.
And I take as role models people who, despite of the hardship they face or the lack of recognition of their efforts and achievement, persist with their pursuit nonetheless. We as artists deal with rejections day in day out, we must be persistent in order to continue. So, I look up to people who continue despite it all. But let me say though that I “admire” (perhaps “love” is a more appropriate word here) the oeuvres of
Erik Satie. They are humorous, irreverent, and beautiful. I think his work gives me permission to make a work such as Picnic in the Cemetery where we allow ourselves to be silly, to live in contradiction.
JS: How have you changed since you began to do creative work?
NKK: I guess in general, I now know better what I am getting up for. When I used to work outside of the arts, I would ask myself if I wanted to get up to go to work every single day.
The Chinese have a saying, literally translated as “How we are at eighty is determined at age three”, meaning that you form your personality very early on in life. When it comes to doing creative work, I think that is true for me. I feel that my creative process has not changed that much since I was a kid playing with building blocks and colouring books or writing down little tunes with the numbering system I learned at primary school. My skills have grown somewhat since then, but my habit of making things up continues.
JS: What are your biggest challenges as a creative person?
NKK: My inner challenge is to deal with my self-doubt and my fear of screwing up. It can make me a very ineffective person. I would sit on a decision for a long time, weighing the pros and cons; I won’t make a decision until I absolutely have to, and when I finally do take it, I tend to make the decision I first thought of taking anyway, so it is a time waster, all this considerations. Perhaps it is a disorder of some kind that renders me incapable of taking actions right away.
And from the outside, it is the consistent necessity to write grants and proposals all the time. I think they take up three quarters of my waking hours, leaving precious time to actually create and enjoy life. That and the constant struggle of achieving financial stability. This I think most artists can concur.
JS: Please describe at least one major turning point in your life.
NKK: Joining La La La Human Steps certainly changed my direction in life. The job took me all over world and showed me the inner world of the performing arts. Through extensive touring with the company, I observed what it took to put a work on the world stage, both from the artistic side and the producing side. So, when the necessity came for me to produce my own work, I was not too daunted by it. Mind you, there is a lot of guesswork still even now, especially when it comes to marketing and fundraising, but things seemed a little less impossible for me having observed how it was done.
Another turning point was participating in the Composer-Librettist Laboratory hosted by Tapestry Opera. To hear myself referred to as a composer was quite significant. It gave me some assurance that all the doodling I had been doing was in fact composing.
JS: What are the hardest things for an outsider to understand about what you do?
NKK: When I run into people whom I don’t see regularly, they often ask if I am still making art. Because they don’t hear about me in the media at all, they would think that perhaps I have switched careers. It is difficult to understand why we would keep going if we have not “made it” after all these years, and that artists whose work they have never heard of in the media can make a living.
It is also impossible to fathom how a lot of artists in fact live around or under the poverty line, how we can manage to live on so little, and how we can cope with it. Poe famously said: “I have made no money. I am as poor now as I ever was in my life – except in hope, which is by no means bankable”. I think that sums up lives of many artists.
What is important to note also is that artists have a lot more tolerance for insecurity when it comes to income than most and we are good at making choices and plans that allow us to keep creating even if we don’t know when we are getting paid next.
JS: How and why did you begin to do creative work in the first place?
NKK: I have memories of writing down tunes that came to me even as a child. That would be the start of it. As to why, I have no idea. Maybe that is why Gary Kulesha says in his questionnaire published here that music is a calling.
JS: What haven’t you attempted as yet that you would like to do and please tell us why?
NKK: Oh, the list is inexhaustible. If we just stick to music, we can already list orchestral work, a musical, a pop song, EDM (electronic dance music), electro-acoustic work, piano piece with live electronics, community projects. And that is just music! I am also interested in making live art and installation. The list goes on.
JS: What are your most meaningful achievements?
NKK: That I have not quit. It is difficult being an artist. For most of us, income is very precarious, and the emotional toll on dealing with “rejection” day in and day out, from granting bodies, institutions, peers and even yourself can be traumatic; and when you have multiple grant and proposal rejections within a short frame of time, it can kill your spirit. At that point, it is not only a question of money, but also a sense that perhaps you are not doing anything worthy. You can allow yourself to be sad for a bit, but you have to be able to pick up and go at it again, you have to be really determined not to crumble.
So, I pat myself on the back to have withstood many situations like that. I know my colleagues in the industry all have that determination.
JS: What advice would you give a young person who would like to do what you do?
NKK: I don’t know if I am exactly role model material, still being kind of a novice in what I do. And a lot of what we are able or not able to do really depends on our circumstances, and needless to say circumstances vary greatly from one person to another, and that would alter drastically what allowances we have the privilege to make and how we can operate in this world. I am therefore not that comfortable giving any advice in a very broad stroke. But perhaps I can say this: be helpful and be willing to accept help.
JS: Of what value are critics?
NKK: Lets face it, everyone, regardless of what they do, is always curious about what other people think of their work. And in the performing arts, it is important people talk about your work. It is just part and parcel of the performing arts ecology.
We hope the critics have nice things to say about our work of course, but we don’t always get that. And one would hope that the critics take enough care to write their impressions that the artists would find their negative comments useful in helping them improve the work in question or at least improve the work they will do in the future.
JS: What do you ask of your audience?
NKK: Each work I create is different, so it is hard to categorically say that I expect the audience to treat each project the same way. But I guess in general, I would say: experience the music with your heart more so than your head, especially when you don’t have text to deal with. Even with a work like Mr. Shi and His Lover that has such a dense libretto and you feel that you want to be able to catch every single word, it is quite impossible to do so the first time through. My hope is that with a piece like that, the music will be effective enough that the audience would want to experience it again, and the second time through they can take in a lot more of the text.
And with Picnic in the Cemetery, where the premise is abstract expressionism, that the piece is built like we were children playing in our tents, with instincts and imagination more so than logic and reasoning, it is even more important to not overthink the work during the performance. You can analyze what you experience afterwards if you want.
JS: What specifically would you change about what goes on in the world and the arts?
NKK: An equal distribution of wealth around the world; a world without borders; respect and protection of the environment, and empathy for everything.
As for the arts: more inclusiveness.
JS: If you could relive one experience from your creative life, what would it be and why would you do so?
NKK: It is rare that I manage to be truly in the moment when I am on stage performing, that I am one hundred percent in control of my technique and in tune with my performance. If I can relive one of these rare moments, I would be happy.
JS: Tell us what it feels like to be a figure who is presented somehow in the media. What effect does this presence have on you?
NKK: I have not been featured that much in the media, so this is not that relevant right now. But I do find doing interviews a little stressful. As you know, it has taken me months to complete this questionnaire.
JS: Name two places you would like to visit, one you haven’t been to and one to experience again and briefly tell us why.
NKK: Fogo Island: There is this beautiful artist residency there right by the ocean. I think it would feel like being at the edge of the world.
Tokyo: Because Chinese and Japanese cultures have a lot in common, I love how Tokyo can be both familiar and yet completely foreign to me at the same time.
JS: Please tell us about one or more projects that you have been working on, are preparing, or have recently completed. Why do they matter to you and why should they matter to us?
NKK: I have just completed productions of my music theatre work Mr. Shi and His Lover at the Tarragon Theatre and the National Arts Centre English Theatre a couple of months back.
I have a show running at Canadian Stage Berkeley Street Theatre this week until May 6th. It is called Picnic in the Cemetery. www.canadianstage.com/online/picnic
This work is different to me because it is one that I take a lead on. And that it is not starting from a story or a script. We are trying to give the audience a concert+ experience from listening to abstract instrumental music. It is also a work that is made from working closely with a group of collaborators where the division of duties is a lot more blurred than my music theatre work.
I don’t dare to think that any of the work I do truly matters to people, but at the very least, in the case of Picnic in the Cemetery, there may be some joy in experiencing something completely new and unfamiliar. The music is original work, so most audiences would not have heard them before. But they may remind people of works they know, so the work is both fresh but comforting at the same time. With not knowing what is going to happen from one moment to the next, perhaps there is more a sense of adventure. I hope they will be pleased with the silliness of the play, the absurdist aspects of the performance. I also hope the work may give some people some joy and comfort.
JS: Let’s talk about the state of the arts in today’s society, including the forms in which you work. What specifically gives you hope and what specifically do you find depressing?
NKK: I often wonder about the divide between commercial and non-commercial theatre, but also about arts and sports in general, in terms of how commercial and sports events are so much more popular. I have friends who would be willing to shell out $400 for a couple of tickets to musicals or sports events but would find $50 an extravagant amount to pay for indie shows. What values are we not giving the audience that they would feel this way?
Disclaimer: I have fairly low success rate with Toronto Arts Council, only a moderate success rate with Ontario Arts Council, and have never successfully written a Canada Council grant application, so what I am about to say may sound like sour grapes and entitled. I understand that there are limited resources and I am sure my proposals can be better written, but I do find the granting ecology a little arbitrary and confusing. Outside of that, the least we can expect is that the proposals we spend weeks preparing are assessed efficiently. And recently, in the pursuit of getting more efficient, things seem to get actually less so. Perhaps it will get better over time.
But for the moment though, I wish I could count on the grant result announcement of my applications to the Canada Council to be on time. It really causes so much extra stress when they are not. Also, I am disappointed that we won’t be able to get feedback anymore for unsuccessful proposal. How is that helping artists? And when the OAC recently amalgamated several programs into one, I would assume therefore that fewer jury members are looking at a larger pool of applications, and I am not sure if that necessarily helps the assessment of the applications either.
And as mentioned before, artists like myself who are self producing, spend so much of our time writing grants and proposals that leave so little time for anything else, and the balance is all wrong. I need to find ways to break this cycle.
JS: Finally, what do you yourself find to be the most intriguing and/or surprising thing about you?
NKK: That I am actually quite persistent.