This work examines the blurred boundary between stage life and  everyday life through a collage of fragmented narratives, fictional  personae, and lived experience.

The composer interviewed two performer friends about their  reflections on the past sixty years of their lives, asking how their  identities on stage relate to those they inhabit in daily life: Are  they intertwined, identical, or entirely separate? Their responses  emerged through hybrid personae situated somewhere between  self-representation and performance.

Fragments of these recorded voices were then detached from their  original narrative contexts and embedded within the ensemble.  Reframed musically, they generate new meanings and encounters, allowing the performers’ memories and the musicians’ live  presence to intermingle. In this way, the piece constructs a fluid  fictional-nonfictional landscape in which lived experience and  staged reality continuously reshape one another.

Yiran Zhao