5 Questions with Chop Chef
Chop Chef, the quirky brainchild of author Julie Koh and composer Paul Smith is a satirical operatic comedy in which six contestants from around Australia enter the cooking battlefield of a fictional reality television series Chop Chef.
Faced with unusual and extreme cooking challenges, Kitty (Jermaine Chau), Tom, (Benjamin Caulkwell) Andy (Gavin Brown), Victoria (Ayako Ohtake), Kale (Nicholas Geddes) and Renée (Lisa Cooper) must compete to remain alive in the game and avoid facing the chop—literally.
This new Australian opera mashes together flavours of Masterchef and Hunger Games on the operatic stage where reality television can be pushed to its absurd conclusions. In thrilling arias and melodramatic ensembles, each contestant is pushed to their limit and will stop at nothing to be the last chef standing. In the game of Chop Chef, there is only one rule—eat or be eaten.
(Jermaine Chau as Kitty in Chop Chef)
No.1
How was Chop Chef conceptualised? Run us through how it all began.
Jermaine Chau (JC): Chop Chef was largely born from the alignment of two key people: the librettist and the composer. I’ve known Julie since high school—even back then she was a writer in the making. I remember performing her brilliantly funny iambic pentameter for school plays. She infamously invited me to join her in singing a subversively reworded version of a song at our school speech night—so you could say we've actually been on stage together before Chop Chef. I reconnected with Julie after reading her short-story collection Portable Curiosities, even lining up at her book launch to get her to autograph my copy (but I was mainly there for the free ice-cream). It was her short story, ‘Cream Reaper’, about killer ice-cream, that inspired me to introduce her to Paul Smith, who was looking for a librettist for Blush Opera's new show.
Paul is Chop Chef’s composer. He and I are co-artistic directors of Blush. For a number of years, Blush had been performing Paul's chamber operas on the festival circuit and we felt it was time to scale up our ideas. Paul had the wacky notion of basing an opera on reality TV cooking competitions; however it was Julie who heightened the stakes by suggesting that each contestant should be killed off as part of the show's ritual elimination. To me, this was genius, and it excited me as it would stretch the Blush brand into a darker, political dimension.
Julie Koh (JK): I’d never had any aspirations to write an opera. In late 2016, Jermaine approached me to write Chop Chef. I’d known Jermaine since high school, where she’d started her journey as an opera singer. She was someone I trusted, so I accepted her invitation to a first meeting with Paul. Paul and I both turned up on the day with our hands bandaged—his broken finger was strapped with Daiso washi tape. It was clearly a match. Paul and I then developed the story of the show together, generating the words and music in stages.
No.2
Chop Chef is also presented by Blush Opera, which since its early days have sought to engage diverse audiences in the opera form. Jermaine, what have your experiences as co-artistic director been with this so far, and how do you think Chop Chef continues on from this vision?
JC: Blush Opera was created out of necessity. I’d left music school in 2014 and realised there was little for me to aspire to as an Asian-Australian opera singer. The only two commonly performed operatic roles that seemed to represent me on stage were those in Madama Butterfly or The King And I. I realised that by participating in these operas, I was complicit in allowing a bunch of dead white men—who have probably never set foot in Asia—to dictate my narrative. There is a time and place for the historical repertoire, but that time is not now. Blush Opera was created with a modus operandi to tell contemporary stories in the operatic medium.
Blush has always aimed to present the traditional art form of opera in alternative ways. Whether it be singing while putting together a Billy bookcase in a Parramatta laneway or singing through tears while cooking for your life on a reality TV show, we want our audiences to be able to see themselves and their daily experiences reflected on the operatic stage. In the process of creating Chop Chef we have proactively engaged a diverse creative team. With the help of Courtney Stewart, who introduced us to some seriously talented creatives, we have directors Kenneth Moraleda and Nicole Pingon at the helm to guide us through the wonderful libretto. We’ve brought a diverse team to the table and they bring with them a wealth of experience. It sets a different cultural standard, producing a work environment of inclusivity and fun!
In seven years of running Blush, I’ve realised that it is not the responsibility of the dominant culture to tell my stories on my behalf—it is my responsibility. As my mother told me while walking down a busy Hong Kong street as a nine-year-old, ‘Put your elbows out and push or you will never get on the bus.’ You have to push in; you cannot wait to be invited. In the words of Viet Thanh Nguyen, ‘Writers from a minority, write as if you are the majority. Do not explain. Do not cater. Do not translate. Do not apologize.’ Now, I can't write a musical phrase nor pen a libretto, but where I can facilitate others to write, compose, design, direct and create, I will. I hope Chop Chef is that space to do so.
No.3
To me, running the idea of a reality TV show (and a cooking one, no less!) through the lens of opera seems subversive and yet it makes sense—they are both dramatic mediums that lean on high stakes and high emotion to come alive, but puts together what is understood as ‘high-brow’ and ‘low-brow’. Having read librettist Julie Koh’s fiction as well, the satirical element feels like the perfect bullseye for Chop Chef. Julie, what do you think changes when you write a piece that others perform on a stage versus one that others read off a page? As it’s your first opera, what sort of new challenges and/or pleasant surprises did you encounter?
JK: The clash of highbrow and lowbrow is definitely where a lot of the humour in the show originates. In terms of the difference between writing for the page versus the stage, the libretto itself is just under 6,000 words—the length of a short story—but the opera itself lasts for about an hour and twenty minutes. I needed to communicate character and plot as succinctly as possible, which is no different from the challenge of writing a short story, but I also had to include as much drama, action and emotion as possible to take advantage of the operatic form.
There were also structural constraints that I had to consider, which wouldn’t necessarily be relevant when writing literary fiction. For instance, the number of characters in the show was based on the number of performers we could realistically afford to put on stage. Paul and I also decided to structure the opera along the lines of a typical reality TV cooking competition. Similar to how reality TV profiles contestants of interest, focusing on their backstories, we gave each of the characters on stage at least one major aria to sing.
An interesting challenge was that the opera was written out of order, before we had finalised the plot. This was because funding for the opera’s development was cobbled together from small grants that came in over the years. We used each chunk of money to write a few major scenes at a time, which would then be performed to fulfil each grant. One of the first arias we wrote together, ‘Water and Air’, actually marks the end of Act I. So when it came to completing the opera, we were filling gaps and working around sections that had already been set in stone earlier in the process.
There have been many pleasant surprises along the way. It’s been a treat meeting the exceptional artists who’ve signed on to stage and perform Chop Chef. In particular, we needed singers with excellent acting and comic abilities, and I’m glad to say that we’ve found them. Ayako Ohtake, for instance, is an incredible coloratura soprano. She plays the character of Victoria: an uptight perfectionist who is a devotee of ‘lean in’ feminism. We originally intended for that character to be played by an older white woman but Ayako turned out to be perfect for the part. Her casting makes the show read differently, with Victoria now standing in direct contrast to the character Kitty, who is originally from Hong Kong. We see their different approaches to the same challenges play out across the show, leading them down different paths and to different conclusions.
No.4
Nicole and Kenneth, you both come to direct Chop Chef from the world of theatre. Can you tell us a little bit about how you’ve adapted or brought what you already know into opera?
Kenneth Moraleda (KM): What we are working with is a cheeky premise anchored by Julie’s finely structured, witty libretto. Paul’s music brings the emotion and added support to the humour. Our job is to be the outside eyes that consolidate those elements and finesse the instincts of the performers. Most theatre, musical theatre and opera productions employ similar staging techniques to convey story, but specifically we are creating the gestural language of the Chop Chef world by devising practices taken from movement theatre. We are also bringing our experiences in the film and TV spheres to frame the TV show within the opera—the multiple levels of truth as information is funnelled through the camera lens. We are excited by the fact that audiences who are absorbing this story live will have access to the machinations off-screen as well as what is contained and curated on screen.
Nicole Pingon (NP): As a theatre maker, I’m generally very fascinated by multidisciplinary, image-based, sonically rich performance, so exploring opera has been so much fun! Across both mediums, it always comes back to taking care of the story and ideas, and ensuring clarity for the audience. Things that have remained as part of our process are the text, dramaturgical and character work, and collaborating with our amazing creative team. We’re lucky to be working with a number of Asian-Australian creatives including Kate Baldwin (Lighting Designer), Keerthi Subramanyam (Set and Costume Designer) and Tyler Fitzpatrick (Production Manager).
I’m super excited to play with our incredible performers, and experience how they instinctively work/think/move on the floor. It’s a constant exchange, and I’m learning a lot from working with our stellar team.
No.5
It’s no secret that opera faces much more representational issues than other art forms, largely due to its ivory tower status. Were there any other similar operas you had seen that inspired the birth of Chop Chef? What do you think Chop Chef does to change this gaze?
JK: When I was a kid, I was obsessed with the mid-nineties Essgee Entertainment version of The Pirates of Penzance starring Jon English. I had the soundtrack recording on CD and basically knew it by heart. It probably taught me the most at a young age about bringing irreverence into a hallowed arena, and you can see that influence in Chop Chef.
In my twenties, I saw a number of Opera Australia productions—mainly classics like The Marriage of Figaro and Tosca. Probably the most contemporary opera I saw in that period was A Streetcar Named Desire. While Paul and I weren’t directly influenced by these formal operas, we did use Chop Chef to respond to, or parody, classic opera tropes. These included the misogynistic representation of women, and the use of a lot of death arias. There’s also the trope of the ‘mad scene’, one of the most famous being Lucia di Lamamoor going crazy in her wedding nightdress, which is covered in her husband’s blood. So we put our own subversive ‘mad scene’ in Chop Chef. We also nod to classic arias just for fun—Lakmé’s ‘Flower Duet’ has become our ‘Flour Duet’.
One opera that I find really tiresome is Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, mainly because it’s staged over and over again, as if there have been no new narratives about Asian women since. The white imagination just loves to keep replaying for eternity this scene of a Japanese woman (historically played by white women) stabbing herself to death over a white man. So in Chop Chef we do what I like to call a ‘reverse Madame Butterfly’. It sounds like an Olympic diving move but basically we subvert the done-to-death narrative of the poor Asian woman staying up all night waiting for the cowardly white guy to return to her—an insidious narrative that is still ingrained within contemporary race relations. In this way, I use the libretto to turn my gaze back on the straight white male operatic gaze.
NP: I think Chop Chef so brilliantly showcases the possibilities of what opera can be. It’s spicy, it’s hot, it features searing commentary on the world we live in and the very nature of opera itself. We get to meet characters who don’t usually have a place in the stories told through opera, and hear their hot takes. This opera is not afraid to zoom in on the cracks of the systems we inhabit and explore race relations in this country. All the while, it’s so much fun, and invites you to giggle and laugh along the way. Chop Chef is sure to satisfy your tastebuds, and expand and inspire ideas of what opera can be, for both audiences and makers alike.
KM: Problematic as it can be, reality TV leaps ahead of opera in presenting the diversity of the Australian landscape. This notion, the main premise of the work, is a perfect jumping-off point to explore the complexity and nuance of cultural identity. The work is studded with popular culture references making the conversations on race, capitalism and monoculture much more immediate and relevant. While the constructs of representation that the opera world presents are often wrong, what it brings brilliantly is high drama. Chop Chef has all that drama plus, we hope, incisive commentary on race relations.
JC: Opera companies around the world attempt to solve the issue of diversity by employing their notion of ‘colourblind casting’, where a Madama Butterfly can be sung by an African American woman in the role of the Japanese girl Cio-Cio-San. To me, this does not solve the problem of the narrative—her words, her decisions and her destiny are still written by Western men. We realise that no amount of interpretation and reinterpretation can change these classics. There will always be inherent racism and misogyny baked into the work, so we need a more radical approach. We must write new operas now. What happens if the words of an opera are written by a woman, and that woman is Asian?
Chop Chef opens on 22 April at Riverside Theatres (Lennox Theatre) in Parramatta NSW and will run Thurs—Sat 8PM and Sat 2:30PM, with a special live-streamed performance at 8PM on Fri.
Get your tickets here.