“Nowadays, we have people listening to AI pop singers,” Chinese-American composer Huang Ruo says during a talk on music and culture in Hong Kong. “They sing so beautifully, but it’s not real. So I do believe theatre and opera are the last dance of humanity.” The 50-year-old New York-based conductor and pianist behind acclaimed cross-cultural operatic projects M. Butterfly (2022) and The Monkey King (2025) made further impassioned statements about performing arts in the modern world. “Seriously,...