Hot Drinks / Cold Drinks (春归 / 夏隐) is a participatory performance for the tea gathering Return to Nature, where music and tea unfold as a single continuous experience. The audience is served both hot and cold tea, inviting listening as a sensory ritual shaped by taste, smell, temperature, space, and time.

The work draws on four vocal pieces from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries: two from Song dynasty China by Jiang Kui (姜夔)—Zui Yin Shang Xiaopin (醉吟商小品) and Xi Hong Yi (惜红衣)—and two from medieval Europe—Guillaume de Machaut’s Rose, liz, printemps, verdure and the English round Sumer Is Icumen In. Though distant in culture and geography, they share attentiveness to seasonal change and the natural world.

Rather than presenting historical repertoire, the performers improvise through melody, text, and gesture. Moving throughout the space, they shape shifting proximities with the audience—sometimes close, sometimes distant—so that sound appears, disperses, and re-emerges from different points in the room. Fragments of the four vocal pieces surface and dissolve within ambient sound, silence, movement, and shared space.

The performance unfolds in two connected parts. Hot Drinks accompanies the shift from winter to spring with warm tea; Cold Drinks follows the arrival of summer and early autumn with cold tea. The changing temperature and aroma of the tea mirrors the seasonal arc, inviting the audience into a shared practice of attention—where listening, tasting, and smelling become a single, continuous mode of perception, a quiet embodied meditation.

Hot Drinks / Cold Drinks

春归 / 夏隐