Anyone With Ideas Longs for 706, Because It Tries Every Possibility | This Is Wudaokou, Full of Young People, Part 2

"With them, I can talk about things I can't find anyone to discuss in academia."

The clock struck 6:30 in the evening. The volunteers broke into The Internationale, and "Foucault," in a red coat, jumped onto a chair right on cue to deliver a speech.

"Friends, welcome to Paris, France. I am your comrade-in-arms Foucault, and this is bound to be a day history remembers. This year is 1968, an age when capitalism runs rampant. Today, knowledge has been alienated by capital into an information resource, forests have been alienated by capital into a resource of trees, and even we humans ourselves have been alienated by capital into human resources. People are no longer ends in themselves — they have become resources, become tools. People only care about how to work the angles, how to consume. They've forgotten why they consume, why they work the angles. People have forgotten love, forgotten sincerity. Today, this very night, we are going to make the whole world remember. Reason, you are not a prison of the flesh — no! Comrades, forward!"

With that, he flung the hat off his head.

"Dans la rue (to the streets)! Dans la rue! Stop the Vietnam War! Stop the Vietnam War!" A long-haired girl raised her arms and led the chant. People followed her to the Peanut Canteen, where a "secret policeman" in uniform made as if to drag away the protesting students. After some shouting, the crowd surged upstairs to the small theater on the second floor.

People streamed in and out. 706's founder Wu Fangrong stood at the door, reminding the volunteers again and again to keep it shut, so the neighbors wouldn't complain.

At the turn of the stairs, the poet "Ginsberg" launched into another speech: "Welcome to New York! The Summer of Love, this free happening, has been going on for two months now. We are sick of the freedom and democracy the American government talks about. The Vietnam War — a war no American wants to fight — all for what they call an imperialist ideal. We are here to preach love and peace. There is no authority here! Here... right, no authority. This is our utopia!" The crowd burst out laughing when he forgot his lines.

A sheet of paper was taped to the door of the small theater: "Fight with words, not with weapons — flowers are more beautiful than bullets." The long-haired girl who had just been shouting "dans la rue" in French now picked up a guitar. Welcome to the Joan Baez concert, she announced. On the white cardboard sign on her back was written the slogan of the American hippies: "Against the Vietnam War, against segregation, against using taxpayers' money for aggression."

"There are no capitalists here, no corrupt politicians! Here there is only the liquid of love." The LSD king Albert Hoffman walked in behind her, dreadlocks on his head, a Hawaiian floral shirt on his back, a fluorescent water gun in hand.

"Friends, when was the last time you had sex? Sexual transgression is an act of the limit. Ahem — we must open ourselves to one another, free ourselves from the grip of possessiveness. True love is to spark each other's creativity, to turn pain into pleasure, crime into delight, torment into ecstasy — through this, we can turn the death wish into an overwhelming feeling of love, and find true freedom. Today we are going to become brand-new selves! Those who are already couples should break up today; those without partners will find one today! I love you all!"

The crowd burst out laughing again.

"Joan Baez" led everyone in the revolutionary anthem of that era, We Shall Overcome: "I do believe, deep in my heart, that we shall overcome someday."

What exactly is 706?

May 5 was the opening ceremony of the 706 Youth Space culture festival, "The Resurrected Utopia." Three months earlier, they had published an article on their WeChat official account, "Special Recruitment | The 50th Anniversary of May '68, the Year That Rocked the World," announcing a series of events — talks, salons, seminars, workshops, parties, exhibitions — "inviting well-known contemporary Chinese thinkers and young activists from every field to draw nourishment from critical theory and practice, past and present, and to summon the spirit of youth for this era."

It sounded outrageous. The label "utopia" once again attached itself to this youth community, and reactions ran the gamut: envy, noncommittal shrugs, or the verdict that this was "asking for trouble."

Wu Fangrong doesn't see it that way. He describes himself as "someone who wants to make money, but also has a bit of an ideal."

"706 is a youth stronghold, a cultural space, a public space. Within the bounds of the law, you can pool a lot of resources and do a lot of things," Wu Fangrong said.

In 2012, two or three years after dropping out of a graduate program in telecommunications, Wu Fangrong and more than a dozen friends pooled their own money and, half for fun, founded 706. Six years on, the friends have scattered in different directions, and he alone is left running the day-to-day operations.

The 600-square-meter space is divided into left and right sections across two floors. The public areas include a coffee area, a small theater, a library, and a canteen; a few small rooms are used for lodging and offices. When beds run short, people sleep on mats on the floor of the small theater or the library. On evenings and weekends, various organizations or individuals hold reading groups, discussion sessions, exhibitions, or lectures, and scholars and well-known intellectuals from the surrounding universities are frequent visitors: Tsinghua University professor Qin Hui, Renmin University associate professor Zhou Lian, Japanese columnist Yoshikazu Kato, and "Owspace" founder Xu Zhiyuan.

Today, if you come out of Exit B of Wudaokou subway station and walk south a few hundred meters along the west side of Caijing East Road, you'll see the east gate of the Huaqing Jiayuan residential compound. Cross a central garden with wisteria in bloom, pass a small convenience shop, press the button for the 20th floor, and knock on the door marked "2007" — and you've arrived at this "utopia," though many regulars don't much like the label.

"I don't really understand why people keep bringing up 'utopia.' To us, this is just real, actual life," a resident of the 706 Life Lab named Youyang told QDaily.

The everyday life of a youth space

Most of the time, 706 is only as lively as it was at the culture festival's opening on weekend nights. During the day, the residents are mostly out at work or running errands, and only Carmen and Mayuan wander constantly between the coffee area, the small theater, the library, and the rooftop.

Carmen is a long-haired cat that Wu Fangrong keeps, black, yellow, and white, already well over ten years old. Mayuan is her son. They often lie belly-up on the long table in the coffee area, sound asleep, or curl up shamelessly on some resident's floor mat, becoming the conversation-starter for strangers who don't yet know each other.

Wei Henghui, an undergraduate studying political science at Jilin University, once pondered the question of whether leisure is one of the necessary conditions for building a public space. In records from 706's late-2013 event "One Thousand and One Years," she described the ordinary rhythm of life at 706: "I'm lazily typing away in the hall, Yueyue is playing guitar, Mengsi is flipping through a magazine, Baozhong is on his phone... Zhao Yan sighed, 'Everyone who comes to 706 has time on their hands.'"

Wei Henghui also once launched a survey of public space using 706 as a case study. To the question "Who do you think are the people who most often take part in 706's activities?", more than half of respondents checked "college students" and "freelancers."

Plenty of people pass through 706, but the ones who live there long-term and know almost everyone are fewer. Feng Yue is one of them.

People call Feng Yue "Master Feng," probably because of his breadth of knowledge and the way he carries himself. Feng Yue says he's a PhD student in the mathematics department at the University of Tokyo. He's also interested in philosophy, theology, physics — that kind of thing — and can chat with anyone about almost anything, speaking in a booming voice, enunciating each word deliberately, in a tone that sometimes comes off as showing off his learning. He always wears brightly colored sweatshirts, silver-rimmed glasses, and a wisp of a beard on his chin that makes him look faintly like an immortal sage.

While his advisor is abroad on a research visit, Feng Yue has sneaked back to China, planning to rest for a while at 706. He always has a book in hand, but almost never goes to the library, preferring to sit in the bustling canteen area, because "I like the noise." Lately he's been deep in Agamben — having heard that this master of the philosophy of the event is coming to China soon, he seems excited, and plans to translate several English editions of his work into Chinese.

The "Socratic Dialogue" held every Saturday night is one event Feng Yue attends religiously. Its organizer, Zhao Chunhao, is an old acquaintance of his. After graduating from the philosophy department at Peking University, Zhao Chunhao started an education company, which ultimately failed. He still wanted to find some way to carry on the kind of thinking practiced in philosophy class. "The unexamined life is not worth living" — Zhao Chunhao always begins with Socrates's line when explaining why he started the event.

"Socratic Dialogue" takes place among 5 to 11 participants, with a moderator. The discussion unfolds in three stages: participants state their view on the topic in the form of "opinion plus example," then the floor opens for questions and challenges from others; participants then vote for the example they most want to discuss and go deeper into it; finally, everyone reflects together on the consensus that has formed.

One Saturday night at the end of April, for instance, the topic was "What is life," with the example "Messi." One participant argued that for Messi, "life is all the time from the start of a football career that earned him recognition to the end of that career." Another countered, "A career is only part of life, a means of making a living — and life isn't necessarily a means of making a living."

The exchange went back and forth for a few rounds, running from 7 to 9 p.m. Someone, no one remembers who, brought a bouquet of white roses and lilies, breaking it apart and handing a single stem to everyone in the room. It made the slightly worn square table in the canteen area feel, for a moment, like the Athenian public square.

If there's no special event, Feng Yue will invite a few friends to browse All Sages Bookstore, to see what new titles have come in. It's just a 15-minute walk from 706. After browsing, they head to nearby Xiangzhufang for a meal and keep talking. When he's in the mood, Feng Yue, who's good in the kitchen, will step in as head chef at the Peanut Canteen, with Qingyuan chicken or roast pork chop over potatoes as his specialties.

His friends all met at 706, and their backgrounds vary widely. Gao Sai studies history at Peking University and is most interested in Party history; Doctor Yun is a pediatrician who likes to read Hegel in his spare time; Feng Yue's girlfriend Jingbu used to study art history in the Netherlands; and George is the translator of the Chinese edition of A Theory of Justice. What outsiders might see as arcane or dull academic gossip, Feng Yue and his circle find endlessly entertaining — they've found their ideal kind of liveliness at 706.

It's not just Feng Yue. Different people find different kinds of liveliness here.

Gao Xiong is a sophomore in the mathematics department at Tsinghua University, and on weekends he comes to 706 for the music group. The group is run by Nianyi, 17, who sings resident gigs in bars, and includes Xinyang, who graduated from the history school at Capital Normal University and now makes a living teaching guitar while traveling and making friends. "With them, I can talk about things I can't find anyone to discuss in academia."

Shuxin is in high school in the U.S. and was back in Guangzhou for spring break when she flew all the way to Beijing just to see 706's independent-publications exhibition, held over a weekend. What surprised her most among the publications were the pieces on population policy and urban planning. Such topics show up only sparingly in English-language media and are almost entirely absent from Chinese media, whereas these "underground publications" recorded them vividly in text, photography, and comics. Shuxin bought several.

"I just want to talk to as many people as possible, be curious about everything, want to understand everything. Sometimes I think I'm being too naughty, and sometimes I think it's actually pretty good." She sat at the bar of the Peanut Canteen, a copy of Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence in her hand.

The day before Shuxin moved into 706, the upper bunks there had just been torn down by street-office staff who barged in — the second time it had happened that week. The coffee area was piled with mattresses and bedding with nowhere to go, and Shuxin, in her Chanel heels, ended up sleeping on a mat on the library floor.

Since the 2013 reform of the policy on group rentals, 706, which walks a legal gray line, has grown used to the occasional surprise inspection. But since the end of last year, the inspections have grown more frequent, and different people show up each time: street-office staff, police, neighborhood-committee members, all kinds.

Asked about this, Wu Fangrong jokes: "You get used to it — it's exciting, actually. You get to guess who's coming this time."

Let's put on a culture festival

Wu Fangrong has two phones, two WeChat accounts, and at least two group chats with close to 500 members each. He's the center of Wudaokou's social life, and the center of its resources. People may not know each other, but there's no one who doesn't know Wu Fangrong.

The culture festival is one more youth event that came together largely through Wu Fangrong's web of connections. Its organizer, Luo Ke, graduated from Yunnan University last July and then interned at the Beijing office of the British charity Save the Children. Because he'd been following the fire that broke out in Xinjian Village, Daxing District, late last year, he got to know a group of like-minded friends, and one of the places they met was 706.

Early this year, Luo Ke and a philosophy graduate student from Peking University got to talking at 706 about how this year marked the 50th anniversary of "May '68," and proposed to Wu Fangrong that they hold a culture festival. After a recruitment post went out in February, the number of people who signed up for the organizing team wasn't large; counting friends Luo Ke and Wu Fangrong pulled in, there were just over 20 in all: students from the philosophy department at Nanjing University handled theory and found suitable speakers, a student from Tsinghua's literature department volunteered to write copy, and residents who worked in design took charge of dressing up the whole space.

On staffing, Wu Fangrong prefers an open, inclusive approach: first find people willing to do the work, and only then think about titles, opportunities, or ability. If someone leaves, only then do you find a replacement. This keeps everything running in a way that looks democratic and free, but also loose and inefficient.

Even though the recruitment post went out in February, it wasn't until early April that the organizing team was basically assembled. The more than 20 members met only once a week, at a reading group, mostly focused on studying theory. Along the way, people kept dropping out over personal reasons or theoretical disagreements. On April 24, just 11 days before the opening ceremony, all the organizers finally met at 706 for their second planning session.

When looking for speakers, Luo Ke kept getting the same response: "That's too sensitive — are you sure you want to do this?"

Money was another problem. Faced with it, people had little recourse but to turn to Wu Fangrong. 706's main source of income is lodging: a bunk bed costs 2,300 yuan a month, or 120 yuan a night; a floor mat is 60 yuan a night. Since the crackdown on group rentals, 706's living space has shrunk by half, and its profitability has been cut roughly in half along with it. People enjoy the resources, opportunities, and buzz that 706 offers, while worrying, at the same time, whether it might disappear one day.

To Luo Ke's relief, the organizing team finally nailed down the culture festival's main sections in April. To soften the framing, the title "May Storm" was changed to "The Resurrected Utopia"; the four sections were "Proposals for the Commons," "Critique of Everyday Life," "The Desert of the Real," and "The Imagination of Utopia," corresponding respectively to past, present, and future — "it counted as having a fairly complete framework."

On May 5, somewhat unexpectedly, the culture festival went ahead as planned.

The whole space was divided into five exhibition zones. The café at the entrance was cleared out and fitted with a long table selling black commemorative T-shirts for 50 yuan each, printed on the front with the line: "We wander together in the darkness of night, then are consumed by fire" — the title of a 1978 French documentary directed by Guy Debord. Upstairs, the library was used for lectures, with roll-up banners introducing the university movements of various countries during May '68, and slogans on the walls reading "Be realistic, demand the impossible" and "Let imagination seize power."

On the other side, the Peanut Canteen served "Existence Macaroni," "Materialist Sandwich," and "Freedom Taco" for the day. The dining area became a Hyde Park — a corner where anyone could freely deliver a three-to-five-minute speech. "Old Six" Zhang Lixian's Duku《读库》 set up a stall there, selling The Age of Utopia, in which French screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière records his experience of 1968-69.

Upstairs, the small theater on the second floor hosted a "Hyde Park" version of the music event, where anyone who wanted to express a view or an emotion through song could take the stage. Nearby on the rooftop, there was a conversation about "Buddha-like youth," and people could freely drink and talk long into the night by candlelight.

But scenes like this may not be so easy to see so often for a while. On June 4, 706 was notified that it was "required to suspend operations for rectification from June 4 to 20... drinking and talking on the rooftop are banned, and public music events in the small theater are suspended."

Rehearsing Marat/Sade

"Marat, take to the streets; though you've been dead two hundred years. We're trampled underfoot by this age, locked in prison; we're madmen, but not slaves. Your revolution already grows inside my body; simply by existing, we are a reminder and a provocation to you. Don't save us — save each other; don't heal us — heal yourselves."

A girl with long, curly hair stood on the pale-yellow floor, facing the mirror, script in hand. A dozen or so actors playing mental patients lay sprawled on the floor, waiting for her to finish the last line. After this, they would form a circle, walking and singing, praising the triumph of the revolution and the coronation of the new emperor, Napoleon, and then break into a frenzied attack on the asylum director and nurses. The mood would build and build until the whole play reached its climax — and its close.

"You can't say it in that preachy tone. Again." Director Yang Siting cut them off. She's thin, with short black hair, big eyes, standing over 1.7 meters tall, and she speaks with real command.

Also on May 5, two weeks before the official performance, the Marat/Sade cast held its first full rehearsal in the basement rehearsal room of Theater No. 9. The play was the closing production of 706's culture festival, cast with amateur actors recruited on short notice, nearly all of them college students.

With funding tight, Yang Siting applied to Theater No. 9's "Feifei Performance Season," a program for non-professional troupes, and won a 5,000-yuan subsidy. But even that money had to be spent carefully: all the props were bought on Taobao and assembled at home; the actors weren't paid, and Hou Xinlin, who handled keyboard and score, also worked for free; every yuan saved went into the sound equipment for the official performance — "we burned through it a thousand yuan at a time."

Yang Siting is a senior in the Foreign Languages and Foreign History program of Peking University's Yuanpei College. When she was called in to 706 to plan festival events, she was originally only meant to work on theoretical planning; but once the Marat/Sade proposal was settled, everyone suggested she direct it. The play is considered a practical application of the German-language dramatist Brecht's theory of alienation — precisely Yang Siting's field of study. Though she had little directing experience, she'd been part of a musical-theater club at Peking University and knew some students who might be interested in performing.

Marat/Sade previously had only one old Chinese translation, whose dialogue was hard to stage. Yang Siting combined the original by the Swedish playwright Peter Weiss with the script of the 1967 film of the same name to translate and settle on a new Chinese version. Three years earlier, she'd seen a production by the Italian Art and Health theatre company near Gulou, but couldn't follow it because the subtitles were too small; only the fact that the whole cast were played by mental patients had stuck with her.

The play is set in an insane asylum. One of the leads, the Marquis de Sade, stages a drama about the dying moments of Jean-Paul Marat, the Jacobin revolutionary of the French Revolution. It's a play that encompasses figures from every class and faction: revolutionaries, royalists, vested interests, the proletariat. But the argument at its core is the ideological clash between Marat and Sade: "Marat firmly believes people can change the structure of society through violent revolution; Sade believes that only when the individual is unrestrained, free to do as he pleases, and opens the 'prison inside himself,' does society have any chance of change."

The cast was finalized in early April. Most of them had never heard of 706, had never heard of this play, and had no idea it was part of the May '68 culture festival.

But like the young people who spoke so passionately at the opening ceremony, they'd all set their own agendas for their lives. These agendas were naive and candid, with no direct connection to the desire, reason, and rebellion of 50 years ago — but each had something of their own to push against.

Lyu Hongyi, with a head of curly hair, is a senior in the directing department at the Beijing Film Academy and joined the cast on a junior classmate's recommendation. He was purely drawn to the avant-garde form of Marat/Sade, since there was no chance to rehearse this kind of play at school. His teachers put more stock in the Stanislavski method, where everything is drawn from real life. Deng Ruonan, who studies theater management at the Central Academy of Drama, was drawn instead by the mental-patient premise — meaning amateur actors might well outperform the more commercial professional troupes.

Lyu Hongyi and Deng Ruonan's thinking now is simple: make Marat/Sade the standout production of Theater No. 9's "Feifei Performance Season."

Chen Wenxuan, still a high school junior, was brought in at the last minute. Of the seven actors playing patients, four dropped out midway, and the fair-skinned Chen Wenxuan was recommended as one of the replacements. Since he's preparing for the acting-department entrance exams at the Beijing Film Academy and the Central Academy of Drama, he always brings an English vocabulary book or a math textbook to rehearsals.

At 16, Chen Wenxuan heard an aria from Su San Qi Jie in a play and started teaching himself Peking opera, then went on to train in an amateur acting class at the Central Academy of Drama. After playing the second young master Zhou Chong in Thunderstorm, he caught the eye of a talent agent and started getting offers from different companies. The future looked bright; the only hurdle seemed to be the entrance exam for the acting department.

Although Lyu Hongyi and Deng Ruonan told him that both the Central Academy of Drama and the Beijing Film Academy favor tall, rugged, masculine types (the Film Academy leans a bit more "pretty boy"), Chen Wenxuan remained confident. A talent agency invited him to try out for an idol-trainee competition, and he turned it down. "If those shows don't think about promoting traditional culture and are just pure talent contests, I won't go," Chen Wenxuan told me. "Going forward I'll only sign with agency-model companies, so I can arrange my acting career more freely."

Zhang Ruiqing, who signed up to play Charlotte Corday, originally studied broadcasting and hosting at Northwest University. After an exchange trip to Taiwan, she happened to join a film crew, signed with an agency, and had just crossed the threshold into being a working actor. This was the time to build a body of work, and she felt the role of Corday was distinctive and challenging enough — a patient with narcolepsy, a young noblewoman who naively believes protecting the monarchy will protect the life she knows, and a revolutionary sacrifice who answers violence with violence.

During rehearsals, Zhang Ruiqing spent most of her time lying at the side of the stage, pretending to be asleep. Chen Wenxuan, who played a patient, lay next to her and would quietly ask her about her plans for the future. "Picking roles is hard — you can't go too long without work, but you also can't take on anything too bad," Zhang Ruiqing murmured back.

Ai Li, who played the asylum director Coulmier, is from Xinjiang and works as a director at a company in Beijing, mostly shooting commercials. His mindset is a bit like Lyu Hongyi's — he wanted to take part in some avant-garde theater, chase a fresh experience. But when reposting rehearsal photos, he carefully blurred out the signs held up by the cast, "because I have a lot of friends from Xinjiang in my WeChat Moments." Those signs were props used when the patients marched in the play, echoing the culture festival's theme with slogans like "Let imagination seize power," "Quietly endure blue-collar labor, tightly grip a white-collar job," and "Absolute power, absolute corruption."

Ren Zhidong also played one of the patients. Currently a junior in the Chinese department at Beijing International Studies University, he found the rehearsals a bit "split-personality." Ren Zhidong is the president of seven arts clubs at his school, and during "Youth Day" he's in charge of a red-classic stage play, The Dawns Here Are Quiet. Every weekend, when he goes to Theater No. 9 to rehearse, he turns into a lunatic bent on revolution.

"But you get used to switching after a while." Ren Zhidong feels he can keep the two things well separated, much the way he handles the relationship between his ideals and his career. He'd originally planned to take the graduate exam for the directing department at Communication University of China, then go into screenwriting or directing, but later thought that wasn't very realistic, and decided instead to go work at an advertising agency first. "The ideal can be realized slowly," he said.

"Reality is extremely complex, forever changing, yet we always think we can reduce it to a few simple ideas. In that sense, we are all, in fact, utopians." So says Jean-Claude Carrière in The Age of Utopia.

Another kind of everyday life at 706

Feng Yue has a junior schoolmate doing a PhD in nuclear physics engineering at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, based in Shijingshan, who happened to have a meeting at Tsinghua and put down a mat in 706's library for the weekend. While chatting with Feng Yue in the Peanut Canteen, a girl from the journalism department at Shandong University joined in and asked about the specifics of his research. He pulled over the whiteboard nearby and, growing animated, sketched diagrams and explained, going from midnight to two in the morning.

Put simply, his research question is: how do you use calculations to change the trajectory of particles inside a particle collider, turning a parabola into a straight line? He's already spent two years on this problem.

"Do you think it's meaningful to spend two years on this question?" the girl asked.

The junior schoolmate paused, then sighed. Feng Yue answered for him: "For a math PhD, you spend three years writing the dissertation, three years for the professor to review it, three more years to get it published — nine years gone. As for meaning, something people have been arguing about since Descartes's time is still being argued about now — is that meaningful?"

"I often feel like nothing is meaningful," the girl said. "For instance, if the world has already entered a post-truth era, then why bother doing journalism."

The night ended in silence.

Most people don't dig that deep. On an ordinary weekend night, a group finishes a 25-yuan portion of white-cut chicken at the Peanut Canteen, then heads to the coffee area for a few rounds of Werewolf. After that, people cluster in twos and threes, crack open a few beers, and talk late into the night. A new week begins, and everything is the same as before.

For most people, 706 is just a transit point. On the afternoon Feng Yue made roast pork chop over potatoes for the residents, Zhan Yandong walked in beaming, hugging a cardboard box. "I quit my job!" Zhan Yandong had interned at ZTE for four months, living at 706 the whole time. His conclusion: Beijing isn't worth staying in — Shenzhen is better. The pay is just as good there, the opportunities are just as plentiful, and the most tempting thing is the household-registration incentive policy that just launched.

Lizhi thinks along the same lines as Zhan Yandong. She used to work as an accountant at a state-owned enterprise in Beijing, didn't much like the job, quit, and planned to start over in Zhuhai. Her original plan was to stay a week at 706; she ended up staying three months. Still, going to Zhuhai is only a matter of time — "right now I'm just resting."

Yang Shu has worked as the house manager at 706 for over a year and is, aside from Wu Fangrong, the person most familiar to the guests — tall and thin, curly-haired, round glasses, always looking busy. He trained as a teacher, worked as an elementary-school teacher for three years, and once founded a company focused on STEM education. His parents have already bought a house back home and are urging him to return, find a proper job, get married, have kids. Before getting on the "right track," Yang Shu plans to play around at 706 for a while, to spend some time he won't regret looking back on.

Midway through the culture festival, Yang Shu launched a new column on 706's WeChat official account, "Sightings at 706," writing about the striking people he'd met. On March 15, his subject was Xianfeng, a middle-aged man of indeterminate age.

"All anyone knows is that he graduated from the electrical engineering department at Xiamen University and apparently once worked at a state-owned enterprise; everything else is a mystery. Around the space, he fixes beds, repairs the plumbing, fixes toilets, all while reading books, writing poetry, and keeping a black cat. The residents have given him a nickname: 'still a youth, no matter where he's been.'"

Marat/Sade at Theater No. 9

On May 19 and 20, as the culture festival drew to a close, Marat/Sade finally had its official performances at Theater No. 9.

The show was free; the only way to attend was to register through 706 Youth Space's WeChat official account. Roughly 300 tickets across the two shows sold out within a single day. The audience packing the venue was as young as the cast, averaging, it seemed, under 25.

A professor from the German department at Peking University came, bringing along a close friend of the play's original author from his lifetime. This white-haired old woman, in a pale-purple Chinese-style suit, squeezed in among the young crowd, visibly moved.

Theater No. 9 officially opened in 2004 under the Chaoyang District Cultural Center, and together with the Beijing People's Art Theatre and the Dongfang Avant-Garde Theatre, forms one of the three hubs of Beijing's small-theater scene. Everything about the place feels old. Upstairs from the rehearsal room, on the east side of the main hall, glass display cases hold objects from the 1980s and '90s: a spinning disco mirror ball, cassette tapes of pop songs, and a replica of a 1980s-style barbershop — a skeleton draped in a white coat sits in a chair, staring into the mirror.

Posters line the wall in a row, like a timeline of major events: a notice from April 2003, during SARS, that pool halls and video-rental parlors were suspended; a slogan from the opening ceremony of the first Migrant Worker Film Festival, held outdoors on the eve of Labor Day in 2006 — "Long live labor, heaven rewards diligence"; and from 2008, "Humanistic Olympics, harmonious society."

Yang Siting didn't want Marat/Sade to feel disconnected from the present. While translating and compiling the Chinese script, she wove in lines meant to conjure the present day instantly.

In the fourth scene, the patients play the angry, rebellious poor, complaints piling on top of each other:

"My lungs are black!" "I have AIDS!" "I like men!" "My home was demolished!" "I can't afford school!" "My classmate got called in for a talk!"

In the sixteenth scene, the Marquis de Sade, playing the director within the play, sneers at every nation's revolution — "revolution is too easy," you just prop up an idol and an ideal and you can whip the angry crowd into a frenzy — "I don't believe in any cause or any reason for sacrifice." The patients play along, shouting long live, their "idols" thoroughly of the moment:

"Long live the giant panda!" "Long live food delivery!" "Long live my girlfriend!" "Long live surveillance cameras!" "Long live QR codes!"

Near the end, after the leader Marat is stabbed to death by the young noblewoman Corday, the patients spiral into a frenzy and start praising the revolution — "Glory, two hundred years of it!" Yang Siting had one actor break into a rap in the middle of this, showing off the new idols set up in modern life.

"A blink of an eye, eighteen years into the new century / Hopes dreams fantasies delusions, breaking new limits every day / Shop windows and mall corridors glittering with fashion / Swipe your phone, check the official accounts, watch your idols anytime / Infinite new experiences, however much money you've got to spend / Repressed indulgent thrilling cruel, the world's about to explode / Towers a hundred times taller than the sky, buy a ticket and fly all over the world / Poor Marat never got to taste the good life of today."

The rap pushes the whole play's emotion to its climax. The original playwright chose to end it there abruptly, using the Marquis de Sade to state his neutral stance: "For me, nothing is ever settled. I leave behind a question with no final answer."

Yang Siting thought that ending was "too Western, too casual." She rewrote Sade's line into a long, sweeping call built on parallel clauses, full of bravado:

"Two hundred years, and the guillotine has become the electric chair, the watchtower, the surveillance camera; the barricades have become the phone screen and the neon light — but our bodies are still blood and flesh, still the beat of a pulse and the rhythm of breath. I have directed a savage carnival, unleashing the power of sex, violence, excretion, dream, and intoxication, making the philosophers scoff and the revolutionaries tremble. Revolt with your body, create with your body; use the body's volume, thickness, weight, and warmth to create chance encounters and pleasure beyond calculation; use the body to say what books cannot say, use the body to embrace the executioner's pleasure and the condemned man's pain — the law of power turns to ash, it cannot govern the organs, and it cannot discipline the corpse."

The patients swarm around Sade, cheering, and charge at the director who represents authority and the nurse who represents discipline. Someone sets off a dry-powder fire extinguisher; someone throws tomatoes. White powder drifts down over the center of the theater, tomatoes split open, releasing their fresh, raw smell. A collage portrait made of dictators from every era is hurled onto the red guillotine at center stage. The patients collapse in a heap, and applause breaks out from the audience seats in the rehearsal hall.

"I'm so moved, so moved," the old woman said, standing up to stop Yang Siting. "Please, put on more Brecht!"

The young director stood at the side of the stage and smiled.

(In this piece, Jingbu, Shuxin, Gao Xiong, Zhan Yandong, Lizhi, and Luo Ke are pseudonyms.)

Cover and in-body images are the author's own photographs from the scene.