/PRZWT/Beijing, July 15, 2024 - Preface "To such a midsummer, and to everyone who is interested in theatre"
Summer is a carnival of alcohol and dopamine, a specific season to release your inner throbbing and passion, and a season when big plays are brought to your eyes. Only at this time, you don't have to deliberately capture the neglected life around you, because thousands of life trajectories have been condensed into a good show in front of you.
All you need to do is to take up the special cup of life, sit in a corner of the city and see the world as it is, and constantly profile the "story fragments" you see with your eyes.
This is watching a play. Each script is unique, and each creator uses their own unique perspective to describe to you the "variety of life" in the same world.
01 "Artistic creation and ordinary life are not opposites, they should be read together."
This year is the third time 751 has held the Beijing Drama Carnival. For the public, drama is about the epitome of a kind of perceptible and empathetic life, but it is not as real as the daily trivia of tea, rice, oil and salt, and bitter and sweet. This innate sense of distance stems from the subtle gap between art and life.
Is the gap really irreducible? Is artistic creation really higher than ordinary life? Ordinary life is doomed not to be a footnote to art?
"Artistic creation originates from ordinary life", which can be said to have condensed the voices of everyone in the previous two Beijing Drama Carnivals, and is also a common understanding reached by many participating artists, creators, starring actors and the public.
This year's 751 Beijing Drama Carnival, we still use this precious consensus and understanding, and use every play rooted in ordinary life to "old art and new", just like the role of human beings in life is complex and constantly changing, but the way of looking at life is always positive, positive, and even with a hint of witty Forrest Gump color to firmly believe.
Life is a thousand faces, art is all-seeing, and ordinary Chinese can perceive true knowledge and perceive the appearance of life like a play.
02 "To see the world, it is better to go out of your own world and look around you"
If Beijing, which is striving to build a performing arts capital, is attracting more and more attention, then this year's Beijing Drama Carnival will attract all attention from July to August to these 11 major performances.
1. Art District: Entering the Evolution History of Old Factory Buildings and Seeing the Transformation from Industry to Art
How to be reborn?! How to be reborn?! Although it seems to be all wrong, it is actually destined. Watch Xiao Ke take the small workers in the old factory as the protagonist and tell the story of how to transform his old factory into an art district on the verge of unemployment and layoffs.
2. Water Flows Down: A Father-Son Dialogue on Chinese Family Outlook and Life Outlook
Prompting marriage - this may be a problem that most adults encounter. Under the collision of traditional family education concepts and modern new ideas, what makes the iceberg-like parent-child relationship resolve?
Screenwriter and director Gu Lei takes father and son and marriage urging as an important factor in the drama conflict, bringing a drama that is both a tragicomedy and a warm poem.
3. A series of children's dramas: defeating magic with magic and leaving a utopia for childlike innocence
The world of children is always depicted in colorful colors with their imagination, and they enter the magical world of drama creation together to awaken the childlike innocence that has never been transformed and dusted in their hearts.
"Play One" is the work of Wu Liuqi, a contestant of the "Annual Drama Competition". He tells several witty stories in the way of a clown, and uses finger puppets and rich and cute props to create a fantasy space for children to stimulate their imagination.
"Mr. Cha's Magic Forest Magic Movement" is China's first parent-child musical magic drama created by Sha Wenshuo and Yang Heran. The drama takes environmental protection as the theme, takes "light" as the main expression method, uses domestic top music arrangement, and uses beautiful and dreamy soundtrack and live professional singing to bring adults and children into an immersive live interaction.
"Mr. Char's Suitcase" is also a well-crafted immersive children's interactive experience magic drama co-created by Sha Wenshuo and Yang Heran. It skillfully integrates multiple expressions such as comedy, physical mime and audience interaction, allowing children's imagination to become the joy of adults.
4. Farce theater: improvisation, everything that will happen is unknown
The farce field is led by Ah Qiu and a group of improvised comedians, divided into "Farce Field Improvisation Competition" and "Staying Up Late Improvisation Special Show", of which "Farce Field Improvisation Competition" will determine the performance direction by drawing official original cards; let everyone become a part of this comedy creation, witness and immerse themselves in the unknown hilarious and touching.
5. Wang Zi Mime Blind Box Show: Silent performances can also make the audience laugh
Wang Zi brought a special performance of his new comedy collection, using a unique "blind box extraction mode". Before the performance, Wang Zi selected five to seven of the more than 20 works, including special "hidden styles", and rearranged the content and presented it to the audience.
6. She's fine!: Showing female power in the face of urban pressure
"Instead of internal friction, it is better to collapse." Pan Yue uses six delicate and subtle life fragments as a mirror to reflect the beauty and waves of the modern female world. Under this prism, every moment of internal friction is given a new life. She interprets the "cool point" that everyone has imagined in their hearts in a fanciful way, and is the best stage mouth for urban girls.
7. Romantic Occasional Arrivals: Dramatic Romance from a Classic Drama
Whether it is Romeo and Juliet, or Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai, the occasional "Romantic" is the shining point of happiness in our lives.
Director Xiao Jing carefully selected the classic clips of love in the history of seven dramas, including "Romeo and Juliet", and invited the audience to relive and experience the romantic moments in the drama with professional drama actors.
8. When Chopin Encountered Modern Dance, a Contemporary Dance Theatre Experiment
When classical music and contemporary dance merge on the stage, what kind of spark will this unprecedented collision generate?
The piano performance of musician Ruben Micieli reinterprets Chopin's works, injecting new inspiration and sensibility. Alexander Lopez Guerra, the resident dancer of the Pina Bausch Dance Company, interacts with the music in the form of improvised dance, and their unique body language fully interprets the emotions and images in Chopin's music.
03 "People who watch theatre are also creating lives together with art creators."
Someone once said that the process of drama creation is the relationship between people and all the living things around them, and this relationship allows each other's vitality to have their own reverberations. This sound echo is co-creation.
In addition to the colorful repertoire of the Beijing Drama Carnival, the #Drama Co-Creators #project will be launched simultaneously in Xiaohongshu on July 18. Through this plan, we hope to "open" the public's voice box for drama creation, leave a sentence or a piece of unadorned copy, and work with artists to create a new language expression. These are as precious as jade in our eyes.
Back to the original question: "What do we really want to see when we talk about theater?"
The answer is their own. When their eyes cross the stage, everyone who is watching the play seriously is playing their own role.
I hope everyone can come and sit on the red horse of the 751 Beijing Drama Carnival, watch life, see themselves, and watch the play.
