Project Information

This project is an innovative concept to combine traditional Chinese drums, modern western percussion music, Beijing opera and American tapping dance in order to interpret a classic Chinese folk tale “Mulan takes her father’s military service”. Mulan was living in a civil war times, every men were call up by the country to fight with barbarian, but Mulan’s father is too old to do this, so Mulan posing as a man to take her father’s place. Unfortunately Mulan was defeated by the barbarian general and become a war prisoner, she believe this time is no way back home, no one thought the barbarian general was also a woman, suddenly they laugh and understand to each other, in the end the barbarian general helps Mulan to escape and go back to her home.

Beijing opera artist Ju San-Li as General Mu Lan, Liu Chia-Hou as Girl Mu Lan, tap dancer Yang Yue-Jia as Barbarian General. Composer in residence Hung Chien-Hui compose seven sections music to the show “Mulan”, “Hometown”, “Join the Army”, “Battlefield”, “Summoned”, “Night Fog” and “Go Back”. Each piece is independent but related to each other.

In my FOH mixing I set up 2 level FOH delay speaker to recreate the depth of the music, first the Chinese bass drums in the pit I put them only to the delay FOH speaker 2, the audience can feel the drum beat sounds far away from the back of the stage, just like thousand horses run through. Second I put the marimba 3/4, vibraphone 3/4 into the delay FOH speaker 1 and FOH speaker, let them can fully fill the stage and become the bottom of the melody. Finally the fly glockenspiel I put it into the delay FOH speaker 2 and 3 to simulate the real place where the sound come from.

Due to we must let the instruments move freely on stage, I use wireless headset microphone on musicians to pick up the move tom-tom, cloud gong, and others. For the moving keyboards I put wireless lavaliere microphone into them. The most difficult part to me is the tap dance, each dancer have a pair of lavaliere microphone on their feet between the sole and heel, I also use the boundary microphone to increase the low sound when they tapping. The front microphone CCM41 just for the backup, in case the vocal lavaliere microphone have frequency jam or drop out, I can still keep the sound can be heard. 

Equipment List