Phantom of Utopia I: The Emergence (2023) was presented at Ball State University, SEAMUS 2024, Louisiana State University, ICMC, and was accepted for NYCEMF 2025. The opening movement of a three-part multimedia series interpreting Tao Yuan-ming’s The Peach Blossom Spring, this performance layers Chinese calligraphic dance with extended reality media, fixed video, and spatial audio to explore themes of exile, fragmentation, and unreachable utopia. An interactive audio-visual system was designed and implemented using node-based and object-based programming to integrate sound and projected visual feedback with the dancer’s motion. The performance featured costumes collaboratively conceptualized with fashion designer and Assistant Professor Kyla Kazuschyk, intentionally designed to enhance projection mapping and emphasize the flowing aesthetics of Chinese calligraphy in motion. Collaborative dialogue with Irina Kruchinina informed the interpretation of Chinese textual elements, bridging the poetic, semantic, and pictorial dimensions of the poem with embodied movement. The piece also incorporates binaural audio and immersive spatial composition techniques to deepen the sensorial experience of the liminal journey between physical and imagined realms.
Technical Innovation
The encounter with the peach blossom forest symbolizes the fascination of the unknown, drawing us into realms where time loses its measure and reality blends with the impulses of desire. The movements adopt node-based programming in blender to design the flow, pattern, directions, density, forms of particle system, simulating blossoming of flowers in an abstract form as a visual portrayal to the prelude of the enchanted navigation and mystery.
The dancer interacts with the text, trying to explore it literally, through imitation, by shaping the body into poses inspired by the physical forms of Chinese characters. The visual here shows the words as intensities, crystallizing into meaningful shapes and then bursting back into moving possibilities of meaning through formation and disintegration of particle system. (Cheng, Kruchinina, Esmaelli, 2024). One of the layers of particle system accentuate the meaning of the text through the shapes, flow, and directions of particles, and glimmering of particles compliment the recitation of poem in the audio component, the appearance of sentences in poems, and the orchestration of Chinese instrument in the piece. The pattern of glimmering not only works closely with the interactivity of sonic and semantic components of the narration, but also create a hypnotizing effect bringing audiences to the realms where virtual and reality blends with the stirring desire of the unknown.
The implementation of the dance movement and the graphic design
Artistic Choice
The orchestration of the music is composed of Chinese percussion set, distorted erhu, dizi and Zheng. The usage of Chinese drum is particularly important in the structure as each attack of the drum at the beginning gives a sonic cue to the appearance of sentences in the poem. The accelerating piccolo wood block leading to a big strike of wing gong together with the large drum signaling fisherman suddenly unveiled the sacred peach blossom spring, bringing structural significance of the subsection 2: 忽逢桃花林，夾岸數百步，中無雜樹，芳草鮮美，落英繽紛，漁人甚異之。. The subsections were explained in Textual Analysis and Interpretation of Peach Blossom Spring.
Translation of subsection 2 (Zhou and Yang 2023) (Ye 2017):
Suddenly, he discovered an enchanting sight: a peach blossom forest, its
beauty beyond measure. Fascinated, he travelled forth, and with each step, the forest divulged its secrets and mystery. No other trees dared to intrude upon this ethereal space, where fragrant grasses beautifully and vibrantly complement fallen petals, adorned the earth in a riot of colors.
The distorted erhu is the sonic portrayal of the slit or gap between virtual reality, in which the fisherman and the vision of the extended reality was trying to overcome and bridge between the gaps. The entrance of the Dizi and Zheng happens before the bewilderment of the fisherman showing structural significance to the entrance of subsection 3: “復前行，欲窮其林。林盡水源，便得一山”, and the two instruments together form a dialogue interacting with each of the instrument playing, intertwining to bring in melodic counterpoint, elegantly transition to the
Cantonese soundbites, 復 (fuk6), which translates to continue (navigating); 前 (cin4), which translate to (navigating) forward; 行 (hang4), which translate to walking.
Translation of subsection 3:
Subsection 3: Bewildered by this spectacle, the fisherman continued navigating, determined to uncover the forest’s end. And so, as the forest yielded to the embrace of a mountain and water fountain, he was astonished by the wonder of nature’s bounty, forever changed by the hidden paradise he had discovered.
Since navigation is a recurring process, the words were repeatedly arranged in a rhythmic pattern, echoing with the pulses in the underlying drums and cymbal beats, to provide the momentum to the forward moving motions to the sentence: uncovering the forest’s end, the forest yielded to the embrace of a mountain and water fountain, which is one of the focal point and climax in the movement.
The fluid motion of the particles form lines showing movements of the water while the gleaming of lights is highly interactive to the drums, clappers, and cymbals. The perfect fourth and fifth vocal in subsection 3 marks a sense of arrival as a cadential point. At the end of the piece, augmented fourth (D, D# and G#) was highlighted in the vocal when reciting 山 (saan1,
mountain in English), which then resolves by the set of notes in a sequence of C#, E, leading to F# at the bassline, closing with C# and C at higher register. C#, E, F# can be respelled in F#, A C#, E as a seventh chord omitted the third, leading to the tension not fully resolved. When F# prolong in the bassline, stacking together with the C# and C in higher register, it forms the same set class as D, D# and G# (016). The C# resolve stepwise downward to C leading to a sense of resolution while the set class 016 contains an augmented fourth, insists to remain a sense of unresolved mystery as the ending.
Ka Hei Cheng 