Stage Actor Liu Chang: Don't Stop Thinking, Don't Forget Yourself | Interviews ⑧

"When you watch a play, don't ask me what I'm trying to express. Think your own thoughts. I've already spent more than an hour performing in order to say it. If I could say it in a sentence or two, why would I go to all that trouble to perform it?"

In May 2016, Meng Jinghui's studio put out a notice: it was looking for actors. More than 2,000 people turned up. After interviews, 13 were kept. They became a new company called the Black Cat Theater Troupe, and Liu Chang was its head.

Meng Jinghui is the troupe's artistic director. Introducing them, he said he had spent years staging every kind of play and had developed certain styles — satire, song and dance, things nobody can make sense of, and so on — but even so, the Black Cat Theater Troupe would not follow his lead.

On the last day of 2015, after work, Liu Chang and Meng Jinghui ate at a small izakaya by the roadside.

At the time, Liu Chang was playing Ma Lu, the male lead in the fifth production of Rhinoceros in Love. He had performed more than 2,000 shows. He had joined Meng Jinghui's studio straight out of college eight years earlier, and had spent three of those years playing Ma Lu.

Liu Chang didn't want to go on like this. He felt the work was finished, that he should change something, do something else. Meng Jinghui said: "Fine, then direct. And if you're going to do that, just start a troupe."

That night they drank until the next morning, smashed open a wooden sake barrel, and were still drinking when the next day's fresh sake came out. From 2016 on, Liu Chang mostly stopped acting.

First he wrote and directed a piece of his own for the Shenzhen Biennale of Contemporary Theater. Because Liu Chang loves photography, Meng Jinghui handed him a theme: crossing boundaries. The title, 1/125 (《125 分之一》), is a shutter speed. He performed it with a contemporary dancer and made something strongly visual. For roughly the next six months he traveled around Europe watching plays. Then, in May 2016, after the auditions, he assembled the Black Cat Theater Troupe and started rehearsing.

They rehearsed all sorts of things and staged eight productions in a year. Liu Chang says he doesn't spend any thought on which plays not to do. He asks instead: "Which play do I want?"

"I Love XXX (《我爱 XXX》) lets new actors train on lines — just speaking cleanly, almost no plot, everyone performing it together. The Good Person of Szechwan has a lot of switching between characters; that trains their acting. Young Beast (《年轻的野兽》) — what do you do if the job is only to act? A Midsummer Night's Dream is a comedy; how do you play that…"

It was through this that they found, bit by bit, what the troupe was. At the end of August 2016, worn out and unable to rehearse any further, they threw a party called "Whatever Happens Happens" and invited the public. Close to 200 people came to the Fengchao Theater to dance, drink and carry on with the actors for more than three hours.

Meng Jinghui saw that the style of the party was the style of the troupe: young, imaginative, full of passion and destructive — like the black cat on their poster. Liu Chang had photographed that cat at the Avignon Festival. It had something drifting about it and something dangerous, an affinity with the troupe, and a theatrical feel. So they decided they might as well call themselves the Black Cat Theater Troupe.

A year after it was founded, the troupe held a Black Cat Theater Festival, built on the same aesthetic. Besides the plays, the festival had roving parties, flash events and cross-disciplinary happenings. They reach the world through play and imagination.

Take the party. Liu Chang says you can simply treat it as a performance. To him that is a question about theater. There are many ways to live, and through the Black Cat Theater Troupe they want to show people a theatrical one.

In September 2017, not long ago, Liu Chang went home to Anshan and spent a week with his parents.

As he was leaving, his father said that he had come home and never really talked to them. "I hadn't noticed at all. When I left, it hit me: 'Damn.' Not just at myself — there was surprise in it, and regret."

He brought this up because the talk had turned to fear. He said the thing frightened him. Not that he had failed to talk with his parents, but that he could be surprised and full of regret about it.

"Maybe it's age that makes me react this way. I used to not care at all," Liu Chang said. He was on train No. 2549 at the time, an old train, the same one he took the first time he came to Beijing. It leaves at night and doesn't arrive until the next day. His own words: "I was lying there, and that was the question in front of me."

Q: QDaily

Liu Chang: Stage actor, director

Q: Is the Black Cat Theater Troupe's character simply your own character?

Liu Chang: No. We found it bit by bit. It's what I hoped for. It's a theatrical life.

Q: I remember someone asking whether you'd act in film or TV, and you didn't seem to rule it out.

Liu Chang: I've got nothing against it. What I'm against is crap films and crap TV. If something good came along, something great, I'd want to be in it. I just haven't run into one. Maybe I'm not good enough yet.

Q: How do you choose actors?

Liu Chang: There's no fixed standard. It's my own taste, or a judgment I've built up over the years. Someone did ask me once what matters most in an actor. Love. Why is your desire so strong? In the end it's how much energy a person has, how much passion, because that's what changes them.

Q: Do you have the opposite standard in your head — knowing for certain what you don't want?

Liu Chang: I go by what matters most to me, you know? If you're weak somewhere, never mind, I look at what's good in you. Some things can be changed.

Q: Next to the other work from Meng Jinghui's studio, what's different about the Black Cat Theater Troupe's plays?

Liu Chang: The most important thing is that the people are different. When the people are different, everything is different. Everyone has their own texture. On the broad direction — over all these years, what he (Meng Jinghui) likes has shaped me a great deal. We go and see things together.

Q: When Meng Jinghui introduced your troupe, he gave a lot of definitions. Did he miss anything, or leave anything half-said?

Liu Chang: What he thinks doesn't matter that much; that's his way of understanding us. What counts is everyone who pays attention to the troupe. What they think means more to me. The good opinions mean something. The bad ones mean more.

Q: What bad opinions have you heard?

Liu Chang: "Young" is a double-edged word. Being very young has a good sense and a bad one. The bad sense is rawness; the good sense is energy. Doing the work well, working hard, being sincere — that matters. Whatever people say, I listen.

Q: What's the most recent thing you found you'd misunderstood about the world?

Liu Chang: The question is too big. Everyone's world is different; what each person understands and sees is different. I've never thought about it.

What I take "misunderstanding" to mean is finding that something isn't what I thought. So there are two ways to handle it. If I believe my own idea firmly, and nothing is enough to make me think I'm wrong, I hold on to it. If I find I was wrong, I correct it.

And even that isn't fixed. Maybe only at my last breath, when I stop thinking, will I know: this was my misunderstanding, I got it wrong.

Q: What have you been busy with?

Liu Chang: Lately I've been working with a Dutch actor and with Huang Xiangli; we're creating something together. We rehearsed two weeks the first time, we'll rehearse again, and we expect to perform it next year.

Then there's the Black Cat Theater Troupe. It's performing in Shenzhen, and next month Young Beast premieres in Hangzhou. I also have the Black Cat Theater Festival to put on, in Beijing. Other festivals happen once a year; I want to do three this year, which is pretty crazy.

(Why three?) No reason. It's not exactly sensible — people may wonder what kind of people we are, doing all this stuff that has nothing to do with performing. But none of it has left performing behind.

Q: Anything lately worth sharing?

Liu Chang: The Black Cat Theater Festival, and I mean that sincerely. Because I don't know myself what it will turn into. Shanghai was one thing; I don't know what it'll be here, because the people have changed.

That's the thrilling part. Say I see a play — if I try to tell you about it, I can't make it clear. I saw a film, Dunkirk, too mainstream, no thrill in it. What I have and am willing to give people, that's sharing. What you're describing is a recommendation: I saw something, I tell you about it. That's a recommendation.

Have you been off topic this whole time?

Q: Are there moments when you feel you've fallen behind?

Liu Chang: I don't feel I've fallen behind. My actors are all ten years younger than me and they've already started making things of their own. I just feel my age, you know what I mean? That's not falling behind. Look at old Meng (Meng Jinghui) — he's much older; has he fallen behind? No.

Q: What are you thinking about these days?

Liu Chang: How to run the Black Cat Theater Festival at the end of October, and after that, which interesting people to work with, to make new and interesting things.

I'm also thinking about where the troupe goes. Later on there could be our own Black Cat band, a Black Cat radio station; we might shoot our own films. Do some fun things.

Q: Is there much pressure?

Liu Chang: Of course there's pressure. I'd never run a troupe, never directed this many people — before, I was an assistant director. My actors were all half-trained, and we just started. I'm carrying a whole group of people with dreams of theater, and if they don't perform, they don't get paid.

Q: What does the ideal audience look like to you? How do you imagine them?

Liu Chang: I don't imagine them. Why would I lay down rules for other people? Every performance is finished by the actors and the audience together; the two add up.

People ask whether I get sick of it after more than 2,000 shows. But I'm growing too. The audience is the same — they're people. Still, I hope they respect the theater, and respect themselves. A performance is an atmosphere everyone makes together, and it's fragile.

I went to Notre-Dame this time and attended a mass in the morning. In a certain sense that's a performance too. Everyone was devout, everyone had energy. What sort of person you are doesn't matter; what matters most is energy and desire, throwing off the daily grind and making yourself clean.

Q: Do you have advice for society, or something you especially worry about?

Liu Chang: Don't stop thinking, and don't forget yourself.

This has always had to do with our education and our circumstances. Take a text from a school reader: the first question is the key content, the central idea, how the structure runs general-specific-general, what the author meant to express. It never asks what you thought when you read it. Does it really matter what the author was thinking? That's the question.

It's like watching a play: don't ask me what I'm trying to express. Think your own thoughts. I've already spent more than an hour performing in order to say it. If I could say it in a sentence or two, why would I go to all that trouble to perform it? Don't forget to think. Don't always wait for someone to tell you.

Q: Anything you want to say about the theater world?

Liu Chang: See every good thing through to the end. (Does that depend on the period — does it hold for the theater world at any time?) It doesn't depend on anything. It always holds.

Q: What do people commonly misunderstand about theater?

Liu Chang: They think they can't follow it, that they won't get it. They think it's far away from them, but they've never gone near it, so it stays locked in their imagination forever. Everything is a misunderstanding, because all you have is imagination. When you don't know something and you're going on hearsay, that's a misunderstanding.

Other industries are the same. People think film actors are all rich, that the money comes easily, that they all take drugs, that they're all up for an affair. You'll find every industry has people like that.

Q: What kind of person do you want to be?

Liu Chang: Someone who gets something for nothing. Do nothing at all and have it all arrive anyway. That's what I want. I haven't pulled it off, but I want it. For instance, I'd like a houseful of wives and concubines.

Q: Why would you want something for nothing? What's good about it?

Liu Chang: How great would that be? What's wrong with it? I just want something for nothing. That's all. No need to explain further — think what you like.

Q: What talent would you most like to have?

Liu Chang: I'd most like to be great at music. I envy people who can play an instrument; I think it's terrifically cool. It's like a hoodlum who knows martial arts — nobody can stop you.

Q: If you could choose, what would you want to happen again?

Liu Chang: I don't need anything to. I think regret has its own meaning.

Q: Who do you think has done most to push this era forward?

Liu Chang: Every one of us. I think I've pushed this era forward too.

Q: And who's done the most?

Liu Chang: Me. Right — if everyone thought that way, this era would… Actually, to be honest, an era doesn't need pushing. Every era has its own character, its own value. Everyone goes on about people born in the '90s; I think they're fine. That's how it is. An era isn't something one or two people decide.

Q: Among the living, who do you admire most?

Liu Chang: Chen Minghao. He's an actor, we've worked together, and I admire him a lot. He acts brilliantly, he's an interesting man, and he directs too. (Interesting how?) Just interesting.

Q: Why did you want to become a stage actor?

Liu Chang: I didn't want to become a stage actor. I took the drama academy exam and — damn — I became a stage actor. Back then I didn't understand that you don't get whatever you want. I went to college, then found I'd graduated, went looking for a job, and ended up in this one.

Q: What's your motto?

Liu Chang: Once you're out the door, it's all luck. Words of a great philosopher. (Who?) Me. Old Meng agrees with that too. In the end it comes down to taste and choice. Enjoy your bad luck — the part you end up telling other people about is always the bad-luck part.

Images are from Liu Chang's Weibo, the Black Cat Theater Troupe and Meng Jinghui's studio; some images have been cropped.