Interview: Hai-Ting Chinn of ASTRONAUTICA at The Marsh Explores the Wonders of Outer Space from the Perspective of Women Astronauts

And now for something ethereally beautiful, quirkily humorous, and more than a little trippy. The Marsh is bringing Astronautica, a new musical drawn from the words of women who have traveled through outer space, to its digital platform, MarshStream. Conceived and performed by Hai-Ting Chinn (whose delightful opera Science Fair was presented by MarshStream this past March), Lindsay Kesselman, and Kirsten Sollek, the women of Trio Triumphatrix, this newly commissioned work incorporating music, voice, and video features works by several female composers including Chinn herself. Astronautica offers audiences an artistic evocation of the transformation that happens when one sees Earth set against the endless blackness of space, without the artificial boundaries that divide humankind. Originally scheduled to premiere live onstage last year at National Sawdust and The Flea Theater, Astronautica has been transformed to an online presentation with haunting and gorgeous imagery. Astronautica will stream at 5:00pm & 7:30pm (PDT) on Saturday, June 26. Immediately following the 5:00pm performance Chinn, Kesselman, and Sollek will be joined by The Marsh Founder/Artistic Director Stephanie Weisman for a Q&A. Two days prior to that, Chinn and composer Jennifer Jolley will also discuss their work on Stephanie's MarshStream at 7:30pm (PDT) on Thursday, June 24. For more information or to purchase viewing access, visit www.themarsh.org/marshstream.

I caught up with Chinn by phone last week from her home in New Hamburg, New York. She had just returned from Vienna where she'd been coaching the Wooster Group for their adaptation of Mother Courage. Chinn is a highly-acclaimed mezzo soprano known for her fresh approach to creating innovative work and her championing of contemporary classical music. She also has extensive experience performing more standard repertoire, including a stint as Lady Thiang in The King and I on the West End. Chinn is a pleasure to talk to - interesting, funny and unafraid to take a deep dive into some complicated topics. We talked about how Astronautica originally came to be and subsequently changed due to Covid, her recent work on The Tacoma Method about a little-known purging of the Chinese community there, and how she sees the arts world changing, or not, due to the twin pandemics of Covid and racism. Throughout, Chinn was naturally chatty and equally quick to provide surprising insights and quick to laugh, with a unusually resonant and expressive speaking voice. The following conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Your stage pieces tend to be so unique that they can be a bit challenging to describe succinctly. So how would you describe Astronautica?

Astronautica is a series of 11 songs by 9 different women, for acapella women's trio, using the words of NASA women astronauts as the lyrics. As some people have said, it's sort of annoying that we still have to say "women astronauts" and "women composers." That actually turns off some women because they say, "Why do you have to distinguish us? We're just astronauts and composers." But we wanted to amplify the voices of women in music, women in STEM, women in previously male-dominated fields, and it ended up just kind of being all about badass women in the world - and out of the world!

What was your process for making this show?

I came up the idea, along with my trio members, who are soprano Lindsay Kesselman and contralto Kirsten Sollek. We had been working and singing together informally for years and dreaming about making a project of our own, and I came up with the idea after I saw a documentary about the overview effect. Which is how psychologists describe what happens to some astronauts when they get out of the atmosphere and see the entire globe of the earth with their naked eyes, floating in the vast blackness of space. They have various shifts in perspective that turned out to be extremely relevant in this year - things about how all of a sudden you're not an American, or a woman, or a liberal or a conservative; you're an earthling. And then about also how fragile the planet is, how incredibly thin the life-sustaining atmosphere is, and how easily we could turn it into something totally uninhabitable. So I wanted to amplify those words and put them in the realm of art, where we can listen to them and hopefully learn from them.

And you made the piece with Lindsay and Kirsten, who you also perform with as Trio Triumphatrix?

[laughs] Yeah, it's from the Latin. It was a joke, because we were all singing a Handel oratorio that had that word in it. We were sitting in the back row giggling over that word and jokingly said, "Oh, that'd be a great name for our trio!" and then like the next week someone asked whether we had a name for our trio, and we just kind of blurted that out and it stuck.

Did the three of you create Astraonautica together? Did you take the lead?

I sort of created the libretto structure, because I had the idea and I had the experience of making Science Fair. So I did that part of it and kind of drove the concept, but we worked collaboratively on almost everything else, putting together a list of composers we wanted to invite, singing through the pieces and giving notes to the composers on how they worked for us as individuals and as a trio, revising things with them, and then obviously developing the way we sing it together.

Once the pandemic hit, a whole other thing had to happen. The project was commissioned by Voices of Ascension, which is a chorus and orchestra in New York run by Dennis Keene. They've been around for 31 years now and they mostly do the big, well-known choral pieces through the ages - mostly dead white men but, you know, the great ones - and they had just started an initiative called "Voices of the New" where they wanted to commission smaller, vocal chamber music from under-represented voices in vocal music. Because they were just starting out, they asked the community of singers who have worked with them as soloists or choristers over the years if anyone had any ideas. And coincidentally I had just had this idea with Lindsay and Kirsten and pitched it. They immediately loved the idea and so they commissioned it and set up live performances for May 2020 in three different venues across New York City, and obviously that didn't happen.

So they asked me if I could come up with an entirely digital version that we could present during 2020. We already had the idea of video elements using NASA footage, because NASA makes all their imagery public domain. There's a vast trove of beautiful imagery from space expeditions and training and environmental research and all kind of things so we had already planned to have the concert with a video accompaniment, using all that stuff. Then basically we decided that we would get together in a pandemic-safe weekend. We were all tested and we went with just our romantic partners, who were therefore in our bubble, and they did all the recording and video footage over the course of our week. It was just the 6 of us working on this, and we recorded and made greenscreen videos of us performing the songs. Then I took it all home and taught myself how to use Final Cut Pro and made the project that you'll see. So, yeah, that's what I did with my pandemic basically. [laughs]

I think you're really fortunate that among your romantic partners you had the appropriate skillsets to pull that off.

Well, they learned a lot, too. The recording engineer is a conductor and had supervised some recordings, but he hadn't really been a recording engineer before, and then my husband also has done some recording, but not of classical voices, and he shot the actual footage with all of our iPhones. I mean, it was really jury-rigged. But, the moment we are in in terms of technology really made this pandemic something new, all across the globe.

When I watched your earlier show, Science Fair, what really struck me was that while the show is unusual, I never felt like you were making a conscious effort to be avant garde or to be "different." It felt to me more like you were just trying to be your most authentic self.

Oh, thank you!

I can sometimes get put off when I feel like a performing artist is straining to be different because they're trying to prove a point, or maybe they're so afraid of cliché that they end up producing art that no one can comprehend. But for me, it feels like you're just you're doing the work that you love to do. Does it feel that way to you?

It really does. And there are two directions that I want to answer this question. One is that I feel really fortunate that my authentic self seems to be something that other people perceive as new and avant garde, but in a way I'm taking from the whole nerd internet culture. It's only avant garde because I happen to be a classical singer. I'm kind of just trying to do what a million science Youtubers are already doing, and I just happen to prefer singing to speaking. I spend so much time singing religious music in order to elevate people's experience religiously that I just wanted to lend some of that elevation to the thing that I love, which is science and basic, fun geekery. So, yes, I was being my authentic self also in that I just find so much joy in this stuff, and so I was trying my best to convey that joy through music.

And then the other half is that I spend so much of my career doing avant garde or new music. A lot of that is amazing and great, but I don't feel the need to push the envelope in that way. Like I'm constantly doing that for other people's stuff and doing my best on it, but I sort of get my fill of that side of avant garde. So in terms of my own art - I feel like I'm pulling it back toward absolutely conventional music and accessibility. [laughs] Because my whole life is avant garde music that is much more out there, I don't feel like I can push the envelop any farther that those people do.

I'm also impressed by your rock-solid foundation as a classically-trained singer. When you're performing, I feel you're able to give yourself over to the piece completely. I don't get that sense I do with so many classical singers that you're being so careful to produce a beautiful tone that everything else kind of flies out the window.

Well, maybe I would have had a bigger career in opera if I were that careful! [laughs] Yeah, possibly that's another reason why I am excited to make this kind of goofy, but reverent art. Because I don't necessarily sing in a way that fits neatly into the boxes that the world wants. Like opera stuff and Broadway stuff - the way that I sing most naturally is somewhere in between, and I feel like I've suffered sometimes from that. People in the opera world say, "You should really try Broadway cause you're such a good actress." Which is a back-handed way of saying, "But you don't quite sing legato enough for our tastes." [laughs] And then people on Broadway are like, "Well, you should only be doing legit things, like The King & I, because you're really kind of an opera singer." Or even worse, "Well, you look like the ingenue, but you sound like the mother. I'm not sure what we can do with you." [laughs] So maybe that's part of why I had to make my own art. Cause I wasn't necessarily getting hired for high-level things in the worlds that I trained for.

Well, I could totally see you as Margaret Johnson in The Light in the Piazza."

Oh, thanks! Yeah, well, that would be like the one [role I'd be suited for]! That's exactly the type of genre where it would work. It's very narrow though.

But I think it's a great role.

It is, and I would certainly never turn it down if someone offered it to me.

When we last spoke in late February, we talked about issues with Asian representation in the performing arts, and how perceptions around that have changed over time somewhat. That was less than four months ago, but in the intervening time the issue of anti-Asian violence has really entered the national discourse due to the horrific rise in attacks on Asian Americans. Has that at all changed your perceptions of what it means to be a person of Asian descent living in this country now?

Yeah, it did. I have never felt unsafe as an Asian or part-Asian person. I've felt marginalized and slightly discriminated against and stereotyped, but I have never in my life felt unsafe because of my apparent race, and that was a new and not very pleasant experience at the height of the attacks in New York. My Asian friends, especially women, were all talking amongst ourselves about the ways, between masks and glasses and hats, some of us were covering up our hair when we went out on the street to try to make us less obviously Asian. In a way, it was just a taste of what Black-identified people of color have to go through all the time.

And I think we were all also aware of that, even with the new extra fright, it was really not at all on the scale of what Black Americans have experienced over the years, and are still experiencing. But it did open up a lot of very interesting dialog, not least with my father, who is the Asian parent, and being of his generation has much more experience of anti-Asian discrimination and who as a writer has dealt with it in his art over the years. So I had some really interesting talks with him that I probably never would have had if it hadn't been for the political situation.

And I was hired to do "The Tacoma Method" - a recorded workshop of three excerpts from a new opera that Tacoma Symphony is working on about basically the anti-Chinese pogrom - it's the perfect word for a half-Jewish, half-Chinese person! [laughs] - in Tacoma, Washington in the mid 1880's. They drove out a well-established Chinese population and burned down Chinatown, and then it was called "The Tacoma Method" because other cities took it up as a way to get rid of the Chinese. I did that project in these past 4 months, and it was really intense to work on because, like Tulsa, it was not something I had learned about as child, despite the fact that I grew up in the Pacific Northwest and heard about a lot of anti-Chinese sentiment through my father's work.

So it was sort of shocking to me that, along with a lot of other facts about history, I had never been exposed to that. One of the most interesting things about anti-Asian sentiment and violence in the U.S. that a lot of historians are suddenly talking about is how much was erased from history in similar ways to what they did in Tacoma, that they just kind of drove people out and then never talked about it. And somehow the quote-unquote Asian Community, which is incredibly diverse and not in any way a unified bloc, unlike the Jews we didn't make a cultural tradition of talking about all the things that have happened to us in the U.S., and it got lost, whether by design or by coincidence. So, yeah, that was something that really blew my mind a bit, in this intervening 4 months.

I recently interviewed Filipino-American playwright Jeffrey Lo and he spoke of this whole generation of Asian theater artists out there who are now delving into the experiences of their parents, which was rarely talked about when they were growing up.

Yeah, I think a lot of our Asian cultures have a "don't talk about it" attitude. Obviously, Asians are not monolithic and the cultures are very different, but there certainly do seem to be some strong traditions of "don't talk about bad things that happened" and that certainly contributes to the phenomenon of forgetting.

I did want to say one other thing about representation in theater and music, because I talked about it with some of my Asian colleagues. There was an interesting paradox that happened where a lot of opera companies decided they would cancel performances of Madame Butterfly and Turandot because of unpleasant stereotypes, but that really just meant that all their Asian chorus people were suddenly out of work - because they're not hired for the other things! It's so weird - a "What to do?" moment.

So, this is really putting a lot on you, but any idea what to do with that?

It's a - I think the word "paradox" is the best that I can do. The same problem exists for BIPOC performers, like do you continue doing Porgy and Bess by a white guy but who insisted that the cast be all Black, and therefore employs you, basically making music that's based on your culture, but filtered through a white sensibility ... Like what is that? And that's also what Flower Drum Song is, but we've all grown up since those things were created, so in a way Porgy and Bess and Flower Drum Song are part of our cultural heritage as well. I don't know what to do about it, but we have to keep thinking about it, until we are so color-blind, until like Mrs. Anna can be Asian and everybody else can be other races in yellow face and no one cares because everyone is equally employed and represented. Like at that point, we will maybe be able to do that because no one will be underprivileged. But we're so far from that, and even saying it now is gonna get me cancelled, you know? [laughs]

I know what you mean, but I feel like we can't fix this stuff if we can't really talk about it, you know?

That's a good point. And I would say one of the biggest things that has changed in this pandemic year is that we are talking about it - a lot. And I appreciate that you gave a caveat on asking me what to do about it, because as I'm sure you have heard from other people of color, all of a sudden white people in power are becoming aware of the problem and then they're asking their employees of color to solve this problem that is huge. We don't have any better idea about how to solve it than they do, and it just adds to the burden of being a minority. It adds extra stress and all of the sudden you're somehow responsible for whether it gets better or not. It's kind of an unfair question, and yet we are glad that we're being asked to give our opinion. But we are all just Americans, we don't have any better idea of how to solve it.

Could I ask you, because you talk to so many different kinds of people in your work, do you feel like any sort of answers have coalesced out of the various perspectives?

Hmm... I think the good thing is we're finally having real discussions and taking it very seriously. But I worry that - and this is just human nature - people are rushing to find a quick fix -

Yes!

-and the problem runs so much deeper than that. From my vantage point as an audience member, I never thought much about the demographics of all the folks working behind the scenes on a show, because I don't see them. I only see who I see onstage, right? And as someone who largely attends commercial theater, maybe it's the shows I choose to attend, but I actually see a fair percentage of Black folks onstage, a fair number of Latinx folks, and very few Asians. That's just really, really noticeable to me.

Yeah.

For instance, I saw the musical Waitress a few years ago, and one of the supporting roles is clearly written for an Asian American woman, and it was like a revelation to see an Asian performer not tucked away somewhere in the chorus, you know?

Yeah! [laughs]

My gut reaction was just that I was so excited to see that. And then I thought why is that a rare occurrence? That doesn't make any sense to me, especially living in San Francisco which is roughly half Asian. As horrific as these anti-Asian incidents have been, maybe the silver lining is that finally, finally we're talking about it. When we talk about race or ethnicity now, I feel like Asian people are a meaningful part of that conversation, and not just sometimes thrown in as the last word in the sentence because we want to appear inclusive.

That's an interesting way of putting it. But I think of the whole problem of the "model minority." I don't know exactly where it came from, but as my dad said, it's highly problematic partially because it really arose as kind of anti-Black sentiment in the Asian population, like separating ourselves from those "troublesome" people, and positing ourselves as "Oh, they're the bad ones. We're the model minority." Whether or not that's true in terms of the origin, I feel like that has really lent itself to the propagation of the model minority. Like why are you even talking about being a model minority, unless there's something wrong with being a different kind of minority? So there's automatically a kind of anti-Black basis to that idea. But I think that once you as a group get some economic power using that stereotype, that's a powerful motivation to keep promoting it and to keep squishing yourself into that model minority box. Don't cause trouble, do everything right...

And then every once in a while something flares up where the quote-unquote majority throws up in our faces how model minority is still a minority and not on the top rung of the hegemony, or whatever complicated word you want to throw on it. I think that the occurrences of the last months have really pointed that out, and in some ways forced some reckoning. But we'll see... As things open up, people have less and less bandwidth to think about these issues and are more and more just worried about making a living.

Do you feel like things are kind of going back to normal where you are in San Francisco - falling back into the old status quo?

I think it's just too soon to tell. But I do know that Asian American friends of mine who grew up in families that almost never talked about race, and always claimed they never really experienced racism, are rethinking that now.

Yeah! I identify with that. I kind of said the same thing about my profession. I was blabbering to my husband, who's white, about these things. I was actually talking about it in the context of how people were seeking me out as a colored face to hire during the pandemic, and I said "I feel a little guilty about this, cause I don't feel like I ever was discriminated against previously in terms of being hired, so why should I suddenly get special status?" And he said, "Are you kidding?! You spent two years of your life, you a trained operatic singer, in The King & I cause that was the only thing that would hire you. You deserve this!" And it was like, "Oh, right! Yeah, I did audition for other things [and never got cast in them]."

Now that things are finally easing around Covid, I hope we've all learned some valuable lessons from surviving the challenges of these last 15 months or so. What's something you've learned that you hope to be able to carry with you?

Well, I worry that things are falling with a kerchunk back into the status quo. Because a lot of my colleagues have talked about how having all this enforced free time made us realize how we were overcommitting ourselves and neglecting our mental health in order to do as much work as possible, and that everything was "gonna be different" [when the pandemic was over]. And I kind of feel that falling apart as gigs open up again. A lot of people are complaining about how the economic status of a lot of the organizations that we work for is really contributing to the problem. They are all strapped for cash and they are all trying to hire us for the same gigs that were cancelled, but for a little less than they originally offered, because they don't have the money anymore.

It's a huge bind that suddenly feels like 1930's-style union problems and like the bosses versus workers. I'm probably thinking about all this because the Wooster Group show I was coaching is their adaptation of Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage, which is about a woman who embraces communism. It's kind of a pedantic play about how communism should work, but it raises so many great points! I don't know if communism is really the answer, cause it never seems to work, but so many of the ideas are really important right now. Like the divide between those with the money and those who are being hired by them is so stark, it's so far beyond other divisions that we have. We're really kind of being exploited, but it's not like any one person or even one organization is exploiting us; it's the whole system. We rely on gifts from rich people and on grants from the government, and both of those entities are worried about their cash flow, and the artists down at the bottom are being asked to do their cultural work for less, because of that.

And there's always that problem of are the arts really necessary, in the way other things are necessary? We're not essential workers - we're not f-ing essential! [laughs] - and that's why we all had to stay home when we were dubbed super-spreaders as singers. We were happy to stay home and save lives.

You might not see yourself as an essential worker, but I have to say my world has been diminished significantly by folks like you not being out there performing live.

I cannot tell you how much that means to me, but also it's hard to internalize.

Believe me, I'm not saying that just to make you feel good. For whatever reason, I need that interpersonal, artistic communication that occurs between performer and audience. That's what I thrive on, that's what I look forward to, that's what helps get me through the day. And I haven't had that for well over a year now.

I think a lot of artists would really love to hear that from audience members, because we haven't been getting any of that feedback. We're just alone in our houses, singing for webcams, or not at all. Many of us were not that technologically savvy and didn't do anything during the pandemic, except collect unemployment and become depressed, so it really is hard for us to remember that what we do is not mostly for selfish reasons. We're not performing for applause and fame. We're doing it because we, like you, love that interaction. We love giving our artistic energy to people and bringing them joy, hopefully, or making them think. So it's really good to hear that, from the other side.

To post a comment, you must register and login.