MCLC: theater festivals

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: claire conceison <cc253 at duke.edu>
Subject: theater festivals
***********************************************************

Here's an article on Chinese theatre for those interested. Cited in the
article are people I have worked closely with for a long time--Yu Rongjun,
Meng Jinghui, Liao Yimei, Guo Qi--but unfortunately the journalist seems
quite ignorant about China, and particularly about Chinese theatre and the
experiments that have been going on for the past 20 years. it is also
unfortunate that the article chooses to highlight a piece directed by a
foreign visitor rather than a local director.

claire

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Source: NYT (12/14/11):
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/15/arts/15iht-chinatheater15.html

China Opens the Stage Curtains
By DIDI KIRSTEN TATLOW

CHENGDU, CHINA ‹ Watching from the front row at 8 Space, a new theater in
the southwestern city of Chengdu, Lei Bing hooted with laughter as three
actresses in panda costumes slapped playing cards on a table and, in
wisecracking dialogue, laid bare their struggle for love, dignity and
affordable housing in the play ³Fight the Landlord.²

Afterward, Ms. Lei, an insurance company worker, gushed about the
Western-style play, which opened the inaugural Chengdu International
Theater Festival in October.

³I felt the things they were talking about could have been my own life,
all our lives. It¹s like it walked right into my heart,² Ms. Lei said of
the play, which was written by the Beijing writer-actress Sun Yue in 2010
and directed by Gavin Quinn of the Pan Pan Theatre in Ireland.

Western-style ³speaking theater,² as it is known here, isn¹t indigenous to
China, where opera and other forms have long dominated the theater scene.
But that is now changing. Festivals, like the one in Chengdu, are part of
a national drive to bring a new kind of theater to smaller cities in
China. Today, established festivals in Shanghai and Beijing are
complemented by new ones opening almost yearly in second-tier, though
still very large, cities like Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province,
where theater has been scarce.

After slow, painful beginnings in the late 1990s, when a theater company
still had to be state-owned and finding private investors was almost
impossible, Western-style theater in China has entered a period of
remarkable richness, directors, producers and playwrights have said.

Although government censorship remains, practitioners are adept at
negotiating its boundaries and officials, anxious to promote culture, are
increasingly funding even challenging productions and paying for private
troupes to participate in festivals abroad, they said.

³Real development in theater began in 2005, when the government permitted
private theater companies to set up, and in the last two years, people
have really begun to pay attention,² Nick Rongjun Yu, deputy general
manager and playwright at the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center, said. ³It¹s a
big time for theater.²

Liao Yimei, author of ³Rhinoceros in Love,² a 1999 play often taken as the
starting point of China¹s contemporary theater boom, said: ³The Chinese
government is rich and really wants to promote culture. Things happen very
fast in China. After the economy develops, a nation wants culture. That¹s
natural. The issue already isn¹t Œcan we do theater or not¹ but, Œhow to
expand to smaller cities.²¹

Even the theater that was showing the play, 8 Space had opened just three
weeks before the festival¹s opening. Housed in a former Soviet-built
radar-parts factory in Music Park, a new cultural district, Li Jing, its
manager, said that 8 Space was the first experimental theater in Chengdu.

Ms. Li said that the Chengdu festival, which she and her business partner
He Boya sponsored, lost money this year. But she said that plenty of
culture officials had given speeches at a pre-festival media conference,
and that she hoped the government would offer financing next year.

The festival showed nine plays, including Harold Pinter¹s ³Betrayal,² and
a production from Taiwan, ³Cao Qi Qiao,² inspired by Eileen Chang¹s novel
³The Golden Cangue.² Next October, Ms. Li wants to stage more.
But for now, she said, ³We really want to focus on the real problems that
people have in their lives, the practical issues they face, because
that¹ll sell tickets.²

Mr. Yu added, ³I think before people had to do plays that the audience
would enjoy,² like shows about office politics and love. Those sorts of
plays still dominate the billings outside the festival. ³But now there are
serious plays too,² Mr. Yu said. ³Fight the Landlord,² named after a card
game, for all its humor, is one.

In the play, three people spend an afternoon playing cards as their
relationships shift ‹ one moment they are friends, the next enemies; a
love triangle, then a family of three or a couple getting counseling;
house-hunters and match-makers, friends in life and just-Internet friends,
in different combinations they collide and interact, eventually parting
alone.

³ŒFight the Landlord¹ is a performance specifically looking at the role of
recent history and memory in today¹s China,² Mr. Quinn wrote in the notes
for the Beijing festival, where the play was also presented. ³Beneath the
sleep of ideology the project intends to find a present day voice for
individual conscience versus silence, using the card game as a virtual
jumping off point.²

Yet audiences outside the major centers of Shanghai and Beijing are still
unused to Western-style theater, Ms. Liao said. Fengchao Theater, the
company founded by Ms. Liao and her husband, the director Meng Jinghui,
recently toured the cities of Dalian and Shijiazhuang. ³The audiences were
terrible,² she said. ³They talked and made and received phone calls all
the way through the performance.²

The audiences in those cities, said Mr. Yu of the Shanghai center, ³are
about where we were a decade ago.²

Still, next up may be the eastern city of Ji¹nan in Shandong province,
said Guo Qi, the executive producer of the Beijing Fringe Festival, now in
its fourth year. In 2012, organizers plan to invite a struggling, private
theater troupe from Foshan, a city in the southern Guangdong province
known for its factories.

The Beijing festival, and its Shanghai counterpart, which ran for a month
through Sunday and is in its seventh year, are important because they are
a ³training ground,² Ms. Guo said.

³It wasn¹t about business, it was about art. We aren¹t in the festival to
make money. The government has money and is willing to spend it. We want
to groom directors and playwrights,² she said, pointing out that about 25
of the 58 plays in the festival in September were locally written
premieres. Seventy percent of 3.5 million renminbi ($550,000) in local
financing for the festival came from the government, Ms. Guo said. Other,
significant, support came from a dozen national cultural institutes,
including those of Poland, Japan and France, and international companies.

Censorship remains real, with municipal culture officials vetting every
script and attending a rehearsal to check for visual offenses.

³Then they discuss things very directly with us,² Ms. Guo said.

In Beijing the process takes about a week; in Shanghai, because of
administrative factors, up to a month, Ms. Guo said. The guidelines ‹
internalized by the Chinese ‹ are, no anti-government or ³anti-social²
content, no nudity or overt sexuality, handle religion with care. While
this may seem like a lot, ³It¹s better than before,² Mr. Yu remarked.

Ms. Liao said: ³Theater is not a mass entertainment form, so it hasn¹t
been controlled as tightly as film or television. It has had more space
and fewer political pressures.²

Ms. Guo said the theater ³is really very free now. You won¹t really be
shut down for a sentence any more.²
But occasionally, something falls foul of the system.

³At a recent production at our theater a pregnant actress, who was married
to the director, took all her clothes off on stage. That kind of thing can
cause real problems for us,² Ms. Liao said.

Those mounting Western-style theater in China remain cautious, despite the
rapid developments. ³It¹s a dangerous time,² said Ms. Li of 8 Space.
³Because when you are the first person to do something in a city, there¹s
pressure.²