Tetra Nova

The operatic text begins in Saigon, where she meets a little girl named Emi, an American of Vietnamese-Japanese descent visiting her mother's country for the first time since the war's end. As voices of Lua and Emi quickly blend into one dissociated narration, the stories accelerate out of sequence, mapping upon the globe a series of collective memories and traumas passed from one generation to the next.

Darting between the temples of Nagasaki to the mountains of Tucson and an island refugee camp off the coast of Malaysia, Lua and Emi, in one embodied memory, travel across the English language itself to make sense of history neither wanted. When a tiny Panda named Panda suddenly arrives, fate intervenes, and the work acts as a larger historical document, unpacking legacies of genocide and the radical modes of resistance that follow.

Unabashed and righteous, Tetra Nova begins in the language of plague on a cosmological scale. At the heart of this production lies a postcolonial identity in exile, and the performers must come to terms with who may or may not carry their stories forward: Emi or Lua. Part dreamscape, part investigative poetics, the work progresses across four sections, or "Books," named after the four classical elements of the universe: wind, water, fire, and earth. With each corresponding element, a series of multiple fragmenting identities traverse across time and space, the mythic and the profane, toward an understanding of humanity beyond those temple chamber doors.