Editor's Pick: Kunqu Opera Meets a Hong Kong DJ

Quick take: A Kunqu performer and an electronic DJ, sharing a bill, twenty floors above the Expo district. Of everything crossing our desk this week, this is the one we actually circled if.

The Kunqu Part (Stay With Me)

Okay. Kunqu. Before your eyes glaze over: this is not "some old Chinese opera." Kunqu is the old Chinese opera. It's the root system. Six hundred years old. Six hundred. UNESCO, noted international arbiters of Things That Matter, gave it one of their very first "Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity" designations back in 2001, which is a very long title that roughly translates to "please, humanity, keep this forever."

So when a rooftop club books a Kunqu artist (Serena, doing 10pm-10:30pm) inside a DJ night, that is one of the heaviest objects in Chinese performing arts getting lowered onto a dance floor. Cool.

I have been to Shanghai "tradition meets contemporary" nights before. Usually that means a qipao print on the cocktail menu and one deeply confused erhu player plugged into a laptop. This appears to be an actual, honest, on-the-lineup collision.

Legit.

The DJ Part

Tom Price, out of Hong Kong, is holding down 22:00 to 01:00. Which, if you're doing the math (and I did, several times, assuming I'd read it wrong), means there's a full half hour where the Kunqu and the electronics are scheduled in the same room at the same time. Duet? Handoff? Beautiful chaos? The flyer isn't saying. I'd pay the cover for that half hour alone.

The Room

TOTS sits on the 20th floor of Thompson Shanghai Expo, which opened not too long ago, as the first Thompson hotel in all of Asia. (Thompson is Hyatt's cooler younger sibling brand, for those of you not maintaining a spreadsheet of hotel sub-brands). It's the curved glass tower at Expo Place down by the Huangpu, interiors doing a whole "the 2010 Expo pavilions, but make it velvet" thing, river views, the works. Somebody spent money on this building. You can tell.

Point is, this experiment gets a real sound system and a real skyline behind it. If you're going to hand six centuries of theatrical tradition a mic next to a DJ booth, this is how you do it.

The Damage

98 yuan entry, and it includes a cocktail. For a Huangpu-view rooftop, in this economy, that's practically charity. After that, everything (food and drinks) is 68 yuan flat, all night, 7pm to 1am. My advice: get there for sunset and ride the whole arc. Golden hour, then Kunqu, then bass until one in the morning.

"A familiar East, remixed for the night," says the PR. Normally I'd make fun of that sentence. Tonight I'm letting it go.

See you up there.

If you go

Date: August 29, 7pm–1am

Venue: TOTS Bar

Address: 20F, Thompson Shanghai Expo

Admission: 98 yuan with one cocktail; all food and drinks 68 yuan each all night