Theater director Tian Gebing looks back on his “20 years of confrontation”: theater, he says, is “deliberately setting out to challenge some kind of impossibility”

“These 20 years of experience have taught me that the boundary between people isn't language — it's the distance in aesthetic sensibility that's really impossible to cross.”

Tian Gebing, an independent Chinese theater director — a “legend.”

The word “legend” first came up at an event held in the winter of 2018 called “20 Years — ‘And the Whole World Became Our Theater.’” Lai Huihui, one of the organizers, said during a conversation there: “Quite a few young people told me they'd finally met the legend today.” The event was jointly initiated by Living Dance Studio, Paper Tiger Studio and Zuhe Niao, whose founders have each been making independent theater for more than 20 years.

But the meaning of “legend” is complicated. It can mean simply having lasted a long time. It can mean being marginal — working outside the system for years, with few chances to perform in China's mainstream theaters. It can mean rarely facing an audience directly: work that other people often mention but that almost nobody has actually seen. More important, perhaps, is a stance: not fitting in, and working hard to keep it that way.

In the essay “And the Whole World Became Our Theater”, Tian Gebing calls these 20 years a “submerged history”: “Twenty years on, the work of rewriting theater history — of starting to write theater history at all — has begun. History will eventually surface out of that submersion, and the spaces of social power are being redefined again and again. But the people living through this don't care in the least whether history remembers them or forgets them. They simply use this ‘submersion and disruption’ to seize happiness and an abundance of freedom in life, and so become the affluent ‘new humans’ of everyday life and the fearless ‘terrorists’ of the theater.”

Tian Gebing describes his relationship with theater-making as a “life accident” that has lasted 20 years. The accident began around 1998, though his connection to theater goes back further.

In 1986, after doing badly on the college entrance exam, Tian Gebing enrolled at the Central Academy of Drama, where he studied playwriting in the Department of Drama Literature. He liked reading literature, but he couldn't get through literary plays with their “long-winded” dialogue. At the time he was certain he would never end up doing anything to do with theater.

In his second year he quietly took over a basement rehearsal hall at the Academy. Besides his classmates, poets, painters and other artist friends from outside the school came and went from the space, and they realized a lot of their own ideas and impulses there. Tian stresses that none of it counted as work — they never dared perform it publicly, whether out of fear of losing the space or because they simply weren't brave enough yet.

“But that experience was actually worth more than making it public would have been,” Tian says. It was the period when everyone was doing “campus theater” and the “little theater movement”; Meng Jinghui, Li Liuyi, Zhang Guangtian and Mou Sen were all figures who could be seen as “leaders” in that scene. Tian and another group of people, meanwhile, were down in the basement rehearsal hall doing what they themselves thought were cooler things.

In 1989 the school shut the basement rehearsal space down. In 1991 Tian graduated and was swept straight into the rhythm of ordinary life. He started taking jobs — commercials, films, music videos, TV specials. “I didn't have a fixed direction yet. There was a lot to do. Theater wasn't a very important thing.”

That changed in 1996, when he met Martin Krupp, a German then teaching at the Academy as a foreign instructor. The two had no language in common, but their understanding of theater met with “zero obstacles”; Tian calls the encounter “love at first sight.” In 1997 the German came back with a team and sought Tian out, and together they made Beijing Blue.

“These 20 years of experience have taught me that the boundary between people isn't language — it's the distance in aesthetic sensibility that's really impossible to cross. Sometimes you can't communicate with someone who speaks exactly the same language you do, and in theater work especially, this failure to communicate happens almost constantly. Even between brothers and sisters, the gap in aesthetic sensibility can be a thousand mountains wide. In a sense, aesthetics divides us into different countries.”

When the Beijing Blue project ended, it left behind a group of people whose enthusiasm hadn't run out. In the commercialized, marketized air of the 1990s they were in a state of “pending,” and they were skeptical of the collective rush to “scramble for chances to make money.” When Tian decided to make another piece, this group of people unwilling to drift with the current came together.

“None of them wanted in, or they were still struggling, or they'd been knocked back and returned, or any number of other reasons,” Tian says. He notes that after Beijing Blue it was entirely possible they would never have made theater again. “At the time we had a very strong impulse to ‘provoke,’ an inner motive to ‘make trouble’ — that's why we started making theater. We wanted to face down and challenge the whole trend, the unquestionable consensus we felt all around us, including the theater that was then being marketized. Because from the 1990s on, little theater looked like it was flourishing, manufacturing every element that makes stars and markets; a petty-bourgeois, gutless, kitsch theater culture pandering to the direction of the times was being successfully manufactured, and that was nothing like the theater we had imagined in the 1980s. So at that point, could we sing a different tune? Could our generation do something different?”

In 1998 Tian's group took the name “Paper Tiger.”

Partly it was because 1998 was the Year of the Tiger, and partly because they thought the phrase was pretty funny in the context of 1998. It was a term from the Cultural Revolution; by the 1990s its old meaning had lost its context and shifted, and picked up several new layers.

“There's a political slogan our generation knows well — ‘Imperialism and all reactionaries are paper tigers.’ It's a quote from Mao. It was an inflammatory, rousing nationalist declaration aimed at the United States and the whole Western world of the time, meaning they only looked strong and would collapse at the first blow. By the time we thought of that line again in the 1990s the context had changed, and the slogan — the ‘big talk’ — was now soaked in irony. You could feel right away that doubleness of strength and weakness, a kind of moral disorientation flipping back and forth, and it spoke directly to the state of theater then, to a lot of real-world problems, and to the posture and basic attitude of the creators themselves. It also had a bit of playfulness to it.”

Paper Tiger then made its first work, the vulgar-theater piece The Killer Doesn't Mind the Cold and High Art.

The Killer Doesn't Mind the Cold and High Art had no plot to speak of, and nothing that could be called dialogue — only fragments of public text taken from everyday life. Tian deliberately let crude, unpolished, unliterary language into the theater.

Tian defines contemporary theater as “the body taking the stage”: not staging a literary text, not relying on a story to return to some past time and place the way traditional drama does, but creating a time that is happening now, a place that is here. That space becomes a space of the body, and the body becomes the text.

“The literary text is gone. What replaces it? Apart from the body, any other material is possible.”

Every work Paper Tiger made afterward has this trait: public texts chosen as the material of the piece, in an ever-wider range of kinds — textbooks, political reports, birth plans, even contracts and legal documents. They pick language that has broken out of the structures of dramatic literature; they stop treating actors as vehicles for a dramatic text; they let text and body relate to each other in many ways, and that relationship can produce a sense of the present.

The relationship is especially clear in Recitation, a piece Paper Tiger made in 2010 that runs the act of reciting through the whole work.

One media outlet once described a performance of Recitation like this: “A group of male performers read aloud from all kinds of public texts in all kinds of bodily postures, until they reach a state of unrestrained freedom. At the end of the performance, rain pours down on the stage; the performers goose-step through slow-motion smiles, chasing the climax of recitation in vain through their own sweat, and then collapse all at once.”

Recitation deliberately takes aim at the text itself: Tian had the dancers read these things onstage rather than memorize them. “That difference actually matters a great deal. It reveals a truth about text and body — that the text sits outside the body. It doesn't ask you to learn your lines and then pretend they're a language that belongs to your body. So you have to let the audience see from the very start that the two have no relationship to each other. Then you use the intensity of the body, and the connection — or the friction — created between text and body, to produce a powerfully destructive force.”

Using public texts the way Recitation did was a first, in China and in the West. After being invited to perform at the Netherlands Theater Festival, the piece toured other Dutch cities and the Kammerspiele in Munich, Germany.

Another important thing happened in 2010: Paper Tiger got its own studio in Tuofangying, Beijing, which also meant Tian now had a performance space of his own.

Besides presenting Paper Tiger's own work, they launched the “Playing Dumb Performance Festival” there, inviting many artist groups from China and abroad to perform. The festival ran on zero budget: most people paid their own way, Paper Tiger Studio found them somewhere to sleep, and box-office takings were then split among everyone as a small fee.

Paper Tiger Studio and other artists ran a lot of workshops for young people there, and lent them the performance space as well. All of it was free.

Around 2010, Paper Tiger Studio's working method also began to change, turning toward cross-cultural creation.

“We deliberately put different cultures together in the work, which is why we used the word ‘cross-cultural.’ Later we added a few more words and called it ‘cross-cultural research theater,’ which was meant to open up our field of vision on purpose, to stop working inside an isolated reality, and to put problems together with history or with different cultural situations as much as possible. That's also why we call it ‘creating under a world view.’ It rests on the reality of globalization, the growth of the internet and so on. The world has become very tightly connected, and we have to answer that with theater.”

Very Happy came out of that period. Its inspiration came from “the masses”; the title came from the fact that, going through their research interviews, the Paper Tiger troupe found that many of the young people they interviewed used the phrase “very happy” to describe how it felt to first join a collective.

Strictly speaking, Very Happy isn't the name of a theater piece. The stage performance was one part of it; only the complete series of actions — the research, the documentary and the book that came out of the process — can be called Very Happy.

But in the same year Very Happy premiered, the Paper Tiger space was slated for demolition and the landlord ended the lease early. Tian says that personally he felt “a weight lifted” once it came down. “We were paying for that space ourselves the whole time. With no other funding, it was actually pretty exhausting. Doing something with a public dimension entirely on your own is hard to sustain. On the other hand, there's an enormous amount of space in China now, and most of it is going to waste. Couldn't that space be used? So giving up my old space wasn't a bad thing either. Maybe new ideas will come out of it.”

In 2016, Paper Tiger Studio was invited by the Stary Theatre in Kraków, Poland, to stage the cross-cultural work The Ten Commandments, with Tian Gebing directing. It was a historic event: Tian is the only Chinese theater director ever invited to direct at a mainstream European theater of that rank.

Tian recalls: “2016 happened to be the year Polish theater sold really well in China.” Polish productions such as (A)pollonia, Martyrs and Heldenplatz were given near-“pilgrimage” treatment that year, and many Chinese audiences learned the names of directors like Krystian Lupa, Grzegorz Jarzyna and Krzysztof Warlikowski through them.

“Those Polish masters were all deliberately pushed onto the international stage using the power of the state. When you say ‘Poland,’ you think of those names, and then you respect the country. China is the opposite. What they're proudest of is being able to buy up every famous name from abroad — a nouveau-riche kind of consumption. People like us have had no support from any resource belonging to this country; everything has been done with our own individual strength. That's exactly what makes us formidable. Would the Stary Theatre in Kraków ever invite someone from one of the big theaters here to go and direct a show? Of course, this also proves that theater has a value beyond money. Sometimes you spend all that money and you still can't win the world's respect for your country's theater art. All they think is that you're a big market.”

We talked with Tian Gebing further about his attitude toward making theater and making work.

Q = QDaily

T = Tian Gebing

Q: You seem to bring up words like “a sense of provocation,” “making trouble,” “the terrorist in the theater” fairly often. It feels like you're deliberately manufacturing a sense of fear.

T: “Provocation,” used inside the logic of theater, describes a critical attitude — an aesthetic position taken in the face of institutional power, worldly taboos and real problems. It can certainly also be a reason for making theater. If what you want is to cook up some inspirational soup, tell a touching story, or go prospecting in the market — start a business, make a name for yourself — you don't need theater for that; there are far more convenient ways. So why make theater? Really it's to challenge things that can't be achieved in reality. That's the most interesting thing about theater. Otherwise there's no need to make it.

“Terrorist” describes an understanding of performance that came out of our own long years of work in the theater. Paper Tiger's performances have always been fairly “provocative,” with a certain “danger” to them. This is still language inside the logic of theater, of course: it means you have to want to push past your limits. I often say a performer should be an extremely brave person, a person with courage. That courage rests on your deliberately setting out to challenge some kind of impossibility. That's when theater is at its most compelling. That's also what theater means to us.

It's a life outside of life. It's precisely because real life has so many problems that theater is necessary. If inside the theater you're still going to follow the rules of ordinary life and toe the line, then there's no need to make theater at all.

Most of the people and performers who've worked with Paper Tiger over the long term carry this Paper Tiger “DNA” — the wish to dare to push past limits. Only that kind of theater work is interesting; only that produces the chemical reaction between people, the mutual encouragement and excitement, the mutual respect and bond.

Q: In an earlier interview you said, “Theater isn't important; what matters is using theater to create a kind of life.” Is that the life you just described?

T: Yes, it follows the same logic. You use theater to enter life, then use theater to escape life — a process full of invention. We aren't art-for-art's-sake people; what matters most is how to live in a way that catches you off guard. Theater gives you the chance to leave life and imagine it again, and in that way helps you live.

So I used to say often that this is a two-way escape. Life itself is very boring, and theater may let you escape it — but if you sanctify theater and turn it into some lofty cause, all the fun goes out of it, so you have to escape back into life too. It's in the countless moments made by that repeated, two-way escaping. It sounds a bit nihilistic, but the power theater can give you is exactly that power of nothingness.

Q: When I first read that line, I couldn't shake the feeling that making theater is a deliberate act of resistance against something. Is it resisting the boring parts of life?

T: You could also say theater gives life a chance to shift space, making a gap in space and time that props life up. Otherwise daily life is really just a process of being used up and slipping away, and theater is the best way to help you convert that draining away into something else.

Q: You seem to keep stressing that making theater isn't something you absolutely have to do, that you can stop at any moment. How should we understand that? Can it be seen as a precondition for making theater?

T: That's a basic attitude of mine. I don't want to treat it as a profession; once it becomes a profession it stops being fun. There are many important things in a life, and it's hard to say which matters more. You'll have many choices, and you should keep asking: what other choice should I be making? Leave yourself room to move, so don't treat it as the one thing you must do. Because compared with life itself, every choice is trivial. Nothing is the only option, right?

So you can do anything at all. Don't say “I was born to make theater” — that's a terrifying thing to say. And don't sanctify the profession and then use it to sanctify yourself. If you do, your life gets painted over. In fact huge numbers of people end up this way without noticing: institutionalized, fixed in place by art or by some other form, their own body and their own life replaced. That's what we've always been on guard against.

Of course, a lot of people know you because of theater, or because of some particular thing you did. So you do need that kind of identity; otherwise you can't be part of society, can't build a connection to it. But we resist that identity anyway — that's the paradox. In the end I think no identity matters. What matters is how you live, what your life actually is. The truth of a life shouldn't be overlooked because of these “identities.”

Maybe it has to do with the era I grew up in, which left us with a kind of “obsessive resistance” to identity. In making theater we've always been deliberately “de-identifying.” That's different from the identity anxiety of the new generation; they're still in the middle of entering the big market, entering society, and they urgently need to establish their own form of social recognition. And not only the new generation — most of my own generation was like that too. So we didn't want to be like them, and we've kept de-identifying ever since. At the very least we don't care about that sort of thing. It doesn't even matter whether you make theater, whether you're a theater director. In the work we try as far as possible to lower it and weaken it, to let you get back to the state of being a person. That kind of identity alienates people. Some people are simply “a film director,” a symbol of power, and in the end they believe in the symbol themselves; or they're a successful person within some profession, and in the end that profession takes them hostage. Then they go all out reinforcing their professional achievement, and if that achievement is ever denied, their life has no meaning left. I think all of it is illusion. How do you keep from being fooled by that illusion? That matters a lot. Even if your life is a mess, you have to face it. You need a kind of bodily self-awareness.

Q: In your lecture on rewriting theater history you said that now is the most crucial moment to look back on these 20 years. It felt urgent.

T: Did I say that? (Yes.) I think that over these 20 years it hasn't just been us — a lot of other people, including many more young people now, have been carrying out enormous amounts of performance practice, a great deal of it crossing lines and breaking rules, performance turning up in all kinds of different fields. Once that practice reaches the 20-year mark, I think time itself brings a historical consciousness, a historical self-awareness; questions we never thought about before are starting to be thought about now. This is a tangled, complicated history, and these 20 years of practice look pretty chaotic. But their value comes precisely from the chaos — the chaos is what broke through the single system that used to dominate everything.

Because drama in our environment is highly institutionalized. Everything about it is: its mode of production, the whole system controlling resources and censorship, its market-oriented structure. But over these 20 years an enormous amount of creative work has been happening outside that powerful system. By the time we reach the 20-year mark, we suddenly realize that this naturally occurring, extra-institutional work has already surpassed what the system produces. In a sense you could say the system has stopped creating, or has been sidelined and left behind, because its very strength condemns it to repeat itself on the spot. But work outside the system hasn't stopped for a single day. We joke that the bourgeoisie has stopped creating while the proletariat creates like mad — huge numbers of young people, all kinds of independent, self-initiated work happening every day.

At this point I think there should be a historical consciousness. Those of us who lived through it, who witnessed these 20 years of history, have a responsibility to put the question on the table. So raising “rewriting theater history” is really raising a question, a declaration. It's meant to give everyone this awareness: awareness that the extra-institutional work of these 20 years, this independent work with a subject of its own, is already an important fact of contemporary cultural history, and the most valuable part of these 20 years of cultural practice. That's the sense in which it's urgent.

Q: What changes do you think the past 20 years have brought to the creative environment for independent theater troupes?

T: The change over 20 years is this: the term “independent theater” was stressed more in the 1990s, when things were clearer. “Independent” stood in relation to the system; you were either inside it or outside it, and that was the whole relationship. But over these years the system itself has changed a great deal — its form is different now, or the way we understand it is different. The old system is still there, of course. But there's been change in between. Once the market was brought in, for instance, many new forms of the system appeared, commercial mechanisms appeared, and some so-called independent work now itself contains plenty of connections to the system. So the relationship has become fairly complicated. This time we stress subjectivity more; “independent theater” may have lost some of its force, or has come to refer to something quite specific, belonging to a particular era. Look at the shift in wording from “independent theater” to “theater with a subject of its own” — that's also a change over these 20 years.

The generation making theater now, from those born in the 1980s to those born in the 1990s, doesn't have as strong a sense of independence. Some of them would rather get into a system, because the whole environment is different: independence costs them more, and they can't easily bear the cost. In fact they long to get inside a system; the whole situation is changing, and it affects individual choices a great deal. So this generation of creators is different from us. My general impression is that young people who have studied abroad still have a somewhat broader view, carry less of an identity burden, and have a bit more “subjectivity.”

Q: Do you have any advice for young theater makers?

T: I often say there's no such thing as young or not young in my dictionary — only “new humans.” Theater is a place full of possibility. You have to use theater to create a new world and turn yourself into a new human; only then does theater have value for you.

Otherwise, what's the point? Looking for a bit of opportunity in there, or starting something up to make some inspirational money? Why would you make money in the theater of all places? Or queueing up in the system's ranks, hoping to become the next generation's successor? Young people like that are everywhere, and although they're very young, as far as I'm concerned they've already grown old and joyless. I have no advice for them at all. What comforts me is that I've still seen many “new humans” grow up in the theater — at least, that's been my experience across 20 years of Paper Tiger. What is a “new human”? Someone who “leaves,” who “walks out” — a self-liberator with a conscious awareness of their own body.

Cover image: a production still from Recitation. Banner image: a production still from Very Happy, cropped. All photos by Liu Yin. All in-text images courtesy of Paper Tiger.