Du Yun Revisits Her Early Music Theater at NYU Skirball

When the composer Du Yun was a doctoral student at Harvard in the early 2000s, she felt like a fish out of water.

“Very much out of water,” Du Yun, 44, said in a recent interview. “It was my first time not in a conservatory setting since I was 6.”

But Du Yun — now the Pulitzer Prize-winning conjurer of exhilaratingly elusive and often moving sound worlds — did have a rich community of artistic collaborators. She was a founding member of the International Contemporary Ensemble, the group of new-music specialists started in 2001 by the flutist Claire Chase, a fellow Oberlin conservatory graduate. And when the ensemble had an opportunity to create an original work of theater, Du Yun, who was resistant to opera, instead wanted to stage a set of songs.

“I just began writing stories,” she said, as an exercise. “And then I used those stories for a kind of structure.”

Fanciful, allegorical and open to interpretations personal and political, they became “Zolle,” which premiered in 2005. A tale of a wandering soul in the afterlife, it was followed a few years later by a work set in what Du Yun sees as a preparational “before-life”: “A Cockroach’s Tarantella,” a fable about a pregnant cockroach’s longing and plans to become human. Now, the two have been paired — an interplay that casts both in a new light — for a diptych that will be presented at NYU Skirball on Friday and Saturday.

In the early months of the pandemic, Du Yun recorded “A Cockroach’s Tarantella” with the JACK Quartet, the players accompanying her narration in elevated speech. Its sense of yearning for another, freer life was freshly affecting at a time when the album could be heard only at home in isolation. (In 2021, Los Angeles Opera made a digital short called “The Zolle Suite.”)

With the return of live performance, “A Cockroach’s Tarantella” and “Zolle” were staged together in October at the Lucerne Theater in Switzerland, directed by Roscha A. Säidow, who also did the surreal scenic and costume design. Du Yun acted as the narrator, and another vocalist took on the role in “Zolle” she had previously sung.

That production is being adapted for Skirball, played by members of the International Contemporary Ensemble, with Du Yun storytelling onstage and, again, a new singer: Satomi Matsuzaki, from the rock band Deerhoof. In an interview after a recent rehearsal, Du Yun spoke about how the two works speak to each other, and to different audiences, and what it’s like to revisit them now. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.

What makes “Zolle” and “A Cockroach’s Tarantella” a diptych?

Before I finished “Zolle,” I just thought it was so melancholic, because it starts with this woman being dead, and it has to do with so many sorrows, and she’s stuck in her memories. And then I realized: You know what? I need to write a really funny piece — sort of like a “life before” thing.

Stylistically they are quite different.

There is a small musical relation, but other than that I wanted to have a contrast. In “Zolle,” the writing is very full-bodied, with a group of instruments and singers. But I wanted “Cockroach” to be simple: a string quartet that behaves like one instrument, with a narrator.

I also want to tell you, I was doing horribly at Harvard with writing fugues. They were like, You have to write a Bach fugue. And I was like, Why can’t it be a Du Yun-style fugue? I grew up and memorized all this Bach; it’s in my head and it’s in my hand. But I never understood why on these tests it had to be resolved a certain way. So in “Zolle” there’s a bit of Baroque style, and that was my way of proving that I could do it, and do it my way.

These invite a lot of different interpretations. I’ve seen “A Cockroach’s Tarantella” compared to Kafka, for example, though on the surface it seems more like “Rusalka” or “The Little Mermaid.”

It was much more “Little Mermaid,” right? Wanting to be human and let go of who she was, and then having that struggle. When I wrote it, I was also very frustrated with the idea of heaven — the idea of it, the betterment, the pursuit of happiness. I’ve written this before: At the time, I was living in government-subsidized housing that had a lot of cockroaches, so I became fascinated by them and learned that, you know, they can just release eggs for their entire life. It’s kind of mind-boggling.

So like “Zolle” had people thinking about immigration and belonging, “Cockroach” had funny moments but hit audiences differently. You can see it as being about this female body thing, but I also have a Chinese version of it, and women in their 30s and 40s were really crying when they saw it because of lines like “I want to be pregnant out of love.”

Right. For all its levity, it’s actually profound.

It’s very profound.

And I feel like, standing alone, each piece can be open to X and Y reading. But pairing them changes that. The “Tarantella” has so much hope and defiance, but when you follow it with the lonely afterlife of “Zolle,” it becomes devastating.

Audiences connect with these however they do. But I want to mention that when we recorded the digital short of “Zolle” for LA Opera and I was narrating some of the portions, I got really, really emotional. I was thinking about Asian hate, and it really got to me because this piece was almost 20 years ago and it still rings so true. There is a line of saying something like “I am an immigrant, even in this ghost world.” Then I realized it’s something that me, you know, as an immigrant I will always carry with me. [Du Yun was born in Shanghai and moved to the United States to study at Oberlin.]

What else are you feeling as you revisit these works?

You know, this is the International Contemporary Ensemble’s 20th anniversary season. We feel like 100 years old, but we’re also transitioning into another era with George Lewis as the new leader.

But this was the first stage production the International Contemporary Ensemble ever did. So even though they’re moving into different models and we’re bringing in Satomi — I’m a big fan of Deerhoof — this feels like a kind of homecoming. Which is fitting, because these pieces are really about homecoming. Homecoming, but also sending off as well.