Fred Ho - Voice of the Dragon (2001)

Combining music, theater and fantastic Chinese martial arts, Voice of the Dragon is a heroic 17th Century martial arts legend of the betrayal of the legendary Shaolin Temple by a renegade monk. It is composer Fred Ho's newest action-adventure music/theater/ballet epic, commissioned by the World Music Institute, The Mary Flagler Cary Trust, The New York State Council on the Arts, David Rodriguez and the John Harms Center for the Arts, Mary Sharp Cronson and Works and Process at The Guggenheim, and Tina Chen. Featuring a narrator/actor performing text written by Fred Ho and Ruth Margraff with music performed by Ho's sextet, The Afro Asian Music Ensemble, ONCE... is a pioneering, groundbreaking, revolutionary multicultural work in a never before-seen explosive combination and fusion of dance and movement forms with pyrotechnical Chinese martial arts.
Fred Ho has created an exciting and sophisticated body of performance works that will mesmerize, entertain and educate the youngest of children as well as the most jaded of adult contemporary performance audiences. Ho has reworked and re-visioned the martial arts legend to serve as a radical allegory about the betrayal of late-20th century activism in the Asian American Movement by the role of sell-outs internal to that movement. The intrigue of Chinese politics, the intense drama of Chinese opera, the grandness of Chinese heroic literature, the virtuosic power of Chinese martial arts are used to illustrate themes of betrayal and bravery, subterfuge and survival, lust for power and loyalty to principle, of determination in the face of destruction and defeat, and of integrity versus invincibility.