A Theater Festival Just Ended in Rural Weifang — Young Artists' "Experiment" to Change the Countryside

The festival's own participants are wrestling with a question: how do you tell "self-indulgence" apart from "creation"?

At three in the afternoon on April 14, the Lingyunyan Physical Guerrillas began their performance on a garbage heap in Moujiayuan Village.

Li Ning, stripped to the waist, slammed a four-meter wooden stake into the ground. Beside him the other performers hammered at abandoned fuel drums, scattered steel frames and rusted trash bins with tree branches, as if playing instruments.

On the heap they ate chicken and gnawed on wood. The villagers watching frowned, baffled.

The second Rural Theater Festival in Weifang, Shandong, was under way.

One of the very few Chinese theater festivals staged in open countryside, it came about entirely by accident.

In April 2016 the pear trees at the home of a Moujiayuan villager, Mou Changfei, came into blossom, and he had the idea of asking a few friends over to sing opera in the orchard. Then he thought again: the people who like traditional opera tend to be old, while young people like him prefer theater that is more fun. So he began working out how to bring the city's theater into the village. Over lunch that same day he posted a few hundred characters on WeChat, inviting contemporary theater-makers with ideas to come and make work in the village. That afternoon Li Ning called to sign up.

Li Ning is from Jinan. His company, the Lingyunyan Physical Guerrillas, makes experimental theater; it has played the Beijing Fringe Festival, the Wuzhen Theater Festival and the Avignon Festival in France, and is modestly well known in Chinese theater circles. He spent his childhood up to the age of seven in the Weifang countryside with his grandmother, and signed up the moment he saw Mou Changfei's call, hoping to find the feeling of going home.

At first Mou Changfei thought of the festival as something to amuse himself with — maybe 10 friends coming over to play around. In the end he drew performers from Beijing, Shanghai, Zhucheng and Shenyang, who brought the village plays, documentaries, music and dance, Shandong Maoqiang opera, even a body workshop. That is how the first Rural Theater Festival came together.

As Mou Changfei planned it, the festival runs once a year in two editions, timed to the spring sowing and the autumn harvest. The first, last spring, took "Flowers" as its theme and built a reputation in the performers' WeChat Moments; when the autumn edition, on the theme of "Overgrowth," was promoted in October, it immediately drew a dozen or so troupes, along with coverage from People's Daily and The Paper.

This spring was the third time Mou Changfei had staged it. Over three days, April 14 to 16, on the theme of "Sprouting," more than 100 performers and audience members from around the country came to this unremarkable little Shandong village.

It was Li Ning's third visit. He says he is not interested in people, only in things, which is why the Lingyunyan Physical Guerrillas work mostly in physical theater. They specialize in site-specific pieces; for this festival they moved into the village 10 days early to build the work on the spot, out of what they found there and around Moujiayuan's landscape.

The piece is called My Land, My Body: Rough Reality DJ (《吾土我身之糙现实 DJ》), billed as their "harshest, roughest, most explosive and dirtiest" work in years.

Chang Jiang, one of the performers, said they chose the dump because the afternoon light gives it a kind of broken beauty. Rehearsing there was not easy: the actors had to roll about on the garbage, and when spiders kept landing on their shoulders all they could do was flick them off gently.

For a stronger effect, the director, Li Ning, also worked in the eating of chicken and the gnawing of wood to fit the setting — bringing taste into play, setting one thing off against another. They dug a pit in the sand nearby, propped up a hollow chamber with bricks around it, laid two large stones on top and covered them with earth: a loudspeaker built into the ground, so that every blow of the stake came back as a reverberation.

Chang Jiang says the Lingyunyan Physical Guerrillas work without a script. Material comes out of members sparking off one another in rehearsal, and the piece is built by splicing key passages together. "Say we're working on the problem of sound. One actor is practicing, another joins in without thinking about it, and it gets wild, really wild. When we agree on something, a lot comes out of it. If the director thinks a passage works, he keeps it and tells the actors where to stand." Their shows have few lines and little music; much of the sound comes from actors striking their own bodies.

Novel as the work is, the villagers watching found it hard to make out what the performers were doing. Chang Jiang admits as much: "Words run out. There's no way to explain what we do."

Li Ning argues that art can often help people see the value of an object from another angle, and that audiences should trust their own intelligence instead of doubting it. "What you see is what it is. A piece of physical theater like ours just puts up a ladder for you. Whether you climb it and grab an apple or a peach, whatever you taste is yours. This is an age of equals. There's no need to instill anything or to educate anyone. That is what contemporary art is."

Lang Jianfei, at the Rural Theater Festival for the first time, says much the same about contemporary theater: "Don't classify contemporary art. Classification always comes after the thing exists."

Lang Jianfei directs the art troupe at South-Central Minzu University. His company, the Jianghu Theater Troupe, was founded in 2009 and now has more than 40 non-professional actors, all of them working, studying or living in Wuhan. They describe themselves as "respecting tradition without being bound by it, wanting to read people and the world in a more contemporary way." Five members, Lang Jianfei among them, came to the festival.

On their first day they walked around the villages near Moujiayuan to get a feel for the place — and threw out everything they had planned from photographs, because "a place in 360 degrees is a different thing."

Lang Jianfei says you can plainly feel how few young people are left in the village. "'Sprouting' means everything coming up, everything growing. The grass and the trees grow — but of the people who grow up here, how many stay?"

So his actors put on black, dragged long swathes of red silk through Mou Changfei's family pear orchard, and performed Fence on the Country Lane (《陌上篱》), singing Chen Jiannian's "How High the Mountain" over and over:

The mountain high / the road long A bend of flowing water / wildflowers' scent The mountain high / the road long With me walking beside you, you are not alone

One spectator, though, told Lang Jianfei it looked like big red bats flying.

The red, Lang Jianfei told QDaily, stands for China's farmland, its culture, its bloodline. They had meant to borrow clothes from the villagers and blend in with them, he said, but found that village clothing meant nothing in the piece: "It can't stand out. It just gets swallowed by the surroundings. Red cloth is better."

During Fence on the Country Lane, a villager parked an electric scooter inside the playing area. Lang Jianfei shouted for the owner for a long time and got no answer, so he pushed it out himself, scraped his left foot, and the nail on his big toe lifted straight off its bed. He jogged a few steps in the dirt, decided it was fine, and went straight into the next piece, Like Grass and Trees (《将如草木》).

It opened with him plowing a wheat field. Partway through, the actors of the Lingyunyan Physical Guerrillas came running in, kicking up dust, moving hard. Even as he began working out what rhythm and what positions would let the two groups compose a picture together, Lang Jianfei was tumbling through the soil with the rest of them.

By the end of the show his toenail was standing straight up.

But two young women who study "applied theater" and "Chinese spoken drama," and who had come to Moujiayuan especially to watch, said they did not like seeing the actors roll in the dirt and pinch one another. "It feels like their own self-indulgence. And you come to a village to perform for the locals, and the locals have no idea what's going on. From now on they may think that this is what theater is — that theater is the thing you can't understand. Which it plainly isn't."

"Who's going to watch them here in the village? This isn't a big city — the atmosphere is different, the level is different. They may be throwing everything into performing here, into expressing themselves, but a lot of the locals don't understand them." Zhuang Xiuhua, a high-school classmate of Li Ning's, had come out from Weifang city to watch, and she had the same worry. She works in hydrology. "They put all this in, and they get something out of it themselves, but a lot of people feel nothing at all."

Wang Yongsheng, a painter from Songzhuang, disagreed, and cheered the performers on. "They react fast. Young people's inventiveness has really made me look again."

Zhang Xiaoting, an amateur photographer from Weifang, thought the festival was well done. "It brings village life alive. At the very least it lifts the spirit and leaves you feeling good." Zhang Xiaoting watched the Zhangqiu Bangzi opera company from Jinan with more than 20 friends from the seniors' college, and took a lot of photographs.

"Snail," a visitor from Zhejiang, stayed three days and particularly liked the way the work was staged here. "Once you're out of the theater, the natural light is wonderful. Here you can see the soil and the needle tips of the wheat. In this most ordinary of ordinary villages, theater is happening all the time." "Snail" owns a bayberry orchard in Taizhou and puts on arts events there too.

Mou Guohua, Mou Changfei's uncle, says the festival is a good thing: "At least people find out there's something in a place called Moujiayuan. They come and look at the old houses, the pear trees, the cherries, the vegetable greenhouses, the fields. That's the land of northern Weifang."

He also points to a real problem: the villagers can't follow what they hear and see. "A show came last year. Mention the rolling around on the ground and everyone knows it, but ask what opera they were singing and nobody can tell you." The festival does put on some traditional pieces, Mou Guohua says — Hunan nuo opera last year, for instance — but the dialects make them hard to follow. Villagers over 75 prefer Peking opera; the slightly younger ones like the model operas of the 1960s and 70s. Phones and television take up attention too.

"Then again, whatever you do these days, somebody will object," Mou Guohua added.

"Changfei's done a good turn for the folks here," said a Party general-branch secretary named Sun from Gaoli Town, who came to this year's festival. He had been in charge of the area for less than a week, though, and did not know the details.

By his account, the government has no plan for how the festival might develop. It is still a purely private undertaking.

A department head named Du at the Hanting district propaganda office knew more about it. He watched Zhou Qing, an actor with Beijing's Shourui Theater Society, dance ballet in Mou Changfei's family pear orchard, and noticed how few local villagers had come. He suggested splitting the festival into several strands to suit audiences of different ages. "Put on nothing but modern avant-garde work and people here can't take it. I've been wondering — is it basically actors watching actors perform? Are there no ordinary people watching the actors?" He also told QDaily that, to get ready for the festival, the village had cleaned up the corners it usually neglects.

It was that cleanup that took down a vegetable trellis an old woman had built at the village entrance, which left Mou Changfei feeling, as he put it, as if he'd swallowed a fly. He apologized to her at once and gave her 100 yuan.

His bottom line, Mou Changfei says, is never to be cursed at by ordinary people.

And before their show, Li Ning's Lingyunyan Physical Guerrillas failed to clear things in time and took over the sandy patch beside the dump; the owner of the land answered by throwing pig manure across the playing area. Mou Changfei spent another 100 yuan making amends.

"People aren't after money. In her world, a single scallion or a single head of garlic matters," Mou Changfei said afterwards. "We can't hold everyone hostage to the festival, as if they had to support whatever we do. The festival still has to touch the ground of the village. It isn't lofty just because they can't follow it. That's not how it works."

Mou Changfei is 30 and grew up in Moujiayuan. In 2009 he went to Nanshan College in Yantai to study fashion design, then spent two years in Beijing's Liulichang learning to mount paintings and calligraphy. Back in Weifang, he carried a gun for three years as a bank cash escort, then quit for two years at the Guo Weiqu Art Museum. Now he runs his own Jianshan Studio, doing calligraphy, seal carving and brush work, and has settled in Weifang city.

But Mou Changfei says this small patch of land shaped how he sees the world, his values included, and that living in the city leaves him pulled two ways, snagged. He has been looking for "a way of returning to the countryside."

In Beijing he once visited the studio of Zou Xueping. In 2009, fresh out of the new-media department of the China Academy of Art, Zou Xueping joined the Folk Memory Project in Caochangdi, which sends participants back to their own villages with video cameras to record old people's accounts of the three years of famine. Her first documentary came out of it: A Hungry Village (《饥饿的村子》), about her home village of Zoujia in Yangxin County, Shandong.

Oral history did not look hard to Mou Changfei; he thought he could do it too. In 2015 he took a camcorder back to the village and interviewed more than 100 old people about their pasts. What struck him was that these perfectly ordinary old villagers had all had spirited youths, had all tried at some point to break the locks on their lives, and had all ended up carried along by the tide of a great era into obscurity.

In under three years, a third of the old people he had recorded were dead. The drain of people out of the countryside suddenly felt urgent, and he moved his attention to rural reconstruction. "I've followed a lot of community-building and rural-reconstruction cases at home and abroad — the Bishan Project, the Wuzhen Theater Festival, Japan's Toga Festival, the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale. But those places had natural advantages to begin with; they could be built up slowly. What do you do with a village as plain as Moujiayuan?"

Mou Changfei wants the festival to be an "experiment": can an unremarkable northern village grow through theater?

He goes back now and then to Xiong Foxi's The Experiment in Popularizing Drama (《戏剧大众化实验》).

In the 1930s, the Mass Education Movement led by James Yen launched a rural reconstruction campaign with Ding County in Hebei as its test site: literacy, the economy, public health and the arts. Xiong Foxi was invited to bring teachers and students from the drama department of the China Specialized School of Arts to Ding County for five years of experiments in popular theater. The villagers built their own playhouse and wrote and staged their own plays; the visitors also taught them to grow cotton, decorate their houses and settle family quarrels.

"That experiment failed when the war with Japan broke out, but it's a useful reference for us," Mou Changfei says. "A lot of China's big problems are settled in the countryside. What we're doing is still nowhere near enough — not grounded enough, not concrete enough."

In Moujiayuan, farmers live mainly on wheat and corn, and beyond that on greenhouses, orchards, poultry and wage work away from home. By bringing in theater, Mou Changfei hopes to work his way toward schooling, house repairs and training in farming techniques for the village.

Wanting is one thing; he has no money. Last year's two festivals were paid for by a culture and media company in Weifang — just over 10,000 yuan the first time, about 130,000 the second. This year the sponsor's funding fell through at the last minute, and performers who had already bought their tickets ate three meals a day at Mou Changfei's house: flatbread rolled around egg, and pancakes with xiaodoufu, free.

On the third day of the festival, a rose estate in Weifang came to Mou Changfei to talk about working together. "They're in trouble too," he told QDaily. "Artsy young people can't rescue artsy young people."

Cover image courtesy of Verna.