HONG KONG (SE): A predominately local team staged the world premiere of The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci at St. Ignatius’ Chapel in the grounds of Wah Yan College, in Kowloon, on November 5.

Commemorating the 400th anniversary of the death of the great Jesuit missionary to China, Father Matteo Ricci, a packed house heard New York-based Tian Haojiang sing across the boundaries of the old and the new, as electronic music was blended with traditional opera, reflecting the life of a missionary who discarded the conventional to cross boundaries of culture.

While the many events that have been staged around the world in honour of the great missionary have depicted the success of the first westerner to engage Chinese culture in a meaningful way, Tian portrays the inner life struggle of a man and a priest pursuing a lifetime dream, the success of which is ultimately measured by divine approbation, not his own ambitions.

In 1578, at the age of 26, Father Ricci left his native Italy with the dream of inviting the Chinese people to roam the vast memory palace of God’s love that he had meticulously constructed in his mind and filled with the images of what he regarded as the important things in a Christian life. And, in contrast to the conflicts he left behind in his native Europe, he was inviting them to roam in peace.

Leaving behind a Christian continent plagued by wars that were marked by infidel bashing, his missionary journey quickly brought him face to face with the reality of his chosen vocation, in a land where the God he loved so intimately appeared to be as foreign as he did.

His words of Christian comfort to a dying African slave on board ship stung his ears and pierced his heart. It was a first taste for Father Ricci of the blank wall he was facing. While his prayer for the slave expressed the hope that his forced servitude may bequeath hope for others, it was uttered more in the hope that his own chosen servitude may be fruitful.

In Macau, he meets the riddles of language and on the mainland grapples with the conundrums presented by his own foreignness, as he painstakingly searches for the path to the inner sanctum of the emperor of China, whom he dreams of bringing to meet the son of God. He delights as people enter his memory palace, but is disappointed when they only stop to study the clocks, the maps and the other scientific knowledge he has filed away, and not to gaze at the beauty of the images of his God displayed on its walls.

But he loves with persistence and is eventually rewarded with the key to his dream. As Tian commands the music of triumph, he accompanies Father Ricci away from the mundane, as he marches towards the climax of years of preparation, an audience with the emperor, and the scent of his euphoria wafts on the air of the chapel.
However, the sweetness of success is quickly dissolved in the bitter sight of an empty throne. It is the despair of his failure. He is hung on his own cross. He staggers from the palace in Peking into the dust storm of Sodom. Once again his words of Christian solace bring pain to the ears he wants to comfort. He is lost. He does not know if he is in Rome or Peking. Only the comforting words of his beloved Blessed Mother remain.

The puppet children that weave their way through the operatic performance knock on the door of his memory palace. But his dream has died. The door is closed. Father Ricci is dead.

As Tian sings his funeral, one question remains. How can we dream the dreams of God? Producer, director and designer, Matthias Woo, notes, “Once you believe, you will stick to the path until the end.” The Blessed Mother reminded Father Ricci that he would be forever remembered for devoting his whole life to spreading the word of God with peace.

Centuries later, Bishop John Blowick came to the same realisation, as he watched the institutions of his diocese of Hanyang being dismantled by the communist armies. He reflected, “We did not come to convert China, but to do the will of God.”

In the life of Father Ricci, it is the love for peace and the diligence of persistence that appeal to Tian, whose own dream is to sing peace to the world. Woo has a desire to bring art and religion together. He told the Sunday Examiner, “Religion and art go up and down together. In a sophisticated society like Hong Kong, things get centralised into one system. It is a sure way to create a mediocre world.”

However, in Father Ricci, he sees a man who was aware of the limitations created by the boxes we cage ourselves within. He says that in the same way as the missionary of the 16th and 17th centuries, we too must be aware of those limitations and “remain curious about the world beyond the boxes.”

Woo says that for this reason, the production of Father Ricci’s memory palace is abstract, visual and experimental. The images projected onto the wall behind the altar in the chapel by the Zuni Icosahedron organisation, are an invitation to imagine St. Peter walking on the water, something which Father Ricci craved to do as he fretted for an early convert drowning in a shipwreck.

Next, a dapper-looking Father Ricci, affecting a somewhat Chinese-style appearance, is beckoning visitors to his memory palace, then comes the chaos of Sodom and, finally, the mother’s comfort, in Our Blessed Mother.

The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci portrays mission as foreign to the wisdom of the domesticated. It is a challenge to the accepted conversation of any day and invites a search for God in places and faces not yet delved.

The fantasy puppets invite the audience to leave the box of convention and step into Father Ricci’s world.

As he sought to bring a love and a peace to a people of another land, as he searched to touch the dreams of God, Woo says that each person in the audience responds to Father Ricci’s dream in their own way. They can escape, if just for just 90 minutes, the museums of custom that cage the imagination.