Classic tale revived as comic opera

From the perspective of conducting, Lai Jiajing characterizes the score as something that constantly shifts between extremes. In her words, the music moves "between heaven and earth" — a shorthand for its dual identity: grounded in traditional Chinese operatic structures like banqiang and percussion patterns, yet equally willing to soar into dense, Western-influenced orchestration. Banqiang is a core musical structure in traditional Chinese opera, especially in forms like Peking Opera. Functionally, it refers to a principle of musical organization built on flexible rhythm patterns and melodic variation rather than fixed Western-style scores.

She points to the overlapping vocal lines, such as Xuanzang's chants colliding with comic interruptions from Bajie — one of the most humorous figures in Journey to the West — as one of the work's defining textures. What might seem chaotic on paper becomes, in performance, a deliberate layering of perspectives.

Director Wang Xiaoying pushes this layering further into the realm of interpretation. For him, the key decision was not how to faithfully reproduce Journey to the West, but how to dislodge it from expectation.

"The production is not anchored in a traditional cultural reading, but in a contemporary one — where myth is treated as material rather than monument. The goal is to break the habitual image that audiences carry, and allow the story to reassemble itself under modern conditions of perception, media, and imagination," he says.