A Contemporary Ballet Company Packs Up. December, Beijing.

The Beijing Contemporary Ballet and its founder, Han Jiang, after the eviction notice arrived.

Nine days after the notice came, Han Jiang, founder of the Beijing Contemporary Ballet, said: "I've decided I'm going to be a squatter for now." He already had a plan for moving out. The line was for the landlord's benefit.

On November 27, Han Jiang posted the relocation notice to his WeChat Moments, in a wry tone that showed no trace of urgency. The notice had come the day before: "In accordance with directives from the municipal and district authorities, the Cuigezhuang Township Party Committee and Township Government has decided, in light of local conditions, to restructure the area's industrial layout and carry out a full clearance of non-residential properties in Feijia Village."

Two supplementary rules followed. Units with steel-panel structures, mixed residential-commercial-workshop use, dense occupancy, or fire hazards must cease all operations that day. Rental apartments and rental compounds must complete a full clearance, with every unit vacated, by December 15.

A fire in Beijing's Daxing district on November 18 had set off a citywide forty-day campaign to inspect, clear, and rectify fire hazards. Now the sweep had reached Feijia Village.

The space the Beijing Contemporary Ballet rents sits inside the Shangri-La Arts Commune in Feijia Village. It is a non-residential property, and its entire roof is steel paneling, which makes it the only tenant in the commune to violate both supplementary rules.

Yet Han Jiang spoke about his situation with no apparent alarm. The only time he went quiet was when inspectors in red armbands appeared outside the window. He would stop mid-sentence and watch them. He knew they had come to check whether tenants had stopped work as the notice required. He watched with an unhurried steadiness, the way a wild animal watches.

He spoke to QDaily with flat certainty. Even the short deadline put no real pressure on them, he said. They had a moving company they had worked with for years, a warehouse of more than 1,000 square meters in Hebei, and could clear out in two days. A friend would lend them a place to rehearse in the meantime, and from March a new partnership would give them a rehearsal studio as well.

He let slip how much had been thrown into disorder in recent years: "But this is a difficulty performing artists have always faced." Han Jiang is not a man who likes to show weakness. He spoke of the company with a spare, proud directness: "We already have a five-year slate of work planned, and every piece will be an event. I don't know how the official histories will write it, but the public will keep a record of us, and we have a standing in the world. Next to that, the housing thing isn't a thing."

He reached for the image of working a walnut until it takes on a patina to describe how a rehearsal space has to be "fed" by its productions and its people. "You can't keep moving around. The energy scatters, and problems follow."

Even a figure as renowned as the director Lin Zhaohua: his production of 《三姐妹·等待戈多》, Three Sisters · Waiting for Godot, went back into rehearsal this year, and from what Han Jiang knew, that one production had already changed rehearsal spaces three times. At one point it had even considered using the Beijing Contemporary Ballet's studio to find a larger room.

Han Jiang has run the Beijing Contemporary Ballet since 2008, with his wife, Wang Yuanyuan, as his partner. She is the artistic director; he is the producer.

The company gives more than sixty performances a year, roughly one a week. Its most popular works include 《霾》 (Haze), 《野草》 (Wild Grass), 《莲》 (Lotus), 《夜莺与玫瑰》 (The Nightingale and the Rose), and 《安魂曲》 (Requiem), all of which stay in steady rotation on tour. The next two months alone hold seven performances: The Nightingale and the Rose and Lotus in Hangzhou and Xuzhou from December 20 to 23, then Requiem, The Nightingale and the Rose, Wild Grass, and Haze in Harbin from January 19 to 21.

Beyond that, new works are always in the pipeline. The company has just premiered 《燃》 (Blaze), made for its ninth anniversary; at the end of the month it plans to start rehearsing 《风声鹤唳》 (The Wind and the Crane), its tenth-anniversary work. All of it takes rehearsal time.

Moving now is the worst possible moment.

The company has had no heat this winter. It is simply too cold. The rooms where people gather are warmed by air conditioning, but the dancers still have to wrap up and dash down the corridors to the bathrooms. On top of that, two foreign choreographers had just arrived to stage the ninth-anniversary piece, fighting for studio time through all of November: ten in the morning to ten at night, an hour for lunch, and nothing else but rehearsal.

One of the choreographers the company invited was Spanish, the other Danish. Bringing in foreign choreographers is a deliberate bet on the dancers' growth. It is also expensive. The last time the company did it was in 2010. To keep costs down, this residency was cut to just over a month; it should have been three.

Both countries' ambassadors came to the premiere. "They take it seriously," Han Jiang said. "Our own country doesn't." Although the company had invited the Danish choreographer to China to make the work, his airfare and lodging were paid for by his own government.

Han Jiang is forty-one, from Ningbo in Zhejiang. He graduated from the Central Academy of Drama's stage design department in 2002. Eighty or ninety percent of his classmates went into film and television, but Han Jiang joined the National Ballet of China to get a Beijing residence permit. In 2003, the National Ballet was staging Swan Lake and brought in Yi Liming, a stage designer from the Beijing People's Art Theatre, to work on the design.

Through Yi Liming, Han Jiang met Lin Zhaohua and became his stage designer on a string of theatrical productions: 《狂人日记》 (Diary of a Madman) in 2003, 《厕所》 (Toilet) in 2004, 《建筑大师》 (The Master Builder) in 2006, 《回家》 (Homecoming) in 2010, a collaboration that ran more than a decade.

Lin was also the man who first opened Han Jiang's eyes. After their first project together, the first thing Han Jiang did was give up his rented apartment and move into the National Ballet's dormitory, to save money to make theater.

The story of how Han Jiang came to found the company goes roughly like this.

"A choreographer wants a company of their own. A choreographer's method needs a company of its own, built over time, from theory to practice, before it can become a coherent body of work."

There was also a more immediate reason. In 2007, a dance piece called 《惊梦》 (A Dream Interrupted), which Wang Yuanyuan choreographed with the Tianjin Ballet, took part in a dance festival in Beijing. When they tried to take part again the next year, an official from the cultural bureau balked: "How can a Beijing dance festival feature a Tianjin company?" In a climate like that, working independently would plainly be freer.

So Wang Yuanyuan left the National Ballet of China in 2008. By the time the company was founded that year, she already carried a serious reputation. In 2006, she was dance director on Feng Xiaogang's all-star film 《夜宴》 (The Banquet). In 2008, she worked with Zhang Yimou as one of the dance choreographers for the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics.

This is a private, non-profit company, outside the state system, free to make work with far less interference from policy. But its income can only cover salaries; it cannot pay dividends to the company's board members. They were in their thirties, full of drive and energy, and idealism still counted for something. That was where Wang Yuanyuan and Han Jiang stood in the early years. In the first three years they produced ten dances in tight succession, spending more than ten million yuan a year.

Wang Yuanyuan has won Best Choreographer at the International Dance Competition in France, the Varna International Ballet Competition in Bulgaria, the USA International Ballet Competition, and the International Ballet Competition in Russia. The West wants to see contemporary Chinese dance, but few artists have both the vision and the ability to deliver it.

In 2012, the company's fourth year, the money ran out. Han Jiang and Wang Yuanyuan thought: forget it, let's stop, just shut it down.

A friend said to them: "Do you have any idea how much your company means to the small studios working in stage art? You let people in this field survive three more years." The friend felt the company should not stop, and Han Jiang and Wang Yuanyuan took it to heart. Even so, almost every year afterward they thought about quitting. "Every time we couldn't make payroll, the thought came," Han Jiang said. "But we never once missed a payment."

In 2016, Han Jiang looked at the numbers: for every yuan the company spent, only about half came back. Still, in nine years they had made fifteen works, kept six in regular repertory, and staged more than sixty performances a year, a little more than one a week.

Apart from the funding that sometimes comes with national-program productions, Han Jiang has kept the company alive almost entirely through his and Wang Yuanyuan's own efforts. Besides the drama and dance companies, Han Jiang also takes design jobs. "What I earn on my own is more than the whole thirty-person company brings in. Ten productions a year, more than twenty or thirty [thousand] yuan each. Without the company on our backs, my family would actually be doing very well, and we wouldn't even be that busy."

But he said it only to say it, and a moment later he added: "Though that runs against idealism."

The Beijing Contemporary Ballet started out at the Olympic Sports Center. In 2013, Han Jiang moved it to Feijia Village. The rent at the Olympic Sports Center was too high and kept climbing. To stay would have meant performing mainly to cover rent.

When he went looking for a new home, Han Jiang cared about two things. First, could he lease the space for ten years? Second, would the landlord promise to raise the rent by no more than five percent a year, instead of jumping fifteen to twenty percent each time? These were, of course, the ideal terms.

The space in the Shangri-La Arts Commune in Feijia Village came close. The landlord's land-use term had about five and a half years left, so the company could sign for five and a half years too. The space had sat empty for two years with no one in it. Empty was empty. The landlord rented it to the company very cheaply.

The basics were good. It was close to where Han Jiang and Wang Yuanyuan lived, which was convenient. It had been an exhibition hall, with ceilings up to eight meters high, well suited to a rehearsal studio. And in 2013 Han Jiang had seen a government plan for Feijia Village. The plan said the area would be folded into a large park development, but it would take a while to carry out. Construction-authority policy was being tightened in those years, and Han Jiang figured no one would be able to touch the land anytime soon. He felt secure.

About a hundred meters from the company stands a high-voltage substation. Beside it: a few apartment buildings and a handful of shops. All of them are now on the list of properties named in the November 26 notice for clearance.

Right next to the substation is a laundry. The owner told us he had moved in to start his business in the summer of 2017, and that he had in fact worried a little about demolition. But the landlord had pointed to the substation and told him there was high-voltage power here, so it couldn't be torn down. That had reassured him enough to take the place.

Feijia Village sits in Beijing's northeastern outskirts, rows of low buildings with a "waiting to be developed" look. Because the rent is cheap, many people live here, and many businesses have moved in. Every owner went through their own deliberation before coming, much as Han Jiang had.

As deliberations go, Han Jiang's was the more solid. The substation was clearly not the decisive factor. He had run the numbers: rent the space, put in two million yuan of renovation, and as long as he could stay three years it was worth it. As for the "insurance" the landlord had mentioned in passing, Han Jiang had weighed that too.

The lease on the Feijia Village space ran five and a half years. Now it was almost up.

On November 29, a "seal" was pasted on the Beijing Contemporary Ballet's front door. It did not look like the usual kind. It looked more like a notice: a square sheet of white paper with thin lettering reading "In accordance with the relevant notice from higher authorities, this premises is ordered to cease use," with a circle-and-slash "sealed" mark at the top.

The landlord had come to paste it, three days after the notice was issued. In truth, this seal-that-looked-like-a-notice was just a stopgap to satisfy inspectors. The seal was up, but everyone still felt things might yet turn out differently.

Among the other tenants in the Shangri-La Arts Commune in Feijia Village were the painter Cui Xiuwen, the sculptor Cai Zhisong, the singer Gao Qi, the director He Qun, the Red Gate Gallery founded by the Australian Brian Wallace, several film and television companies, and the Beijing Modern Dance Company. All were named in a document titled 《费家村香格里拉艺术区面临的清退问题》 (On the Clearance Facing the Shangri-La Arts District in Feijia Village), drafted by the Beijing Contemporary Ballet and footed with the line "Arts Commune."

In the document the company made two proposals: first, replace the non-compliant steel-panel roofing with material that meets national safety standards; second, if that proved impossible, that the township grant the company at least a year to find a new location. When no reply came, Han Jiang grew uneasy. "Right now the landlord is willing to replace it, but it depends on the township government. And even if they agree, I'm afraid that the moment they strip the roof off, they won't let us seal it back up."

The company's dealings with the authorities drew partly on advice from Han Jiang's friends. Pu Cunxin spent more than an hour on the phone with him, advising him to report the situation to the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles and the Chinese Dancers' Association. Looking at it from the standpoint of government enforcement, he said, engaging the township actively and in good faith would open room for a softer outcome.

All of this was done; then came the waiting. On November 30, the dancers were at the studio for a full run-through of the ninth-anniversary piece, all too busy to talk. With the front door sealed, the whole cast and crew were now coming and going through a side door. Look around the neighborhood of the Beijing Contemporary Ballet, and most of the apartment buildings and shops had been told to clear out by the 15th. Wherever a fresh flyer had gone up, it was almost certainly a moving company's. On the streets, scrap collectors called out, buying air conditioners, computers...

While the dancers were in makeup for the run-through, the residents of a nearby apartment building were moving out. Young people hauled boxes and furniture while their elders stood by a small truck watching over the belongings.

Beijing Contemporary Ballet — Wild Grass

Han Jiang was away in Ningbo on business at the time. This year he had also founded the Beijing Contemporary Drama Company with the actor Jin Dong and the stage designer Tan Shaoyuan, all three drama-school graduates who had wanted to start a company together for more than a decade.

The company's first production, 《海上夫人》 (The Lady from the Sea), was opening its second run on December 2 and 3 in Ningbo. Han Jiang had gone to handle relations with the theater and its team. The drama company's The Lady from the Sea and the ballet company's Blaze were both playing those same days. Neither company said a word to its audiences, before or after, about the housing.

Han Jiang did not get back from Ningbo until December 4. He and Wang Yuanyuan had already started scouting the next place.

"A town in Shunyi District got in touch and asked whether we'd move there; they want all the studios from the Shangri-La Arts District to relocate to their area. There's also the Performing Arts Town in Tongzhou, and Dachang in Hebei. We've talked with the Tianjie Group too, since they manage theaters in Dongcheng. Ideally we'd use this moment to find somewhere we can stay for ten years, or eight. Having a theater right on site would be best of all."

On the day of the interview, several more rounds of apartment residents left Feijia Village. From morning until two in the afternoon, the bike repair shop at the village entrance had fixed a single electric bike, clearing fifteen yuan after parts: it charged sixty, but the customer came up short and paid fifty-five.

The owner, wrapped in an army greatcoat, hands buried in his pockets, a cigarette in his mouth, took the money without looking up at the customer. His son, twenty by the lunar calendar, has grown up in Beijing with his father since childhood and now works in the shop too. Dressed thinly against the cold, the young man was tightening the front-wheel bolt on a local old woman's bicycle. That kind of repair is free; no money in it.

The noodle shop across from the Beijing Contemporary Ballet said with full confidence that the landlord had told them they would not have to move. But press a little further, and the shape of it was this: the first half of his sentence reported the uncertain thing the landlord had said, and the second half delivered his own firm reading of that uncertain thing. They don't have to move, he concluded.

The laundry owner beside the substation, face screwed tight, said the landlord had told him things might change, but that nothing was certain. All he could think about was where to put such a big machine. He couldn't sleep at night.

The young man at the bike shop kept bringing up what he had been seeing lately, and he was not happy about it. His father, anxious, kept signaling him: say less, don't say anything, better not say a word.

None of these shops had heat this year. They had none last year either. The Beijing Contemporary Ballet, in fact, had also gone without heat for a stretch last year, after coal was banned. But the company's electricity kept tripping the breakers, so in the end the government let it keep heating with coal.

This September, the government ordered the company to take out its boiler. The gas lines were not finished when the boiler came out, but the government said the gas would certainly be connected in time. By early November it turned out the gas could not be connected; the pipeline was still not done. For now the company relies on electric heaters like air conditioners and, just as at the start of last year, the breakers trip often. But the switch from coal to gas can't be undone.

When the order to vacate came, Han Jiang was in the middle of a quarrel with the landlord over the gas boiler. The landlord refused to pay for the new boiler and wanted the company to cover it. The company's position was that if it had to buy the boiler, it would certainly take it along when it left. They were still arguing over this when the far bigger trouble arrived.

On December 8, Han Jiang posted an announcement on the Beijing Contemporary Ballet's WeChat official account, declaring that the company would soon leave Feijia Village.

By December 12, the dancers had already moved to a new rehearsal space, a studio borrowed through an old boss of Han Jiang's. The large items left in Feijia Village had to be cleared within three days, and Han Jiang had booked a truck for December 13 to move them. He sent us twelve photos of spaces he had been looking at, possible new homes for the company. They were all, he said, "way too damn expensive."

Images provided by the subject; some have been cropped.