Three Movements for Percussionist
Three Movements for Percussionist is a solo recital that reimagines what a percussion practice can be – from sound, to space, to the performing body.
The evening traces a journey from the tangible to the intangible, beginning with an extended drum kit and shimmering light, and gradually stripping away material instruments until only the body and its fragile boundary between memory and performance remain.
For much of my training, a recital marked an “end”: end of a semester, the end of a degree, or the temporary end of my aspiration to resemble my role models. It was an hour in which I demonstrated what I had learned: the technical level, my stylistic allegiance, the kind of player I was. Repertoire choices were often less about curatorial intention or listener experience, and more about fulfilling those expectations of demonstration. In hindsight, the multiple roles I now inhabit—as performer, curator, collaborator—have little to do with the logic that once organized those programs.
Tangible to the touch, intangible in mind
The root of the word “recital” – “recit-,” to recite, to speak from memory – positions the form within a history of memorization and recall.
Percussionist, and a pioneer of contemporary percussion, Steven Schick describes, in his book The Percussionist’s Art, that the memorization of notated music as the voluntary verbatim recall of sequentially ordered information, rehearsed for maximally precise recollection at a fixed moment in the future. Performance studies scholar Diana Taylor, by contrast, emphasizes the irreproducible, intangible nature of live performance: a process of selection, internalization, and transmission that only ever exists “here and now.”
Situated between these perspectives, Three Movements of Percussionist understands performance as the embodiment of structured memory. Each rendition is not a repetition but a reenactment that inscribes a new layer into the archive of my practice. I constantly negotiate how my body remembers and how my brain remembers; the work lives in the tension between those two modes. Over the course of the recital, my body shifts from acting as an instrument, to function as a score, and ultimately to becoming a living archive where labor, vulnerability, risk, and fragility accumulate and become legible.
Overwrite one another in real time
The four works in this program are landmarks in that evolving archive. They are pieces that have profoundly shaped who I am as a performer, and they arise from collaborations with artists whose practices I admire and whose creative visions resonate closely with my own. Together, they offer not a retrospective of “what I can do,” but a shared space in which audiences are invited to witness how percussion, memory, and the performing body continually overwrite one another in real time.
The evening opens with a new solo by Hong Kong composer Angus Lee’s …but only the radiant, shimmering - (2025–26), written for and dedicated to her, and featuring light artist Amy Chan. Sound and illumination unfold as one continuous current: streams of resonances, glow, flicker, and dissolve like consciousness, leaving luminous sonic and visual traces in their wake. Sarah Hennies’s Psalm 3 (2009) reduces percussion to a single woodblock. Through microscopic variations of touch and timing, an entire soundscape emerges from one object, revealing the acoustics of the space itself. Vinko Globokar’s iconic work ?Corporel (1985) turns the performer’s body into the instrument. Bones, skin, breath become raw, intimate and unmediated, exposing the physical act of sound-making through the collapse of distance between her and the audience.
The program culminates in the world premiere of Three Movements for Percussionist (2026), a new commission co‑created by choreographer Joseph Lee, composer Lawrence Lau and Karen Yu. Emerging from their ongoing research on scoring practices since 2020, the piece invites the performer to replay, reinterpret, re-inhabit traces of a past performance – treating the body as both instrument and living archive.
I am grateful to be able to work with a team of wonderful artists and human beings, who made this personal project of mine come true.
Team
Curation & Performance: Karen Yu
Collaborating Artists: Angus Lee,
Amy Chan, Joseph Lee#, Lawrence Lau
Producer: Michael Li
#Appearance by kind permission of Unlock Dancing Plaza
Sound Design: Anthony Yeung
Lighting Design: Amy Chan
Lighting Assistant: Natalie Cheung, Kahy Chan
Production & Stage Manager:
Zandra Kong
Deputy Stage Manager: Wong Yee Lok
Video Engineer: Kenny Wong*
Stage Crew: Ho Cheuk Kei,
Chan Chi Wai
Coordinator: Emma Yeung
FOH Assistant: Stephanie Ng
*Appearance by kind permission of The Radiant Theatre