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YANG QUEEN: a ‘psychedelic musical’ starring Mantawoman
August 3 @ 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM
£15
90 min (plus an interval)
Witness the magic of Mantawoman – a mesmerising yangqin player, singer-songwriter, and performer from San Francisco – in YANG QUEEN, a psychedelic musical about the power of self-acceptance.
Crystallizing twenty years of performance experience into one kaleidoscopic show, this musical extravaganza dazzles with epic instrumentals, romantic songs, comedic lip-syncs, and trippy visuals. In two acts across ninety minutes, we see Mantawoman reckon with the trials of being a young artist and adult: indecision, heartbreak, identity crisis. Propelled by an inner voice, Mantawoman voyages from fracture and grief towards integration and ecstasy, ultimately learning the importance of living in one’s truest form. Along the way, they invite audience members to sing with them and reflect on their own odysseys of self-discovery.
Praised by Yo-Yo Ma as “courageous, passionate, truth-seeking,” Mantawoman rose to prominence as one of the world’s top yangqin players. The yangqin (pronounced “yahng-cheen”) is a Chinese percussive string instrument with 144 steel strings that the player strikes with bamboo mallets, emitting bright, iridescent tones. The yangqin takes center stage in this sonic adventure, serving as the interface through which Mantawoman teleports us across the seascape of the human heart.
YANG QUEEN was developed in collaboration with Emma Henry Wolf, Tangram, LSO St Luke’s and the Southbank Centre Studio residency in 2023, with support from the Jerwood New Work Fund. Runtime is 90-minutes with a 20-minute interval.
More About Mantawoman
Classically trained from age seven, Mantawoman (b.1994) is a trailblazer for yangqin music, touring internationally with the Silkroad Ensemble and Osvaldo Golijov’s Falling Out of Time, co-founding the contemporary music collective Tangram in London, featuring on GRAMMY and Sundance Award-winning projects, recording on film soundtracks for Netflix and Marvel, and garnering millions of views for pop covers on social media. Under their birth name (Reylon Yount), Mantawoman became the first yangqin player from North America to compete professionally in China (Baotou, 2014) winning a silver prize, as well as the first yangqin player in history to feature on a GRAMMY-winning album (Sing Me Home, 2017). Combining virtuosity with versatility, Mantawoman’s playing flows seamlessly across folk, classical, experimental, improvisatory, and pop soundscapes. Mantawoman’s spectrum of collaborators includes Caroline Polachek, Luke Pritchard of The Kooks, Kayhan Kalhor, Rhiannon Giddens, Van-Anh Vo, Johnny Gandelsman, Christopher Myers, and Alex Ho.
Disenchanted by the limitations of the classical music world, Mantawoman currently embraces queer aesthetics and pop culture as axes of creative evolution. Genre-fluid by nature, Mantawoman’s musicality sonifies the syncretic nature of contemporary existence and offers fluidity as an antidote to cultural and psychological fragmentation.
Blending traditional Chinese techniques with modern influences – which range from Brian Eno to Björk – Mantawoman’s original songs and soundscapes explore feelings about love, authenticity, and spiritual transcendence. In 2023, Mantawoman self-released their debut EP The Way She Makes Us Waves, with support from the Jerwood New Work Fund.
After graduating from Harvard College in 2016 with a BA Environmental Science and Public Policy, Mantawoman was one of forty top American graduates to win a Marshall Scholarship, earning two master’s degrees in music from SOAS and Goldsmiths with full funding from the UK government. During this time, they began to deepen their practice as a singer-songwriter, training their voice while inventing and iterating new methods to accompany themself on the yangqin. An advocate for spiritual activation as a dimension of sustainable community-building, Manta leverages music as a medium for inspiring openness and reflection, prompting listeners to connect more deeply with themselves, each other and the environment.
Learn more at mantawoman.com
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