Christine ML Lee
Composer, Playwright & Poet

July to August 2021

presented by Vancouver Powell Street Festival
Available online (free): https://powellstreetfestival.com/programs/ritual-spective/

“Ritual-Spective 迴融” is an online experimental media art project. In this iteration, the co-artistic creators Kazuma Glen Motomura & Sammy Chien integrates their parents’ visual art work (by Sally Motomura 本村紗里 & Jackson Chien 簡志雄) with dance-technology, creating an audiovisual/film that is is joined by Vietnamese film editor Hân Phạm, sound designer/composer Christine ML Lee, musicians Alcvin Ryūzen Ramos , Anny Lin, John Nguyen, Gonu Kim and creative collaborator Caroline MacCaull + more artists from the Chimerik 似不像 team.

Kazuma Glen Motomura, Berlin/Tokyo based Japanese and South African experimental dance artist, and Sammy Chien 簡上翔, Vancouver/Taipei based Taiwanese-Canadian interdisciplinary media artist, investigate the intergenerational dialogue on artistic, cultural and spiritual legacy. They enter a ritual of listening, learning and processing the past to honour it and then to re-integrate the discoveries into the here and now.

Both artists are children of immigrant artists, dancing through a spiritual poem that delineates the impermanence of lineage, enrichment of absence and the invisible divisions that connects us in a deeper layer. This research phase examines the Japanese divine architecture, kanji characters and personal memories that embeds a sense of lineage, ancestry and legacy in relation with the complex world of colonialism, sociopolitical division and the spiritual nature of humanism.