A Show That Can't Be Defined — and the Blur Between Actor, Play, Theater and Theme Makes It All the More Interesting | Wuzhen Theatre Festival

“Everyone has a marginal side to them. That’s the thing I’m looking for”

For 10 minutes the room was a dance floor. Some people threw themselves into it, some swayed on the spot, and plenty stood stiff and refused to join. Anyone walking in off the street would have taken it for a nightclub; nothing about it suggested theater. But it was a theatrical performance, and the people dancing — and the people refusing — were ordinary ticket holders.

This was the evening of October 20, the third day of the Wuzhen Theatre Festival, and Like a Fish in Water (《如鱼得水》), the second of the two pieces in The Old Goblin (《老妖精》), was playing at the Shen Family Theatre. The conventional stage had become the sound desk, the seats had been ripped out, and the hall had been turned into a club. A huge fish tank stood in the middle. Screens hung on either side, playing the same footage on a loop: goldfish swimming.

Two people in the audience could not accept a show that “didn’t look like theater,” and stood near the entrance shouting for refunds. The director, Lyu Yuzhou, handed them the microphone and asked them to say what they objected to.

They were too angry to talk to the creators as equals. To keep the rest of the show moving, Lyu agreed to the refunds and asked them to sort it out with the staff outside.

Two young women beside me were whispering: if we ask for a refund now, will they give us one too? I asked whether they really wanted to leave. Once they had established I wasn’t on the crew, they relaxed and said no — they had only been wondering whether the two men demanding refunds were plants.

If you rarely encounter contemporary art, confusion, blankness, even fury are all reasonable responses here. The two who walked out had probably reached the end of their patience some time before, and not only because of those 10 minutes.

Earlier we had watched Pregnancy (《孕》), the first of the two pieces. Together the two make up The Old Goblin.

Strictly speaking, “The Old Goblin” is the name of the company the two directors belong to — Lin Cuixi, who made Pregnancy, and Lyu Yuzhou, who made Like a Fish in Water — not the title of the show. This past June the two pieces premiered in Shanghai at McaM (Ming Contemporary Art Museum), alongside The Book of the Survivor (《生存者之书》), directed by Lydia Lai.

At Pregnancy the audience sat on the floor around a table with a pot of water coming to the boil on it. An actor dropped in a slaughtered chicken and threw in thick chunks of ginger.

Over the burble of the chicken soup: no clear relationships between characters, almost no dialogue, only a few scattered lines, no scenes played off another actor. What Lin Cuixi wanted to work on was motherhood, the female body — or, more bluntly, the female animal.

Near the end of the performance a chicken, chased by an actor, flew low and without warning through the gap between me and the person next to me. I screamed.

Lin Cuixi studied computational mathematics and theater as an undergraduate at UCLA, then directing at East 15 Acting School in London. She explained it to me afterwards: “A dog would seem docile, tamed. But this is a bird. You can’t communicate with a chicken. It flies, it shits.”

“When an audience member stops and thinks, ‘a chicken frightened me,’ that is really a feeling about their own body. There are moments when you sense your body mutating into something animal, into a state you can’t read.”

Seen as contemporary art, everything about Pregnancy holds together. The maker has her intentions, but the audience’s reading is never the only one; it points back at the self. Many people felt they didn’t understand it, yet Pregnancy is visibly a carefully rehearsed piece performed only by actors. Apart from the live chicken, everything was under control.

Like a Fish in Water asked rather more of its audience. The director handed out dried fish snacks, picked one woman out of the crowd and asked her on the spot whether she was in an intimate relationship, then came the 10 minutes of dancing, then the shouting about refunds. It looked a great deal like performance art.

Which reactions were real and which were rehearsed? Too much of it defied common sense, too much arrived at once, and everyone seemed to be in a state of not knowing. Put plainly: when contemporary art walks into a theater and faces a theater audience, not everyone is ready for it.

The pounding music and the lights disappeared. The audience tried to shake off the refund episode and gathered around the tank in the middle of the room to watch two performers inside it.

Like a Fish in Water is a live experiment about the kind of intimacy that suffocates. Lyu Yuzhou holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology and sociology from Cambridge and a graduate degree in directing from East 15 Acting School in London. From late April to early June this year, with backing from McaM, she and a collaborator worked as researchers in a villa run by the museum and ran eight rounds of experiments.

Each round used two people. Couples, close friends, even strangers were invited into a small room with basic food and water and a toilet, and nothing else. The one thing people now lean on — the phone — was not allowed in. They had to spend 24 hours living together with almost no private space.

Similar work exists abroad: Marina Abramović’s The Artist Is Present in 2010, for instance. She sat at a wooden table in a museum for 736 hours (30 days), looking without expression at whoever chose to sit down opposite her. But when the subjects are not the artist herself but ordinary people, even a single day turns out to be far more complicated.

Lyu Yuzhou told the audience what had happened: some pairs kept a safe distance the whole time; two people who had never met began flirting after it was over; one person was so bored he slept 19 of the 24 hours; one tried to run away and was caught and brought back.

At Wuzhen that room became a giant fish tank, and anyone could watch the two people inside through the glass. The pair who went into the tank are a real couple, and were the second pair in the experiment. When Lyu Yuzhou first met them they had been together less than a year; she later cast them as non-professional actors and brought them back into a theater.

The screens showed interviews with them from May, along with surveillance footage; a man’s voice and a woman’s described what they each understood intimacy to be. Sound and image did not always match — the voices belonged to Lyu Yuzhou and her collaborator Shen Bolun. Maker and performer were set side by side, and the two of them commented freely on the couple in the experiment, projecting their own imaginings onto them.

Inside the tank: one toilet, 4 apples, 2 bottles of water, 1 roll of paper. They embraced, kissed, tangled together, fell to the floor, pulled apart, and started again. No lines, no plot; all the audience could pick up was mood and feeling. Lyu Yuzhou kept handing the microphone to people watching the tank: “What do you see?”

Some found themselves in it, and looked for what it said about their own lives. “I see how small I make myself.” “I don’t think they’re ever really together for a moment. You can’t get it — intimacy, I mean.”

One man was far inside the piece: “I feel like we’re the ones being experimented on. Maybe we’re your subjects, and you’ll use our answers in the next show.” He had a point. Look up, and you saw a crowd on the second floor who had never joined in at all, staring down at the whole thing.

Someone else had noticed the room changing: “I see fewer and fewer people.” Then, after a pause, this audience member — one of the more enthusiastic dancers — gave the director a note: “Your music is too old. Nobody dances to that any more.” The director laughed. “Sorry. I’m new to clubbing.”

Asked why she had come, one woman moved the microphone aside and quietly asked the director, “Can I tell the truth?” Told she could, she said: “Because I wanted to see Teahouse and couldn’t get a ticket.” Nobody was embarrassed, the director least of all; everyone thought the answer was charming. A polite lie would have been out of place. Like a Fish in Water is itself an act of self-exposure.

The show needs its audience to take part, and at the Wuzhen Theatre Festival it drew a great deal of argument and sharply split opinion — even though the Special Invited Programme had already sorted the works into categories, and The Old Goblin sat under “Theatre Metamorphoses,” a label that tells you the pieces beneath it are not theater in the traditional sense.

What the audience expected and what the festival means by “diversity” had come apart. When the boundaries of drama and theater blur, both makers and audiences are tested: one side has to do more to guide, the other has to arrive more open.

Besides “this isn’t what theater is to me,” some questioned whether the creators had prepared properly. A finished piece, the argument goes, should not allow this many things to go wrong.

But to Lyu Yuzhou the audience is one of the piece’s important performers, and everything that happens in the room becomes part of a work that cannot be repeated. Like a Fish in Water makes the audience choose: dance or stand and watch, stay or go, slip out quietly or shout for a refund.

The audience is not the only one caught up in it. The makers are too, sometimes by choice and sometimes not. Toward the end, a recording of the words “The fish must die” played on a loop. It came from something that went wrong at the premiere.

In front of everyone, Shen Bolun accused Lyu Yuzhou of using him to push her experiment along, and of having no real wish to explore anything, because she had already settled on her answer.

“Why is this supposed to be about a relationship between two people, when the video here and the video there both show only one fish?” She put that recording into her second Wuzhen performance.

Lyu Yuzhou set up the experiment in the first place to look into her own intimate relationships, and asked Shen Bolun — a friend she had an unresolved something with — to work on it with her. After the collisions inside the experiment, what is left in the room now is his absence, which is the interesting part. She tells the audience all of this, at the start of the show and again at the end.

When the video ended, Lyu Yuzhou stood in front of the tank and gave the last performance of the night: “At this moment I’m finally willing to admit that maybe this really is a one-woman show. Like a fish in water, suffocation — all of it is only my own projection.” Then she put a question to the room: “Can we enter a relationship without preconceptions? And if we could, would intimacy have new possibilities?”

About 30 percent of the crowd around the tank had drifted off by then. When the show ended, Lyu Yuzhou got a lot of hugs, all of them from audience members.

We talked with both directors. There is more to know.

Q = QDaily, Lyu = Lyu Yuzhou, Lin = Lin Cuixi

Q: How would you define this show? Performance art, documentary theater, something else?

Lyu: To us it is theater. There is no definition, really, but we get asked this constantly. Theater is a very open place where anything can happen. We have our tastes and our preferences, but we think all of it is theater. What we keep discovering, though, is that audiences need a way in. They need to know what they are watching, and sometimes a label helps them adjust what they expect.

Q: A lot of people said they didn’t understand it this time, is that right?

Lin: Yes. In the work I used to make — a lot of it physical, close to contemporary dance — you don’t have to interpret which character the dancer is playing, right? The audience doesn’t come in with that preset. They read the musicality of it and so on.

But traditional theater is built on narrative. Audiences want a story, they want to find relationships between characters. So this gap is unavoidable. I keep thinking about how to deal with it, how to explain things better, how to adjust what people expect.

Lyu: What I find most interesting is that some people don’t understand it but are curious and open. They come and ask, they try to get in. As long as that is there, it’s fine. And we do guide people, slowly — I did more and more of it as Like a Fish in Water went on.

Q: What do you mean by “more and more of it”?

Lyu: At first we hadn’t grasped how hard it was. An ordinary person can’t understand it and can’t accept it — the moment the dancing started they froze. So in the second performance, on October 20, we talked the audience through the dancing, because people were demanding refunds on the spot.

We used to give far less guidance around that part. If you come with an open mind there is always a way in. What I dread is someone who arrives, can’t find the way in, and goes straight to “this is shit, this isn’t theater” and refuses to try. I don’t know how to open that person up.

Q: You premiered at McaM in June. How did that audience react? They must be quite different from a theater audience.

Lyu: McaM has its own audience, so they come knowing roughly what they’re in for — they know they’ll see strange things. They aren’t theater audiences in the traditional sense. Some of them even said our work was too theatrical. To them we were still doing theater, not performance art. Meanwhile theater people say what we do isn’t theater, it’s too much like performance art.

So what are we? I find that a very interesting position to be in, and I enjoy it. We’re doing something new — though abroad it isn’t new at all.

Lin: In Wuzhen I talked to someone who works for a French festival. What she read in the piece was poetry. She thinks the language of poetry belongs in a theater and is easy enough to read there. But to Chinese audiences, to mainstream audiences, poetry in a theater is fragmentary and jumpy — it just sounds like nonsense.

Literature works the same way. If you read novels all the time and then pick up a poem, you may think, what is this, a handful of words? In fact it has its own logic, and you have to read a lot more before you can feel how the rhythm inside it works.

Q: Have you always made art for public space?

Lyu: Our theater work is actually varied. In Britain I made literary theater as well, and I love spoken drama. It’s just that this is what we brought this time. She [Lin Cuixi] also has work that is more physical, more about the senses. Neither of us has set limits on herself, and we haven’t only ever made work like this.

Lin: We aren’t hostile to spoken drama, to traditional “drama.” We were trained in that system.

Q: In a 2016 interview you talked about marginal art. How do you define it?

Lyu: Not marginal art — I said marginal. I said I’m a very mainstream person myself, but everyone has a marginal side to them, and that’s the thing I’m looking for. The people I work with each time are marginal in some setting or other. You bring that back into a theater, back into a mainstream place, and you’ve given them a chance to speak.

Making this kind of theater, responsibility is the hard part. If you make work like this, you owe those people something; they want a great deal from it, and you have your own artistic aims, things you want to explore through it. To me those two are like two stones on my shoulders, and they’re very hard to balance.

Q: What is hardest?

Lyu: What they want and the ambiguous territory you want to explore, the thing you want to say through it, are sometimes not the same thing at all. So we have to find the right point of connection.

We’re also trying other means besides theater — film screenings, archives, that sort of thing. The mainstream has a monopoly on who gets to speak, and many people can’t. Making a theater piece leaves me feeling powerless. What good does the thing do? So a hundred people came and saw it. So what? What is it you’re actually doing? That has been my pain these past two years.

It’s the question you always face when you make theater with real people, non-professionals: what you owe them, what you’re changing while you do it, whether you’re really moving anything in the real world. Or is theater only a symbol, a flag? I keep turning it over. The work is not as simple as telling their stories.

Q: Have you run into fierce conflict along the way? Have there been moments when you felt you couldn’t go on?

Lyu: Many times. Every time you try to bring their stories out, remember they are ordinary people, and they may not want the most painful parts of themselves exposed. There are a lot of problems like that. Whose wishes matter more in the end — theirs or yours? I’m still looking for the answer.

Q: Like a Fish in Water draws heavily on your own life. Is exposing yourself to the public dangerous? You’re the narrator; the audience members are strangers to one another, and yours is the only identity that’s public.

Lyu: I don’t think it’s dangerous. From the very start the piece interviews the audience and asks them to expose themselves, and all along I was trying to build a setting where exposing or sharing something very personal is safe. So I cut into myself first. Different voices, even conflict, are wonderful.

I’ve realized I’m always on that line. Reality and theater are always in a relationship with each other. And of course I control what I expose. In the opening, for example, I say that a breakup is a kind of detachment; my first idea was to hint at sex, but sex is very private and would have dropped the floor to the lowest point all at once. So a lot of it is designed. It isn’t that I simply expose everything.

Or take my crying at the end. There was a performed element in it, but the audience felt I was lost in my own relationship. Sometimes the line between the real and the performed is a blurred one.

Q: What are your plans after the Wuzhen Theatre Festival?

Lin: We’re putting together a new event, Scratch Night, starting in early November and running five weeks straight. Every week we make a short piece and show it to an audience on Wednesday night. The work is unfinished, and that is the interesting part: the audience comes in knowing they are seeing something incomplete, and then joins in, talks, gives feedback.

Lyu: I don’t want to be an independent maker who works project to project any more. I want to build up a community and a life based in a theater. Making something at high intensity once a week — experimenting, failing, wiping the slate and starting over — is really a way of growing new seeds, of setting each other off.

In spring and summer we run a performance season: someone wants to explore something and the rest of us help, and that turns into a fairly complete statement or attempt. For me the two halves feed each other. I want to build something with a long-term plan behind it, rather than waiting around for resources and chances to turn into projects.

Q: Are you still working with McaM?

Lyu: Our producer, Zhang Yuan, is at McaM, which is how we got the chance. McaM has plenty of plans of its own, and it can’t always be the right fit. For the last three weeks of Scratch Night we’ll work with the Dinghaiqiao community and a photo studio, for example. We need new ground to explore, and we want to move further into society — partly inside the art and theater worlds, and partly out into wider public space.

Note: photography and filming by the audience were not allowed at Pregnancy; both were allowed at Like a Fish in Water.

The cover image and the long cover image are both stills from Like a Fish in Water, photographed by Dai Jianyong.