Meng Jinghui's Second Theatre Festival in Shenzhen: Wildly Free, Deeply Worried

As things stand, whether a show can be staged at all seems to matter more than what the show is about.

Meng Jinghui is running a theatre festival again. The Shenzhen Contemporary Theatre Biennale has reached its second edition, staging 24 performances around the city from March 16 to March 25. Before this, Meng Jinghui's name was attached to the Beijing Youth Theatre Festival, the Wuzhen Theatre Festival, and the Hangzhou Contemporary Theatre Festival. What makes Shenzhen different is that everyone living here tells the same story: Shenzhen is a cultural desert, and the government means to change that.

That may be why Shenzhen frames its festival more abstractly, to the point of wrapping it in the idea of a "biennale." This year it also added a contemporary art performance series called Garbled Fault: Post-Apocalypse, Girl, Even, Digital Futurism, Shenzhen Conceptualism, That Is to Say, Geography, Banquet, the Pretty One, Knowledge Sovereignty, Sauce~ (《乱码过失：后末日，少女，甚至，数字未来主义，深圳观念主义，就是说，地理，宴席，颜值担当，知识主权，酱~》).

The name is absurdly long and cryptic; the series itself is simple. It puts on performances for audiences in every kind of public space in the city, with one keyword as the theme of each show. A performance might turn up at a pig's trotters restaurant, on the lawn of Lianhua Mountain Park, in a shop in an urban village, in an internet café, in a bar, or straight out on the street — or in the middle of some other theatre production, or right after it.

Because it is so free-form, it is hard to say whether this part of the festival is a bonus or just a confusing add-on.

Here is a taste of what the performances looked like:

On the night of March 18, Karaoke Pig (《卡拉 OK 猪》) was playing its second Shenzhen show. Halfway through, two of Garbled Fault's performers — the collective Platform Group and Wang Zhenyu — stood up from the audience. Sitting beside them were Sun Xiaoxing and other Garbled Fault staff. Diagonally in front of them sat Meng Jinghui. They walked straight onto the stage, where Karaoke Pig's actor Gouzi was pacing back and forth clutching a shark-shaped balloon and delivering long stretches of narration in an invented language.

On March 19, Dai Chenlian began his performance piece Cuizhu (《翠竹》) in Shenzhen. The title is the name of the place where he lived in Shenzhen more than a decade ago. Back then he broke up with his girlfriend, and years later it struck him that he had never even said sorry to her. That unspoken apology was where the piece began, and he wanted to make it in Shenzhen. Every day he set out from the Lüyin Holiday Hotel where he was staying and walked to Cuizhu. Audiences were told only the time and the meeting point — never what would happen. Those who followed him might end up doing nothing more than standing with him on the road in front of the building where he used to live, waiting for a cloud.

On March 20, Wang Zhenyu's Notes from Underground (《地下室手记》) was performed at a pig's trotters restaurant, the owner lending them the space for free. According to the program, Notes from Underground set out to perform the sounds, images, and feelings in the memory of an "underground man." During the show, Wang and the other performers, in white lab coats and masks, carried several beef bones on a stretcher and walked two full loops of the street.

Wang Zhenyu and the other performers kept solemn faces. Wang's friend Sugar walked nervously alongside him, cautiously explaining what each gesture stood for. She had heard Wang talk about it, but she wasn't sure, and while she did her best to help her friend she kept warning that her account might not be accurate.

Wang's performance drew a crowd. A property management worker from the neighborhood walked past, wrinkled his nose and said, "You can't do this, it's too scary." But he didn't stop them. Some audience members talked it over afterward in the show's group chat, saying Wang's performance was plainly in earnest — as the tension rose you could see the sweat on his forehead — and that it showed them how interesting performance in a public space could be.

On March 24, on the lawn of Shenzhen Central Book City, Gao Jiafeng released his single Your Girlfriend's Teacher Likes It Too (《你的女朋友老师也很喜欢》), written about sexual abuse by teachers on campus. He tied a yellow necktie around his head, put on brown square-framed glasses and an oversized gray suit. By his own account, he was cosplaying "the teacher everyone should watch out for."

Still on March 24, after Gao Jiafeng finished at the Book City, Qiu Jia set out from Lianhua Mountain Park wrapped in strings of colored LEDs, riding an old-fashioned bicycle with a violinist on the back, crossing the city. That night the violinist played The Story of Spring (《春天的故事》) under the dark sky, and pedestrians on the streets they passed could see and hear it. Several curators and video documenters followed on bicycles from Lianhua Mountain Park all the way to an urban village near Xiasha. Hearing The Story of Spring strike up like that, and thinking about the moment they were in, made Sun Xiaoxing, one of Garbled Fault's curators, want to cry.

There were roughly a dozen more performances… including Brother Nut's Truth Bookstore (《真相书店》), which was canceled. It was to have run from March 15 to April 15. In 2015, Brother Nut vacuumed the air of Beijing for a hundred days, turned the smog and dust he collected into a brick, and hid it inside a renovated wall in a Beijing hutong. This time he bought more than a thousand books with the word "truth" in the title and opened a short-run bookstore in Shenzhen. On March 16, the day of the opening ceremony, a WeChat account called "Daily Statement" put out a notice saying the Truth Bookstore had been cleared out. Whoever posted it said the Truth Bookstore had been "busted as a fake" on March 15, Consumer Rights Day, because of force majeure. In the program handed to the audience at the opening ceremony that day, Brother Nut's biography had to be covered with a white sticker.

Meng Jinghui's basic attitude toward Garbled Fault was open: "Here's a space, do whatever you want with it."

"En? What's Going On? How Did It Turn Into This?"

Before the festival began, Garbled Fault put out its poster: a background of collaged blocks of color and images deliberately blown up until the pixels blurred. The poster was crammed with text, and at a glance it was hard to tell which words were performers' names and which were titles of shows.

The official schedule went up on Garbled Fault's official account. But by March 24, with the whole festival almost over, people were still asking about these performances in the Shenzhen Contemporary Theatre Biennale's audience group on WeChat. Many couldn't work out what kind of performances they were, or what these people were doing.

Sun Xiaoxing, one of Garbled Fault's curators, is a theatre director and teaches theatre history and theory at the Tianjin Conservatory of Music. He hates dialogue that goes back and forth like a ping-pong rally, because he doesn't think real life works that way. The first time theatre moved him was a dance performed by survivors of the Fukushima earthquake — unprofessional, rough, but he felt pulled straight toward it.

For the tenth-anniversary edition of the Beijing Youth Theatre Festival in 2017, Sun Xiaoxing brought his piece Empty Love, Scene ① (《空爱①场》). It opened with two girls spending nearly twenty minutes, in full view of the audience, filling a "room" with goods bought on Taobao. One audience member who sat through it wrote on Douban, "I just want to ask everyone here: does this even count as theatre?" Others found it interesting, said it broke with tradition, said the everyday, unforced quality of the performance got to them and left them sad in the middle of their enjoyment.

Sun Xiaoxing's theatre company is called "En? What's Going On? How Did It Turn Into This?" The company is one man; when there's a new show, new people join for the run. Those three questions are how he sums up and explains his own theatre. Turned around, they are also the audience's first reaction to watching it.

Meng Jinghui decided to back Sun Xiaoxing's kind of "conceptual theatre in dialogue with the contemporary" — work that doesn't have to happen in a theatre and might happen in any kind of space. He believes such exchange helps a more varied environment take shape. He even thought it could go a bit further. "Shenzhen is young, it carries the genes of reform and opening-up, and it can graft on more from contemporary art."

"Teacher Meng likes bringing young people along to play. But you know how a lot of other elders are — scared to death that young people will take their rice bowl, so they resist them fiercely," Sun Xiaoxing said. "Meng Jinghui trusts young people."

"Why Won't the Capitalists Give Us Money?"

In 2008, most of what you could see in China's theatre business was theatre seasons and performance seasons — a few works put on together and that was that, with no theme or selection worth the name. That was the background against which Meng Jinghui started the Beijing Youth Theatre Festival. In 2012 he started the Hangzhou Contemporary Theatre Festival, and the next year, together with the director Stan Lai, the actor Huang Lei, and Chen Xianghong, president of Wuzhen Tourism Co., Ltd., he launched the Wuzhen Theatre Festival. Then came the Shenzhen Contemporary Theatre Biennale in 2016.

So one man has taken part in, or led, a whole string of theatre festivals. Meng Jinghui says he had no plan and no expectations at the time; it was built up bit by bit. Or as he puts it, "We started playing around with it, and then we did it." Here is how he describes where the Beijing festival came from: "We just felt there should be a theme, a selection, and an artistic director for the whole thing. Then everyone thought about it and said, you go do it!"

Running a festival means picking the program. To pick 10 shows, Meng Jinghui has to watch 200. Foreign ones, domestic ones. "Back and forth, back and forth — it's a real hassle."

Mounting the exhibitions fell to one or two people from Meng Jinghui's studio plus a few volunteers. The Shenzhen Contemporary Theatre Biennale had three offline exhibitions, two of which had to have their gallery layouts changed. Meng installed two of them himself with a crew; for the third he was busy giving interviews, so he told people how to arrange things and had them make the changes fast.

Only a scattering of staff from Meng Jinghui's studio came to Shenzhen for the Biennale; most of the labor came from volunteers. The Biennale recruited more than 30 of them. Some lived in Shenzhen; others came from Changchun, Hangzhou, and Dalian because they loved Meng Jinghui's theatre. They were not paid, and they covered their own food, lodging, and travel.

The volunteer Liang Xiaoying was the resident volunteer at the Futian District Music Hall. In the last days of the festival she was up at 7 a.m. and asleep at 1 a.m.

On the subject of money, Meng Jinghui got worked up: "Why won't the capitalists give us money? Let them off their taxes, let them hand the tax money to us — hey, us artists, hey hey hey — and then they'd be the ones begging me. I've got a big pile of money, give it to us and you can write it off. We have a foundation too, we could do it, a youth theatre festival, wouldn't that be great."

Meng Jinghui is also thinking about "what happens next." "It's a green question. If you want water, you have to plant trees. Plant trees and you get good air, and good air gives you a good climate. A good small climate gives you a good large climate, and it becomes a healthy, green, enclosed circle."

Besides the shortage of money, Meng Jinghui says there are few good shows — few works that are inventive, few that startle anyone. That is the other difficulty in running a festival. Part of it is the state of the industry described above, which has left it short of creators. The other part, as Meng puts it: "The work as a whole isn't brave enough, and it doesn't settle the question of ideas first. [That is, what idea your work is built on — moonlight and romance, say, or a reflection of society.] Creators are used to censoring themselves. Before anyone else castrates them, they castrate themselves." He said: "At any time, in any beautiful moment of humanity, courage, dignity, action… these are always good words."

What Makes a Good Show

The Garbled Fault strand is of course not fully formed, but some of its performances, like productions such as Karaoke Pig and A Wonderful Day, are trying to push their expression a little harder. Only Meng Jinghui knows what this thing of theirs is.

On what makes a good show, Meng Jinghui has said the same thing many times: "It isn't about the audience merging with the performance on stage, sharing the actors' joys and sorrows until they forget the reality around them. The audience should be the protagonist, keeping a distance from everything on stage, aware at every moment that they are watching a play, with enough judgment to tell right from wrong and black from white, and to consider how they should deal with the questions the play raises — so as to improve their ability to understand social phenomena and handle complicated things."

Under that philosophy, some shows are hugely popular — the small-theatre production A Wonderful Day, for instance, sold out its Shenzhen run at one point.

Others leave audiences at a loss. When Chen Minghao's Karaoke Pig played in Beijing, many in the audience disliked it, and it scored 4.6 on Douban. But Meng Jinghui thinks it is a good show, and has had it staged at the Beijing Youth Theatre Festival, the Hangzhou Contemporary Theatre Festival, and the Shenzhen Contemporary Theatre Biennale.

A cook from a Children's Palace watched the dance piece Burn (《燃》), walked out halfway through and sat down on the steps. He said he didn't understand it — not that it was bad, he just didn't understand it. A security guard told him this dance didn't look like dance, that it wasn't as good as square dancing. The guard added that at this venue "Two Dogs" had sold well. He meant Two Dogs' Opinions on Life (《两只狗的生活意见》), a comedy played broadly and physically.

The performers have opinions of their own.

When the Biennale's official media asked Gao Jiafeng what he thought about "effective expression," he said he keeps reminding himself not to be too precious, to talk like a human being. However tightly you wrap something in metaphor and rhetoric, some performances are masturbation and at bottom stay masturbation. "I usually masturbate where there's nobody around. If I have to let people watch, I really need a convincing reason! You can't just duck under the big banner of 'performance art' and leave it at that — at least I can't."

He remembered his first performance in Shenzhen, dragging a speaker around Lianhua Mountain Park in a spacesuit. That day he went back to his hotel after the performance and cried, out of sheer boredom with what he had done. He felt terrible about the volunteers, and thought that in future he would never trouble anyone with something like that again.

As Meng Jinghui sees it, "Contemporary theatre festivals are all facing this same test, and the test is both personal and a collective test of this whole era. We are inside this era, so all we can do is use our own methods to make an effort."

Vertical cover image by Pan Yi; horizontal cover image by Erick.