ISLANDS is an interdisciplinary performance exploring water as landscape, memory and a space between cultures. Bringing together live music for Chinese and Western instruments, film, olfactory and movement, the programme drifts between different musical imaginings of rivers, oceans, reflections, and distant landscapes.

Contemporary works by Qin Wenchen, Caroline Shaw, Kalevi Aho, Jing-Mu Kuo and Arthur Yuen sit alongside Chopin, Palestrina and Debussy, tracing connections across centuries and traditions. From the ancient image of water as a source of spiritual longing in Palestrina's 'Sicut Cervus', to the shifting reflections of Debussy’s 'Reflets dans l’eau' and the landscapes evoked across contemporary East Asian works, water becomes both subject and metaphor: something that flows between places while resisting fixed boundaries.

ISLANDS is made in collaboration with multimedia artist Chang Meng, who takes inspiration from Chinese tea ceremonies to create a space in which performance and ritual blur. In doing so, ISLANDS asks how cultures and traditions separated by geography might speak to one another through our relationship with water.