What Does Turning 36 Mean? Wang Chong Hit Obstacles at the Height of His Creative Powers | Interviews ⑮

"I want to shed my cheap clothes, leap into the waves, and rebuild this world in the seawater."

Wang Chong read law as an undergraduate at Peking University, took a master's in theater at the University of Hawaii, then a PhD in theater at the University of California, Irvine. To him, theater is a kind of "public forum" — an art of the present moment.

That present moment has caused him plenty of trouble. In 2017, none of his four new plays could be staged publicly in China. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang 2.0 and Magpies Gone, Winter Come (《鹊去冬来》) premiered in Tokyo; The Little Emperor premiered in Melbourne. Teahouse 2.0 did premiere in Beijing, but tickets were never sold to the public — each performance invited 11 people to watch.

In the 11 years since he began directing, Wang Chong has made more than 20 plays. Many of the titles carry a "2.0." Lined up together, those "2.0"s read like the repeated clauses of a single sentence, and what they mean is what he calls "the present moment."

Take his first play, Hamletism (《哈姆雷特主义》). People have been staging Hamlet for four hundred years, but Wang Chong had no interest in retelling a story everyone already knew. He wanted Hamlet to talk about the here and now: gender politics, war, the nature of theater, globalization, technological alienation.

That experimental streak sometimes shows up in how a piece is staged. Last July, for instance, he took the lines of Teahouse and used them to stage Teahouse 2.0, the story of a gangster boss who comes to a school to keep a schoolgirl as his mistress. It was performed in a middle-school classroom, and 30 of the 44 actors were high schoolers. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang 2.0, on the other hand, is kissing from beginning to end, in every variation, with almost no dialogue — in an age when sex and gender are being redefined, the cast used kissing to say what they had to say.

Wang Chong turns the questions on his mind into plays, and performing them is how he shares those questions and argues them out. So far, the sharing has not always gone smoothly.

A domestic theater had more or less agreed to run Kiss Kiss Bang Bang 2.0. But the theater was importing a Japanese production at the same time, the approval process hit a snag, and the theater grew wary of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang 2.0 as well.

What happened in 2017 goes back to the year before. In 2016, Wang Chong directed Mr. Big (《大先生》), a play about Lu Xun written by Li Jing and starring Zhao Lixin. The script had won a semi-official prize (the 2014 Lao She Literary Award for outstanding drama script), the production drew state funding, and the producer was generous enough to send the creative team to Taiwan to study puppet theater.

In Wang Chong's eyes, the play had "the right timing, the right place, the right people." Then, after nine performances, its sensitive content got Mr. Big shut down.

Which is how Teahouse 2.0 came about: a play that ran five performances for a total of 55 people. "I wanted to push back, absolutely. Before, it was big houses, TV stars in the leads, everything done loud and large. Now I go the other way, all the way inward. It's stifling, but there's a pleasure in it."

Wang Chong finished his PhD and came home in 2008, and the plays came out one after another. By 2012, sitting in a small bungalow, he had written the New Wave Theater Manifesto.

It read: "We — my friends and I — have not slept all night. We sit in Beijing's haze, listening to the waves beat against an embankment riddled with holes, rocking the little boats of the moral guardians. I feel the briny spray hit my face, close enough to touch. I want to shed my cheap clothes, leap into the waves, and rebuild this world in the seawater."

He wrote it because he and the producer Li Yi had each scraped together some money for theater and wanted to do something with it. A call to arms seemed right: a way to say what was wrong with Chinese theater and to go looking for a new aesthetic — theater that engages with social reality and pushes at the edge of the art.

In that same year, 2012, Wang Chong put out Thunderstorm 2.0, The Chairs 2.0, The Beauty and Sorrow of Steve Jobs (《乔布斯的美丽与哀愁》), Flowers of Shanghai 2.0, One Lens, One Life: Ibsen (《一镜一生易卜生》) and the short piece This Play. Counting tours of older productions, he gave 129 performances that year. The Beijing News wrote at the time that "Wang Chong stands out, and in exploring the fusion of theater and the moving image he is ahead of the directors of his generation."

In that Beijing News interview, Wang Chong summed up his 2012: "One thing I'm proud of is that everything, including a commercially inclined piece like Jobs, was done by my own standards — all of it under my control. Out of all that work, not one piece was a commercial job-for-hire, nothing was slapped together, it was all what I wanted to do. Even the 20-minute pieces came out of something I actually felt, something playful that touched me, something I was interested in. Theater is my only way of life and my only source of income, and I'm rather pleased about that. I'm a professional director, and I don't belong to any work unit."

He was 30 then, and he said: "At this age your classmates are all having children. Your family keeps worrying: what do we do, we have no grandchild to hold. You feel a kind of emptiness too — you watch certain American movies and start thinking family doesn't sound so bad. But a classmate of mine told me: your plays are your genes. Everyone wants to pass on their genes, and we normally do it through children. When I'm making work, I feel that same urge — that desire runs through to sexual desire. When an audience watches your play, you feel your genes have been scattered out into the world."

Then came 2013, and for 18 months straight not one of Wang Chong's plays was performed in Beijing. All sorts of reasons tangled together: censorship, the market, resources. His plans for 2013 were still in print in the coverage; reality had slipped out of his hands.

Censorship sent that year's Landmine Warfare 2.0 to Tokyo for its premiere, where it took the top prize at the Tokyo International Festival of Theatre Arts.

Wang Chong is about to turn 36. He brings up his age himself. After coming back from Tokyo at the end of 2017, he rehearsed Love in the Parallel Universe at Beijing's Frontier Theater, and at the end of December the production toured to Xi'an. It is a play of his from 2015, one he helped finance; over the previous two years it had been performed six times and lost money badly.

To stay alert to space and time, he has gone two years without a mobile phone. The one exception: each of those two years, on his birthday, he has gone to his Weibo page and posted a once-a-year message.

2016: "All right, 34, a few more years and I'm middle-aged. Jing Sheng says I should do something different today — is that an invitation to Kabukicho? To change your art, change your life first: a year without Weibo or Facebook (never had WeChat to begin with). Same as when I was 33, I'll be making work in 7 countries this year; both Mr. Big and The Parallel-Universe Method of Love (《平行宇宙爱情演绎法》) will tour. The photo is a selfie I took today — if you miss me, you can burn it as an offering."

2017: "Today I turn 35. Haven't logged into Weibo in a year; don't need to. Never had WeChat. Stopped using a phone last February. In April I move into a house I designed myself, the Power-Outage Pavilion: no electricity at home, and no electronics through the door. Human attention has fallen entirely; theater is the last line of defense, because we attend to real time and real space. I'll tour 4 countries this year, Mr. Big takes its final bow — please support the crowdfunding for Teahouse 2.0. Weibo, farewell forever. Friends, goodbye!"

Q: QDaily

Wang Chong: theater director Wang Chong

Q: Why is there always a 2.0 in your titles?

Wang Chong: I want to open people's eyes again, because China still tends to permit only one reading of a thing — which is the same as China's political situation. A classic is allowed one staging, or at the very least one interpretation. Beijing People's Art Theatre's Thunderstorm and Teahouse are treated as unsurpassable. But nothing in art is unsurpassable. Those productions are so old, so ugly.

Q: Your Central Park West ran for so many performances. You said that was because a company was running it commercially. Can that model be copied onto other plays?

Wang Chong: It isn't that easy. Central Park West worked because Woody Allen is behind it. Something like the Zhu Ling case, which I wanted to make into a play, would also pull a big audience. So does The Vagina Monologues. So did Mr. Big — when it played at the National Centre for the Performing Arts, it had the highest box office in the building.

These restrictions in China cut off our possibilities. But art is exactly about attending to these living, breathing things. That's instinct.

Q: You've said before what makes theater appealing. If I ask you now what draws you to making theater at the most basic level, what would you say?

Wang Chong: It's exciting. I wouldn't have put it that way before; now it's just my gut answer. Theater is like laying out a set of secrets, and the audience comes to work out what your secrets are.

Q: You've said theater is a public forum, and film is a top-down mass-communication product. Is film really that limited next to theater?

Wang Chong: Neither one is limited in that way, actually. Theater can also be a top-down propaganda product. Teahouse is a top-down propaganda product; the context it was written in was the Great Leap Forward. The model operas go without saying. The reason I keep coming back to the model operas is that what really carried them was the films of them. The filmed versions probably had more impact than the stage performances did.

Q: So that earlier judgment of yours was specific to the situation in China?

Wang Chong: Not only China. It's a basic understanding of the art form. Theater is convenient. You can pick up any subject you want to discuss, whenever you want. Spend a month or two on your own, make a one-person show, and off you go and perform it. That right there is a forum.

The reason I feel this way is an experience that genuinely shook me.

When I went to Edinburgh and Avignon to watch shows and perform, I found that one-person shows were 20% of the total program — which is a very high proportion. Now look at what percentage of Chinese theater is one-person shows, counting every festival and counting the everyday sense of the term. Then look at the percentage among the old established repertoire.

A play like Teahouse is all about the people, a historical panorama, the masses, society. It tells its story from that angle, not from "what do I think." The Vagina Monologues is precisely about what I think. This is my vagina, and here is what I want to say. I want to say it myself, on a stage. But who is this "I"?

In the Chinese context it's probably still the masses and heroic figures, and you are not allowed to be a man with testicular cancer, or a woman who was raped, standing on stage in person to say these things. None of it is permitted. Or maybe "not permitted" isn't right — it simply isn't a form Chinese theater takes.

Q: About the environment for film and theater.

Wang Chong: What rules film right now is consumption. What rules theater is the old men, plus consumption. By consumption I mean the whole apparatus of the market; by the old men I mean the logic of prizes, the machinery of recognition.

Between those two mountains I can't quite find myself. No — maybe it isn't that I can't find myself, it's that I'm squeezed until there's no room. Those eighteen months, for instance. I keep asking why that happened. Being in that state put a magnifying glass over the question.

Q: (In terms of becoming a theater director and doing the work,) your path has been fairly smooth.

Wang Chong: Not really. Some pieces did come out smoothly, but they were pure garbage — the ambition was there, I just wasn't mature. Only in the last five years, since the New Wave manifesto, do I feel I've matured. The timing lines up because that's probably when my standards rose. It also happened to be when I had money and had accumulated enough experience.

Q: What's your favorite occupation?

Wang Chong: Theater and film director. Or theater critic, or theater actor. Film acting isn't satisfying. Film critic doesn't work either, because watching films is too easy.

I've started preparing a film. A feature; I haven't settled on the subject. Before this I shot a short about entrepreneurship — it sounds like a dull subject, but it's actually interesting.

Q: Isn't film censorship even worse?

Wang Chong: If you want the dragon seal, the official release permit, you may have to cut yourself down to nothing. But outside the dragon seal there are plenty of other routes. Production companies in Hong Kong, in France, in Japan. A Touch of Sin, for instance: Chinese stars in it, but it never played in Chinese cinemas — I saw it in Seoul. Film lovers in China can still find pirated copies. It gets through one way or another.

Q: When you describe things, you always reach for the words "legal" and "illegal."

Wang Chong: That's habit. I studied law, and it addled my brain a little. There are other words for "illegal," gentler ways of saying it.

It really did addle my brain. In this theater, the Frontier Theater, the men's room is on the right as you come in the back door, and the door to it is always open. I keep thinking: in a bathroom like that, if a man exposed himself and a woman outside the bathroom happened to see it, is that the man's fault?

When I studied law we did a case like this. A couple were watching pornography at home, and their home was inside their own corner shop. A minor saw them watching, and the court convicted them of distributing obscene publications. A real case.

A lot of cases like that made a strong impression on me, maybe because I was too well-behaved as a child and I get anxious whenever I'm not following the rules. Maybe, maybe that's the deep-down reason I think this way.

Q: Where do you get new views and new knowledge?

Wang Chong: The night before last I dreamed I went to meet that investor, Elon Musk. After meeting him I was very nervous, hoping he'd invest in my theater. Probably because I've been reading a lot about him. But he isn't new knowledge either. He isn't new anymore.

What I actually do is listen to my actors and my team talk about the news. Partly because if you have WeChat and follow official accounts, the news you see is much the same as everyone else's. Within all that, the important things always get through — the ones that carry the most emotional force for the person telling them. So hearing it from someone's mouth can hit harder.

The RYB kindergarten story, for example — I heard it from a friend, and it felt more shocking than reading it myself would have been. He acted the whole thing out for me over the phone, vividly, with a sense of timing. Listening that night, it made me feel cold. It's as if everyone is sifting the information for me by hand.

I read books, physical books. But usually that isn't new knowledge either.

Q: What have you been thinking about lately?

Wang Chong: Hard to answer, let me think. I can mention one thing, though it isn't exactly recent. I haven't used a phone for two years — no WeChat, no WeChat Pay, no Alipay, no Apple Pay. I use cash. I used to think nothing of it, but this year I feel a growing sense of danger about it.

Once my parents' generation leaves the historical stage, am I going to be in trouble just keeping up a basic standard of living? Because sometimes when you pay cash, the other person's face stiffens a little, as though you've put them out.

There's also the news that 70% of payments in Sweden are already cashless. And China is changing fast. I wonder whether I'm going to be forced to change how I live.

Q: Is keeping this way of living important?

Wang Chong: Not important in itself, but important as a symbol.

I recently did something bigger, for instance: I renovated my house and named it the Power-Outage Pavilion. There's no electricity in it, not a single socket. If you come there to find me, you have to lock your phone and your computer in a safe outside the house. That's a deeper, harder symbol.

The symbol turns into something real. When I sleep in the Power-Outage Pavilion I genuinely rest better. Normally your attention goes somewhere else, a computer say, and it's easy to reach one or two in the morning without noticing. There, since the thing simply doesn't exist, your attention goes to yourself or to the things around you in the space. You're more alert, you feel the physical world more, you deal with it directly.

Q: At bottom, is this for the symbolism, or for something else?

Wang Chong: At bottom it's for myself, because theater pays particular attention to space and time. So it's better to keep myself a little cleaner, a little simpler. How much does it help? I don't worry about how much. If it makes me 3% or 5% better than I was, that's already remarkable. Compared with other people — plenty of people use their phones plenty and can still hold their focus.

Q: Are you already living in this Power-Outage Pavilion most of the time?

Wang Chong: I haven't formally started life in the Power-Outage Pavilion. But I will before Chinese New Year, for certain.

Q: What do you think perfect happiness is?

Wang Chong: The happiness of playing video games in primary school.

I watched Wings of Desire again this year. There's a line in it: "When you grow up, everything you achieve can only come from your work."

That's accurate, and frightening. Because the achievement my work brings me — as a man, a director, someone my age — gets you labeled cold, a workaholic. Why frightening? Because underneath it is monotony, tedium. It does get tedious.

Q: What worries or advice do you have for the world?

Wang Chong: There's far too much. As for worries, the simplest one is that I'm afraid China may take the road to war. What I'm afraid of is China invading someone else.

Q: What's one thing you'd like to know more about?

Wang Chong: I badly want to climb Mount Everest. This year I climbed Mount Fuji. On this trip to Xi'an for the show, I'm planning to climb Mount Hua.

Q: That's quite a leap — before you were talking about extreme sports, and then this…

Wang Chong: No, no, that's only a hope. So between performances I do some physical training.

Q: Whom do you most admire among the living?

Wang Chong: Lin Zhaohua. I think of him as a lighthouse for my spirit. That is exactly the spirit of passing on the torch. You know he also made Wotou Guildhall (《窝头会馆》) and Lights of Ten Thousand Homes (《万家灯火》), which lean toward official themes. But a master is a master because his best few works stand a level above everyone else's.

The plays of his I like are Richard III and Three Sisters Waiting for Godot.

Lin Zhaohua was enormously important to my education in theater, because the first play I acted in, or took part in, was one he directed. I learned a great deal from him, felt a great deal working with him. He has always spoken to his times, always walked on alone — a strength I hope to carry on. The circumstances we each face are different, of course.

Q: What's the most recent misunderstanding about the world that you've found in yourself?

Wang Chong: Hard to answer. My girlfriend recently applied for a state scholarship to study abroad and got it, for instance. I had always assumed there was no way she'd get it, that it took connections. But she got it, and looking at the list of recipients, plenty of them clearly had no connections either. This area really has become more open, more fair. For someone like me, whose basic stance is strongly critical, that's a fact running the other way. So-called China's rise included: my understanding of it lags far behind.

Q: What are you most afraid of?

Wang Chong: What I fear most is that the civilization we believe in and have worked so hard to build — this kind of theater — turns out in the end to mean nothing. The rise of ISIS frightened me for a while: if something that anti-civilizational really becomes mainstream in human society, the building we've put up simply ceases to exist.

All production photos courtesy of Théâtre du Rêve Expérimental; some images have been cropped.

(The main cover image is a production photo from Ghosts 2.0 in 2014, photographed by Zhu Lei; the thumbnail and banner images are from Hamletism in 2006, photographed by Chen Xin.)