Can Drama Move Beyond the Traditional Stage? Exploring the Connection between Stage Works and Local Communities
The inaugural “October is the International Theater Season” continues to impress, highlighting the relationship between diverse works and local communities and audiences.
Following the debut of Jinxing Dance Company’s “Unexpected Farewell,” Jinxing emphasized the relatability of the dancers on stage to the audience, stating that dance conveys the experiences and longings of ordinary people. This resonates with the spirit of the theater season, which aims to break down the traditional boundaries between the stage and the audience, promoting active engagement and participation.
Featuring plays from the UK, France, Germany, and New Zealand, the season seeks to engage with the local community and challenge the conventional stage-audience relationship. The highly anticipated “Brecht’s Ghosts” by the Berlin Theater Company has garnered significant attention, embodying the festival’s commitment to pushing the boundaries of traditional theater.
Furthermore, performances such as “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,” “Unexpected Farewell,” and “Juliet and Romeo” offer distinct and unconventional approaches to storytelling, inviting audiences to participate in meaningful discussions. “Unexpected Farewell” by Jinxing Dance Company, in particular, focuses on local themes and aims to bridge the gap between the dancers and the audience.
The theater festival is not solely about showcasing high-quality performances but also aims to provoke thoughtful engagement and challenge the passive role of the audience. By fostering interactions through pre-performance discussions and community engagement, “October is the International Theater Season” endeavors to expand the boundaries of traditional theater and encourage active participation in the arts.
Original title: Can drama break free from the closed landscape on the frame stage (theme)
The inaugural “October is the International Theater Season” just keeps getting better and better, exploring the effective connection between diverse works and local communities and audiences (subtitle)
After the first performance of Jinxing Dance Company’s new work “Unexpected Farewell”, Jinxing spoke to the audience: “The starting point of this work is to hope that the audience can see that the dancers on stage are you and me in life, and dance expresses all the conditions and longings of ordinary people, rather than aesthetic objects, far to be seen.”
“An Unexpected Farewell” is one of the plays participating in the first “October is the International Theater Season” Jin Xing’s post-performance talk echoes the spiritual pursuit of this theater season: the stage is not closed landscape, and the theater is not stopped In drama, the most important thing is to establish a connection with the audience and raise people’s sense of participation and active thinking.
“October is an International Theater Season” brings together 7 plays from the United Kingdom, France, Germany and New Zealand. In the two months from mid-October to mid-December, “The Past Five Years”, “Unexpected Farewell” and “Bly “Hit’s Ghost” Staged, “Juliet and Romeo”, “Cheese Waltz”, “Cheese Moo” and “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” at the YOUNG Theater respectively. Three of the plays – the London West End musical “The Past Five Years”, “Brecht’s Ghosts” Berlin Theater Company and the dance literature theater ” Juliet and Romeo” – are also plays participating in the 22nd China Shanghai International Arts Festival. “October is the International Theater Season” takes Yangpu as its home location, and cooperates with China Shanghai International Arts Festival to achieve “citywide drama” It also explores how various stage works can interact effectively with the community and local audiences.
Changing the relationship between stage and audience
The Berlinale’s “Brecht’s Ghosts”, which will be performed on November 11th and 12th, is the most watched play in this “October is the Season of International Theatre”. The Berlin Theater Company founded by Brecht made its Shanghai debut, “Brecht’s Ghost” is a new work that premiered at the Dockyard Theater for Spree last fall. His performance at YOUNG Theater was his first performance in Asia, and the theater company’s China The trip only had one stop in Shanghai, and both performances were sold out immediately, the crew decided to add an extra performance at the last minute , but it was still hard to get tickets.
“Brecht’s Ghosts” has become the highlight play of the “October is the International Theater Season”, which in itself is a strong expression: the mission of the theater festival is not limited to selecting and presenting “good plays” “World of Performing “. Arts” and “Cultural Pier”, can performances with an intense repertoire be taken a step further in the curatorial mind?
“Brecht’s Ghosts” is a puppet show for adults. As the puppet box is opened, a stage full of small puppets tells the chronological history of the theatre. The director Suther Weischer is one of the most important puppeteers in Germany and Austria today. She is committed to revolutionizing puppet theater. Most of her works are characterized by the interaction between puppets and operators, dance and music. . Before that, he made over 80 puppets of historical world celebrities for the work “Heroes of the 20th Century”. After performing the work, he continued to make more puppets of famous people who influenced the course of history, forming what he called group portraits. of the “Ancient Corridor”. When she was invited to perform at the Shipyard Theater in Berlin, she realized that she could combine the “Promenade of Ancestors” with the history of the Berlin Theater Company and Brecht’s creative concepts into a work with a special form. She has no intention of recreating the biography of a theater company or playwright in a concrete way, because “the focus is not on drama, but on rediscovering Brecht, through a dialogue with him (the spirit) to explore the relationship between theatre. and performance, and Audience Perceptions in Changing Times.”
We need to look back at history. “Brecht’s Ghost” restores the stage style of the first performance of “The Threepenny Opera”. At that time, Brecht became the most influential playwright in Weimar Germany with “The Threepenny Opera”. Benjamin He was extremely aware of the changes brought about by Brecht who touched the essence of drama. He said: “Brecht changed the functional relationship between the stage and the audience, the script and the performance, and the director and the actors. “After the war, the end Brecht, who was in exile, returned to Berlin and the establishment of a theater company The literal translation of the name of the theater company is “Berlin Collective”. Brecht created a new method of collective creation in the German theater world which defaulted to the “director-centred system”. Actors are no longer the receptacle of the director’s will, and the audience is not the recipient of the content of the performance. It is a “political corner” in daily life. Revealed in a phased manner. When the Berlin Theater Company toured Paris for the first time, Roland Barthes said: “Brecht’s dramatic style makes all French theater seem old-fashioned.” A few years later, Peter Brook told his students in class: “Look at the Berlin Theater Company Let’s see a side of society that has never been seen on our closed stage.”
Now, the puppeteers will call “Brecht’s Ghosts” on stage in Shanghai. This work is not so much a reminder of the “best days” of the Berlin Theater Company, but rather, it is in the context of this period. launch: Can a play break away from the closed landscape on the proscenium stage? How does it present a changing “worldview” and stimulate active audience participation?
Broaden the discussion outside the theatre
Among the performances of “October is the International Drama Season”, the mime “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting”, the modern dance “Unexpected Farewell”, and the dance theater “Juliet and Romeo” are created in a variety of ways, each. with a typical stylized and non-traditional approach. forms, and their creative logic is interconnected. They are all responses to issues that are relevant to ordinary people in life. They use the language of stage and performance to create an area of public discussion that everyone can use it. intervene and participate in it.
Among these works, the modern dance “Unexpected Farewell” is the one with the strongest sense of locality. Not only is the producer Jin Xing a local artist, but the Jinxing Dance Company is based in Dinghai Bridge in Yangpu. on time and The geographical level is all “recent work”. Originally, “Farewel Annisgwyl” was an old work that was put aside because of the epidemic three years ago. It was interrupted by reality and then it started again to achieve the shaping of two ways of dance and reality. The first impression it gives to the audience is “dancing around you”. The movements of the dancers seem ordinary, and their costumes are intuitive and everyday. Jin Xing and the two choreographers believe that the purpose of dance is to evoke the power deep within the body, which belongs to the dancers and the audience. Life-like costumes and rough-looking movements change the distance between dance and the audience to some extent. Just as David Hernandez, one of the choreographers, expressed: Every movement of the dancers actually tells a story’ the dance. What ordinary people say has experienced in recent years, dance allows everyone to think about how individuals form a community and how the strong accept the weak.
High quality performances are no longer rare in Shanghai life, and the more important issue that arises is, what kind of performances and curation can challenge the relationship between spectators and performers? How to make the audience realize that they are part of the art, so that the audience can actively intervene in the art, or even actually intervene? “October is International Theater Season” is an exploration in this direction.
The crew of the musical show “The Past Five Years” entered the public art class of Fudan University. Students and creators exchanged questions about “Do literature and art really inspire the difficult problems of love?” Professor Tan Zheng, an expert in British literature and Shakespeare’s drama, gave a speech in the dance theater “During the pre-performance guide of “Juliet and Romeo”, the audience discussed “How would Shakespeare, who paid attention to market feedback, writing about thwarted love in this period?” In response to the performances of “Cheese Waltz” and “Cheese Moo”, the entire theater was transformed into “”Cheese Town”, the audience can immerse themselves in the food culture behind the drama the moment they step into the theatre. All of the above are conventional interactions around performances, but the mime “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” takes the performance as a starting point and opens a public discussion that has penetrated many people: In the face of disease Alzheimer’s, we How to deal with illness, memory, and life more generally?
The director of “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” revealed that he was inspired by a neuromedicine specialist during its creation. The other person told him that human memories are constantly being built. The hippocampus is at the edge of the brain like a workshop. creative , with arrangements and combinations The director directs people’s memory. The so-called “amnesia” does not mean the disappearance of memory.” That part of the content has always existed, but it has not entered the workshop.” “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” is not a popular science drama about Alzheimer’s disease, nor is it a call to the audience. Missionary work that removes discrimination on the basis of disease, but reveals the diverse perceptions of life behind cold pathology reports on stage. As the director described: “I prefer to understand this as a celebration of life. Illness and amnesia can be seen as another parallel life experience. “This mime has been performed time and time again in performance spaces that are not theater and unconventional. Performance, this constitutes another layer of speech above the work: drama and performance come back to us, back to life, and the public discussion it triggers is also “every moment of life .” Although this performance in Shanghai returns to the traditional frame stage, the discussions and thoughts that the whole “October is the International Theater Season” has sparked spread from the theater to the daily lives around the audience. (Reporter Liu Qing)
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