Chinese Opera Singer Jane Zhang Sings The Diva Dance From The Fifth Element

January 14, 2019

Jane Zhang, 34, is one of the Chinese's leading contemporary recording artists and has no formal training. She sang in bars as a teenager to support her family after her father died. In 2005 she ended up winning third place in a singing competition which eventually landed her a record deal.

Now let's give you some background on the Diva Dance.

The song was composed in 1997 by French composer Éric Serra at the request of filmmaker Luc Besson

When Éric Serra showed the score to soprano Inva Mula, she smiled at him, pointing out that some sentences were impossible to sing, because the human voice cannot jump between notes so far apart on the music scale as it was written on the score.

"For the scene to work, we needed her to sound like an alien, therefore we had to create notes that no human could sing. So I purposely wrote un-singable things, some too low, some too high, sentences that were too fast, I would then arrange it with the sampler," Serra said.

Therefore the notes were sung separately, edited, and then the recorded tracks were superimposed for the film.

Here is Zhang, a singer with no formal opera training, performing the impossible.