In costume

Those for whom world music equates to low-key, earnest appreciation of Javanese gamelan are in for a surprise on April 24, when the Chinese/Mongolian crossover singer Sa Dingding takes to the stage at WOMAD Abu Dhabi. Not that her music is anything other than fascinatingly odd, comprehensively international or groundbreaking: she sings in four languages, one of which is her made-up gathering of remembered sounds and cries (the others are Tibetan, Sanskrit and Mandarin). This is the sort of single-mindedly weird approach that has drawn plenty of comparisons with the oddball Icelandic singer Björk, but in her native China Sa Dingding has attained mainstream success.

Her live performances are notoriously huge, visually stimulating, slickly produced affairs, and her extraordinary costumes are among the most notable features of her concerts. But those costumes are as relevant to her music as the masks in Japanese Noh or the shields and spears of a Zulu war dance. They speak of her influences, her traditions, her innovations and her culture, and while her pretty features, fantastical sets and digitally manipulated music videos could be tailor-made for the three-minute concentration span of the MTV generation, her importance should not be underestimated. She is, after all, one of the only Chinese artists to break through to the international music industry with anything other than classical music.

Chinese and eastern styles have been making a global impression recently: fashion collections by the likes of Dior and Kenzo have been inspired by the rich brocades, colourful patterns and formal shapes of costumes from the Steppes of China and Mongolia. The long sleeves, padded fabrics, stiff, A-line shapes, stylised make-up and sculptural headgear of the Mongolian Empire and the sumptuous silks of Imperial China are having a moment.

Sa Dingding (her given name, Dingding, means "best best") wears costumes on stage whose details are visually and symbolically aligned with the historical styles of her country yet come together in a modern whole. That bears a strong parallel with her music, which combines her unmistakably Chinese vocals with ambient western electronic beats inspired by the likes of Paul Oakenfold and Massive Attack.

"Designing the costumes is sort of like creating my music," she says, speaking through a translator. "I will not just get some traditional elements from the Chinese traditional culture to use directly in my costumes, but I will get inspiration from all those traditional things and rearrange them when I design my own costumes. In some of the small elements you could tell that this is from China or this is Asian, but they have been modified. And this is sort of like my music: you will not find real traditional melodies - all the melodies originated from me; they're not traditional Chinese melodies - but you can feel they're from China."

In fact, Sa Dingding is a personal and artistic patchwork of influences. Born to a Han Chinese father and Mongolian mother, she spent her childhood years at her grandmother's house in Inner Mongolia, an autonomous region of northern China, where she would pass the summers nomadically caring for the horses and other animals in the grasslands, and the winters in the city of Xilinhot, while her parents travelled. Although she also travelled in other parts of China with her parents, settling in Beijing at 17, it was the music and culture of the minority Mongolians that she found endlessly fascinating.

"During that time I could hear the minority music every day, freely. In my memory, all this music I heard in my childhood was very free music, because people would not sing a song for a specific event: they just sing whenever they feel they want to sing and dance whenever they feel they want to dance, and it's just part of their lives." Certainly Sa Dingding is not someone who has difficulty expressing herself in song and dance, and gained a reputation for her irrepressibility when she was studying music at the Beijing Central Conservatory of Music. The whole performance - the song, the choreography, the costume - is important to her. It's not that this is a particularly Chinese approach to music, she says, with her characteristic insistence on freedom within her forms of expression: it is simply something that matters to her.

"There are a lot of musicians who would not agree that music and visual things should go together," she admits. "But I think for myself, for my style of music, the visual is a very important part. "My music is very abstract, especially when it is being listened to by different people from different cultural backgrounds, and also because I use several different languages in my album, Alive. So I think that the visual part is very important to help the audience to understand more about my music. And in terms of the live performance, I think the combination of the visual and the music is very important: the two parts go together and that will make the live performance great, helping the audience enjoy themselves and understand me better."

This is clearly someone who understands the power of clothes and ritual - and we're not just talking fashion. Chinese and Mongolian culture both have long histories of ceremonial roles for their clothes, with costumes emblazoned with symbolic iconography, with colours that represent nationality and with shapes that indicated status. The importance of costume to her onstage persona is not simply about having flattering jeans or showgirl feathers: the outfits are inspired by the music and awash in relevant detail.

"The costumes that I wear, if you change the colour of the dress, that will totally change the feeling of the whole costume because in China the minority groups all have their own special colours. And a lot of the styles of the costumes, they come from ancient paintings, so you can tell what the source is: maybe they are not exactly the same, but you can tell from seeing them, seeing the style or seeing the colour."

Sa Dingding is no slouch when it comes to research and study: she is a keen linguist, and historical documents and paintings are a source of inspiration for many of her costumes and her concepts, which explains her impressively wide-ranging level of cultural referencing, both musically and visually. "Ancient books or paintings are my great interest, so I will spend most of my time reading and doing this kind of research - this is part of my life. So when sometimes I have an inspiration suddenly, I will find all those interests I had before will help me to design my own costume or to create my own music. For me, looking at ancient paintings and ancient books is like reading fashion magazines."

All of this is incredibly worthy and impressive, of course, but what makes Sa Dingding stand out among her compatriots and her fellow musicians is that determination to bring all those influences to bear in a modern context. At the Beijing Central Conservatory, she studied pop singing and, in spite of China's long-standing isolation from the rest of the world, she was introduced to western pop when she was about 10 years old. When she started to use a computer, she developed an interest in electronic music and is proficient enough to have been the main producer on her album Alive, working with a programmer to create the electronic instruments.

"I am still a modern girl," she remarks. "My biggest interests are ancient Chinese culture, ancient music and minority music; and electronic music and modern pop music. So one day I just decided to mix these great interests together. It's a very natural thing for me, because that just reflects my life." And she is, after all, a 26-year-old music-and-fashion-loving woman. She likes shopping, clothes, jewellery, and she loves the constant discovery of travelling the world.

"Now in China there is very good communication with western culture, and after the first album was released around the world I travelled a lot and had a lot of chances to perform with other artists and other cultural backgrounds. I'm very excited to experience this cultural communication and cultural exchanges around the world. I can find a lot of very interesting things in different cultures and different people coming from different countries, and this is also a great interest."

Abu Dhabi's WOMAD is Sa Dingding's first visit to the Middle East and she sees it as a chance to explore a world she has read about extensively. After all, the role of Mongolian culture in the development of Arab culture is well-documented - at its peak, the Mongolian Empire covered 22 per cent of the earth's land area, reaching from the Danube to the Sea of Japan. "I have known this area for a long time because it is an area that has a very precious history and culture and I have read a lot of books about it, so I want to go there and to communicate with the audience there and to feel [what it's like] by myself when I'm standing in the country."

Still, for all her curiosity about the world, her appreciation of the different cultures within the huge country of China, her love of the music of minority peoples, she remains through and through a Chinese woman. Does she feel more Mongolian or more Han? "I think I just feel Chinese," she says simply. "In China the mixture of different cultures and different minority groups is very typical. I know that my grandma is Mongolian but she cannot tell where her great grandma came from: maybe she came from another group. You cannot tell, so for now there is no clear definition between the many different groups: it's just Chinese as a whole." For Sa Dingding, the performer and the person, it is that whole that remains so much greater than its parts.

WOMAD Abu Dhabi takes place from April 23-25. For more details go to www.womadabudhabi.ae. gchamp@thenational.ae