Director Wang Chong: If It's Purely for Entertainment, There Are Plenty of Industries Besides Theater | Wuzhen Theatre Festival

"For a long time, Chinese theater has been about escaping reality — fencing off a space and manufacturing illusions inside it. But that's actually a kind of political incorrectness."

Theater director Wang Chong's work always leaves two strong impressions: one is "stage video," the other is "explosive subject matter."

The work of his most visible in China lately is Constellations (《平行宇宙爱情演绎法》), which he made in 2015 from Nick Payne's play of the same name. It was invited to this year's sixth Wuzhen Theatre Festival, having just closed a run at the China Theatre in Shanghai in August.

The protagonists are a female cosmologist and a male beekeeper. They meet, fall in love, break up — but that is only the story in one particular time and space. Under the premise of parallel universes, in countless other times and spaces they have countless other possibilities: in some they spend their whole lives together, in others they stay strangers forever.

Twelve cameras ring the stage like the numbers on a clock face, and a thirteenth is trained on a hamster at the center of the stage, running without stop in a cage set against a star chart. The hamster is not in the original script, but Wang Chong put it in the play as a focal point. Most of the time, through the montage the camera cuts create, it looks like a god of cosmic time, driving the universe forward as it runs; but on the two occasions when the female lead plays with it, it becomes just a pet in the play.

Set against Wang Chong's wilder ideas, Constellations is unquestionably a work of some self-compromise — self-censorship, even. Compared with his "2.0 series" and other works, which trained their attention on present-day society and often ran into resistance, a play about love and the cosmos is a far gentler touch.

Before this, Wang Chong had another work invited to Wuzhen: Ghosts 2.0 (《群鬼 2.0》), which went in 2016 as one of the festival's three opening productions.

Ghosts 2.0 is adapted from Ibsen's Ghosts and tells the story of the buried conflicts inside the Wen family. The late Mr. An was debauched and shameless in his lifetime; Mrs. Wen wants to rekindle things with her old lover, Party Secretary Man, and she has pinned everything on her son, An Shihua. An Shihua, back from studying film abroad, has contracted HIV and is sleeping with the family's maid — who turns out to be the late Mr. An's illegitimate daughter.

Ghosts 2.0 keeps most of the original script's logic and conflicts. Besides localizing the names, Wang Chong, to help the audience follow along, turned the pastor into a "Party secretary," a figure that fits China today. The whole play runs only 70 minutes, but there is plenty of play in it — underwear flung about in clouds of red and yellow smoke, and a climax in which the maid curses without pause in Chinese and English for three minutes. As the actors film one another and film themselves, the shots look up at their subjects and down on them, and metaphors of power and rank leap off the big screen.

A year earlier, in the summer of 2015, Ghosts 2.0 played the Ming Contemporary Art Museum (McaM) in Shanghai without selling tickets; the audience reserved free seats by email. After a hard road through three rounds of approval and problems with the venue, Ghosts 2.0 finally met its Shanghai audience by an unconventional route.

Both works Wang Chong took to Wuzhen involve video, and his work with stage video puts him at the front of Chinese theater. At a point when the rest of the country has only been feeling its way for two years, Wang Chong already has a theory of his own. As a maker, he brings fresh ideas and a fresh design to every video-based piece he stages.

In Central Park West (2011), written by Woody Allen, the video was styled as a television sitcom: laugh-out-loud and lurid. In Thunderstorm 2.0 (2012), the video was choreographed to the inch, the camera operators moving through the space like dancers, and the look was that of an old, steady, classically feminist film. One Take, One Life: Ibsen (《一镜一生易卜生》), from the same year, was shot in a single unbroken take: the protagonist is a man dying in a hospital bed, and with a camera crane and two operators on stage, the camera follows him without a cut through his memories, his imaginings and his present.

By Ghosts 2.0 in 2014, Wang Chong's use of video had reached a relatively mature stage, and it is a work he is quite happy with. The actors have to perform for the stage and for the camera at once — now filming, now filming themselves — and the stage as a whole produces new kinds of space. Two actors standing right next to each other, for instance, are split across two cameras and shown side by side on screen, which puts distance between them and bends the space.

Now, in Constellations, the acting sits somewhere between theater and film. Because of the "parallel" premise, the actors have to perform "every possibility," which makes the emotion discontinuous; they have to drop into a new state very fast. Wang Chong thinks that is harder than simply "walking out of a film."

Wang Chong was invited to Wuzhen twice in three years. In 2017, the year he was absent, the festival gave its featured program a "video unit" of four works. In fact, of the 24 featured productions at last year's festival, more than half used video to some degree.

Ding Yiteng's Dou E (《窦娥》, premiered 2016), for example, uses video as a documentary device, and Tian Qinxin's Raging Storm (《狂飙》), a 20-year-old work, folded video into its new version. Widen the frame to include work from abroad and there is also Shadow (Eurydice Says) (《影子（欧律狄刻说）》) from Berlin's Schaubühne, which puts the process of shooting a film directly on stage.

2017 was not "Year One" for video in Chinese theater, but the pairing of video and theater has plainly become a visible trend, and the festival put it on display all at once.

Wang Chong thinks video in theater is simply what contemporary theater of this era should look like. "It's like contemporary art. Besides the traditional brush, paint and canvas, artists use a lot of contemporary materials — video, plastic, household waste, everyday objects. Theater works the same way."

But to ordinary audiences, many Chinese productions still feeling their way with video seem to be "just video, that's all." As Wang Chong sees it, one reason is that audiences haven't seen much yet: early on, when you are still learning to taste food, very sweet or very salty will do. The other is that, at a shallow level, video has become an indiscriminate necessity — the answer you reach for when you have no better one.

What kind of video does a play actually need? And how do you tell the difference?

"As an audience member, the judgment probably still comes down to the structural relationship between the video and the play. Sometimes you feel the video is only enlarging things — a close-up, nothing more; other times you feel the piece couldn't exist without it. It's all video, but doing it one way and doing it another are not the same thing, and sorting out the distinctions would take an academic paper. Take poetry: you can't just say 'it's all poetry,' that's too crude. The problem is that we live in a crude age, and people haven't read much poetry."

In all of 2016, Wang Chong staged one new work, The Great Master (《大先生》). It used video too, but this time what people paid attention to was its content. The play was financed by Wuzhen and received a grant from the National Arts Fund. The actor Zhao Lixin played the lead, Lu Xun; against the historical image of Lu Xun in a long gown with his hands folded, Zhao Lixin built a wholly new one — "white shirt, blue jeans." Apart from Lu Xun, every character was played by a puppet.

After eight or nine performances in Shanghai, The Great Master was stopped. It could not be performed in Shanghai again, and in the end it was banned nationwide. Written by Li Jing, it had won the Lao She Literary Award for outstanding drama script; but once it took the form of a stage production and appeared before the public, it could not escape its fate.

The critic Zhang Chang wrote in a review for Beiqing Yipin, the arts-criticism platform of Beijing Youth Daily: "Do you feel that the place you are in is 'spring'? Wrong! I could almost hear the playwright sobbing under the lines. It is out of step with its time and also avant-garde, fluent and natural and also philosophically searching. It is hard to believe this came off the dull stage of Chinese spoken drama; it is more like a shaft of light, bright as a sword, cutting suddenly into the night."

Look at the budget, the script, the cast, or the fact that the actors, backed by the production company, traveled to Yilan in Taiwan specially to learn puppetry, and The Great Master was a gift from heaven. It will be hard for Wang Chong to make another big-theater work that surpasses it. But because The Great Master was about the present, it was sharper and it cut deeper, and it hit a glass ceiling — the force had nowhere to go. Wang Chong faced two choices: bend his back and keep making big-theater productions, or find another way to let the force out.

After some thought he chose the second — a path of creative defiance — and out of it came Teahouse 2.0 (《茶馆 2.0》), staged inside a school and therefore free of the approval process. It was the only one of Wang Chong's four new works in 2017 to be performed in China; of the other three, Little Emperor (《小皇帝》) premiered in Melbourne, while The Sparrows Are Gone, Winter Has Come (《雀去冬来》) and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang 2.0 both premiered in Tokyo.

Teahouse 2.0 sold no tickets. It ran five times in a middle-school classroom, 11 audience members a show — 55 people in all were lucky enough to see it. It follows Lao She's text closely; the old social relations become today's school relations, and you find that a century apart, the two eras are not so different.

"I love the Great Qing, but who loves me!"

At first Wang Chong wanted to build an extremely lifelike classroom on the stage of a conventional theater; then, by luck, he found a new solution — performing in a real classroom. "When there are only 11 audience members a show and 44 actors, the force you feel is completely different. You know this performance has only 11 people watching, so you carry 1/11 of the responsibility. The play ran five times, so you're one of only 55 people in the world who have seen it."

After Teahouse 2.0, Wang Chong's latest plan is Taxi Driver 2.0 (《出租车司机 2.0》), a performance staged inside a moving taxi, with one audience member per show. He has even imagined a play with no audience at all. I asked him who it would be performed for. Maybe the god of theater, he said.

"China does have that puppet-theater tradition — some shows are meant only for the dead, and if the living watch them it's considered unlucky. Some puppet shows are used for sacrificial rites. That play with no audience at all, I'd make it into a rite."

Not all of his work runs into the approval problem. Abroad, Wang Chong has room to create freely, and there he has realized some of his wilder ideas.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang 2.0, for instance, played Tokyo last year, with all communication on stage conducted through French kissing — but it is not about love, and it is not about sex, and the absurdity rises on its own. This is the work Wang Chong has spent this year pressing on theater festivals in China, this year's Wuzhen included; everyone who watched the recording said it was good, but the reservations stayed, and no one took it.

Some works about China today have been staged abroad as well. Little Emperor, which premiered in Melbourne last year, is built around the one-child policy that ended in 2016; Model Opera 2.0 (《样板戏 2.0》), which premiered in Singapore in 2015, is about collective unconsciousness and individual responsibility inside madness. These are all things Wang Chong badly needs to say — but the people he is saying them to are not the ones badly wanting to hear.

"Think about it: mainstream theater audiences in Australia can only understand your problem so far, or take only so much of the depth you're able to express. There's a lot I want to say, but abroad, when the listener isn't quite the right one, it gets in the way of the force breaking out. When work like The Vagina Monologues or The Great Master can be said and heard at home, that's when the force is really released — every punch lands on flesh."

So does he want to be heard at home? Not exactly, he says. "To put it precisely, what I want is to be heard by the right people."

Look back at Wang Chong's old work or forward to his new work, and he is a director willing to face the present head-on. "In my view, theater shouldn't let people escape reality. Theater should make people face reality. It should carry as much reality and as much of the present into the theater as it can."

Both times Wang Chong went to Wuzhen his schedule was full and he never had time to watch other people's plays properly. But he likes the place. He remembered seeing a cormorant once — the bird that keeps the fish in its mouth — and then a fisherman squeezing its neck with one hand until the fish came back up. He really did see it with his own eyes, and he thought it was interesting.

Years of cultivation have made the Wuzhen Theatre Festival the largest and most prestigious international theater festival in China. Now that the Lin Zhaohua Theatre Invitation Festival has been suspended this year with no sign of returning to the calendar, Wuzhen is the festival everyone watches. Wang Chong does not hide how much he likes it, but he also points out that Wuzhen is a man-made paradise.

"Step outside the scenic area, or into the parts along the edge still under construction, and it's dirty and chaotic. The core is still very refined, trying to produce an illusion — in that sense it's quite like theater. For a long time, Chinese theater has been about escaping reality — fencing off a space and manufacturing illusions inside it. But that's actually a kind of political incorrectness. Some institutions are afraid of anything that touches the present, which makes them hard to work with."

"Theater that deals with the present should be an instinct; it's also what theater and the market ought to look like. Who wouldn't want to see a play about the vaccines, about the Malaysia Airlines flight, about the Wenchuan earthquake? Everyone wants to watch things directly connected to our lives, because that's the only way you can explain what your life actually is, where your country and society are going, which way you yourself should go. It's a way of communicating."

This year's featured program at Wuzhen includes six strong works from past Young Directors' Competitions, among them last year's top prize winner, The Flower Ate the Girl (《花吃了那女孩》). It is about school bullying, and it drew an enormous response during the competition; the festival's organizing committee later called it in its award citation a "brutal reality," but "not a re-enactment of brutality — an expression of deep concern."

The play was scheduled to perform in Shanghai in July; approval problems pushed it to September, and then the Shanghai performances were canceled altogether. Its runs in Wuhan, Hangzhou, Beijing and Wuzhen were unaffected.

Should a commercial theater festival have a mission of its own? If it should, is it there to carry everyone's expectations of a "festival," or to take on more social responsibility? When the Wuzhen Theatre Festival was founded, its slogan was "utopia," and it has indeed been growing in that direction — running into celebrities, meeting up with old friends, these too have been part of Wuzhen's official pitch in recent years.

No one can fault Wuzhen for its choices; drawing more people to Wuzhen and putting them in touch with the art of theater is enough on its own to earn a place in theater history. But everything theater itself carries cannot be conveyed accurately by the efforts of one festival.

For a maker, Wang Chong believes, theater will never be entertainment. The world is "fucked-up enough already"; theater is a tool, a small world "for discussing the fucked-up world." If it were purely for entertainment, there are plenty of other industries to choose from. At the same time theater is not some place perched above everything else. It is a way of communicating.

"Russians say theater is like church. For me it isn't the lofty, sacred thing the professors at the Central Academy of Drama talk about. First, the frequency with which you go to see plays is close to the frequency with which you go to church — once a week if you're devout, once every month or two if you're not. But you know there's a place where you can go and set some things down. Then you come to hear the priest pass on God's will and words about the spirit: what to do with the past, present and future of your life, what exactly is good and what is evil, what should we stay away from? Discussing basic questions, solving the problems of the human heart — in that sense theater and church are related."

"And in this era people are drifting further and further from purely religious activity, so artists have become the mediums of the soul. Art is the religion of our time."

The long cover image is a production photo from the Shanghai performance of One Take, One Life: Ibsen; the cover image is a production photo from The Great Master. The production photos and personal photos in this article were provided by the interview subject.