World Première

A Multi-media Music Theatre Performance Narrated in English and Sung In Uyghur by JAM & JY

A creative collaboration between Xinjiang and Hong Kong initiated in Beijing

A partnership between a Xinjiang Uyghur post-80s band and Hong Kong theatre practitioners

The traditional Central Asian love story of Gherib-Sanam sung in the Muqam form refashioned as a contemporary theatrical story-telling piece with Muqam performed as a genre of World Music

The moon in a grain of sand
The stars in a handful of dust

Concept: Muhpulla of JAM & Jessica Yeung

Xinjiang, the largest "autonomous region" situated in the northwestern-most of China; Hong Kong, a tiny "special administrative region" at China's south-eastern tip. Yet both places have served as central China's main communicative avenue with the outside world, resulting in a deeply rooted cultural hybridity and an ambiguous intimacy with mainstream central Chinese culture. It is this unlikely shared experience that has brought the two creative teams together. The result is a profound aesthetic journey in search of roots, eclecticism and innovation.

The 12 Uyghur Muqams have been listed among UNESCO's Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. In this adaptation JAM have refashioned the genre into an international World Music artefact, retelling the traditional love story of Gherib and Sanam, with the benefit of avant-garde, multi-media resources to foreground the contemporary context of performance.

Special Introduction: JAM
The five members originate from different regions of Xinjiang. They specialise in a fusion of Uyghur ethnic music, Spanish Flamenco and Cuban rhythm, while exploring and celebrating the fusion of Arabic, Gypsy-Indian, Turkish influences in these musical forms, expressing a pan-Central-Asian sensibility for passion and freedom, and thereby creating a distinctive World Music sound, which is at once local and global.