Double Happiness: Detour This Way duo expands its music-theatre vision with more family and community input
At the Modulus Festival, Nancy Tam and Robyn Jacob’s rich, genre-defying exploration of immigration and displacement re-emerges from pandemic limbo
Music on Main, Neworld Theatre, Plastic Orchid Factory, and re:Naissance Opera present Double Happiness: Detour This Way at Left of Main (211 Keefer Street) from November 3 to 12, as part of the Modulus Festival.
THERE ARE WORSE THINGS than having your act postponed, as Nancy Tam and Robyn Jacob will readily attest.
The last time we spoke to the interdisciplinary creators behind Double Happiness: Detour This Way, their show was scheduled to open at the Left of Main performance space on March 12, 2020. And so it did, but few could have predicted what would happen next.
“Well, it was an interesting time for everybody, as we all know,” Tam says with wry understatement, interviewed with Jacob via Zoom. “The day before we opened, COVID-19 was upgraded to a pandemic from an epidemic, and there was a bit of a switch, right? And we were in this limbo land, where we were able to perform for half of our run, like one out of two weeks—and then we had to very quickly pack our show into boxes.
“So that’s what happened there, and for a long time we had a lot of people come up and say ‘Oh my god, that was the last show I saw before…’” she adds. “And the posters were up for months, because there were no further shows.”
The original incarnation of the music-theatre production grew out of Technicolour Education, released by Jacob’s band Only a Visitor in early 2019. At first, the singer, pianist, and songwriter had enlisted Tam to create a multimedia performance environment riffing on the themes of immigration and displacement in its 10 songs, which draw on family stories Jacob had unearthed while researching her Chinese-born mother’s complex path to Canada. As they began to work together, though, they discovered that aspects of the elder Jacob’s life mirrored Tam’s; she was born in Hong Kong and came to Canada as a pre-teen, in 1997. The two began seeking out other immigrant stories, added Tam’s own songs to the setlist, and arrived at a more expansive vision that remains part concert, part theatrical production, and part performance art.
At the time of our original interview, Tam drew a loose analogy between the experience of watching Double Happiness and learning to live in a new country. “You kind of know what’s happening and you kind of don’t,” she said. “Coming to Canada and trying to be a kid still and encountering so many new concepts and new things…was a big part of how I pieced together my identity. And certainly I feel like that experience is not unique. It’s a shared communal experience, and not just within the Chinese diaspora, but within diasporic culture.”
“It’s really helping me put a new lens on what I was learning from my elders, and my mom also,” Jacob added. “I’ve also met tons of people in the Chinese community who are fantastic contributors to the project, so I think it’s just been so beneficial on so many levels, personally and artistically.”
With two years to mull things over, Jacob and Tam have further refined and expanded their concept, and the reworked Double Happiness—which opens at Left of Main next week as part of Music on Main’s Modulus Festival—goes even deeper into their respective origin stories, while incorporating more family and community input.
“We were able to catch up with a lot of the interviewees that we had talked to as part of the research for this show, and then a few more,” Tam says now. “For example, we were able to talk to my younger brother about his perspective on emigrating from Hong Kong to Canada, and that added a new dimension to the work.
“Like, I came to Canada when I was 11 and he was five,” she adds. “Just those few years made his perspective way different. We heard things from him that were surprising to me. You know, I was way more observant and able to understand more of the circumstance, but he was just a little kid, so he didn’t clock those things and there’s a kind of discrepancy or gap between our experiences. I’d thought ‘Oh, we grew up in the same house, so our experiences should be similar.’ But in fact they weren’t.”
Becoming a first-time mother has also brought a different perspective to Jacob. “It feels like I’ve been learning about my own responsibility to acknowledge and learn about my own family as part of the knowledge-keeping that I can transfer on,” she says. “My mom is that person in her family. I mean, there’s more than just my mom doing this, but she does hold a lot of the knowledge. She knows the extended family really well, and she keeps tabs on people, and not everyone does that in a family. But through this process I’m learning about that—and you have to do it. It doesn’t just happen. So that’s a big thing.”
Tam adds that the two-year hiatus between the first and second iterations of Double Happiness: Detour This Way has had another unexpected benefit. Not only have she and Jacob been able to access more funding for the project, they’ve also enlarged their artistic universe. New collaborations include a collection of Tam’s songs, Twin Spirits, which she describes as “a sister album to Technicolour Education”; a 31-minute film or “visual album”, A Little Detour, that will screen on November 26 as part of re:Naissance Opera’s IndieFest; a commission from Carousel Theatre to write three audio plays for young audiences; and a new collective, Five Blessings, that also includes Vancouver Asian Canadian Theatre artistic director Derek Chan, Gateway Theatre producer and interdisciplinary artist Jasmine Chen, and actor and director Howard Dai. Look for their A Year of Blessings, another theatre-for-young-people undertaking which will “explain or introduce six Chinese holidays” over the course of 2023.
All of these projects, Tam says, aim to offer hope for the future and a sense of continuity with the past to often-marginalized audiences.
“We’re really focusing on little Chinese kids growing up in North America,” she explains. “What do they need, what do they know, what do they not know? I just feels meaningful and, yeah, right to go ‘We see you. We want you to feel represented and we want you to know that you have a place, and that we’re thinking about you.’”
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