composer

Huihui Cheng focuses on the domain “theatrically extended composition”, discovering the optical figures of music, giving the sound a theatrical meaning, to increase the expression potential of music.

She experiments with different matters, costumes, lighting, extended objects, movements, etc. To feature intermedia elements she involves dance, performance, and video installation. What they all have in common is that communication forms a central theme: Communication between the performers, between People and machines, and with the audience.

She invented playing installation Piano and its playing technique – water and gloves – in her piece Messenger; and explored the combination of visual elements/costume as an extended acoustic and visual object in her piece Me Du Ca; She collaborated with the ISMM research team at IRCAM (CoSiMa) and engineer Benjamin Matuszewski, on participatory settings using the audience’s smartphones. She also collaborates with artists from different domains, poets, visual artists, video artist, costume designer and she is active in the theater-opera scene recently.

She was fellow of the Kunststiftung Baden-Württemberg, Schloss Wiepersdorf, Künstlerhaus Schöppingen in Germany; Camargo Foundation, Royaumont Foundation and GMEM in France and German academie Villa Massimo-Casa Baldi in Italy, as attended academies of the SWR Vocal Ensemble and the Akademie Musiktheater Heute.

Her works have been performed in the Beijing Modern Music Festival, Berlin Chinese Culture Festival, Munich Biennale, Tongyeong International Music Festival in Korea, Wien Modern Festival, Darmstadt Ferienkurse, Eclat Festival Stuttgart, Klangzeit, and Rainy days Festival Luxemburg. She won first prize at the International Isang Yun Competition, and with her work “Me Du Ça”, she won the ZKM Giga-Hertz Production Prize in 2016, etc.

Huihui Cheng ( born in 1985 in Wu-Chang, province of Hei-Long-Jiang, northeastern China) started to play the piano at a very young age and wrote her first compositions at the age of nine. She took piano and composition lessons in Wuchang with Weiping Xie, who trained her to enter the middle school of the national university for music in Beijing at age of fourteen, a college for musically highly gifted children, under professor Lin Zhu.

She studied composition with Guoping Jia at the Central Conservatory of Music Beijing, Caspar Johannes Walter, Marco Stroppa, and Martin Schüttler as well as Piet Mayer (electronic music) and the State College of Music and Performing Arts in Stuttgart. In 2015/16 she attended the IRCAM Cursus in Paris, under Héctor Parra and Grégoire Lorieux.

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