Intro to Wang Chong

Wang Chong is a writer/translator, one of Beijing’s most renowned contemporary theater directors. Intent on refreshing the stagnant Chinese theater scene by combining genres such as political, physical, documentary, multimedia, and cross-cultural, Wang Chong founded the Beijing based performance group Théâtre du Rêve Expérimental in 2008. It has performed over 30 shows in more than 20 countries. Wang Chong’s work has received much positive critical and popular response. “The Warfare of Landmine 2.0” won 2013’s Festival/Tokyo Award; “Lu Xun” was noted by The Beijing News as The Best Chinese Performance of the year.  Wang has received a Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard University, Asian Cultural Council Fellowship in New York, and Han Suyin Award for Young Translators.

Wang Chong brought his solo show “Made in China 2.0” to Boston earlier this month. It took the audience on a journey inside his experience of creating theater and discussed the stereotypes of what China brings to the world. Sampan spoke with Wang Chong to learn more about his career as an artist and his new production “Made in China 2.0.”

Interview

Sampan: We are very honored your show Made in China 2.0 debuted in Boston this month! Before we dig into that, would you tell us a little about your personal history, specifically about what led you into a career in art?

Wang Chong:

“… Since I became interested in drama, I watched a lot of plays, movies, performances and dances in college. When I was in my third and fourth year of college, I made it clear that I wanted to go to the United States to study drama and become a professor in the future, with drama as my academic focus. Later, an opportunity arose and I had my first directing experience when I was studying drama at the University of Hawaii. I still remember that one night, I stayed alone in the theater and played a video from a play endlessly, and felt the joy of creation for the first time. In addition, I also acted in “Cherry Orchard in Beijing” starring Jiang Wenli and directed by Lin Zhaohua…I didn’t understand the importance of media evaluation, so I was only excited about acting… It was repeated experiences related to acting like this that made me feel intrigued about directing. Slowly.. I … caught up with the wave of independent dramas in China….  [W]hen I was studying drama, I often studied in Hawaii and California, and directed plays when I returned to China during the summer break. Those years gave me some confidence, and made me think that directing is not difficult, and what I did in China was good by most standards… I started from scratch with a small budget and I established my own theater company in 2009 after returning to China in 2008—the Théâtre du Rêve Expérimental.”

Sampan: How do you define “experimental theater”?

Wang Chong:

Experimental theater…will always have a relationship with the background, such as the social background, the development stage of art, the context and so on. [It] should always have a relationship of tension with mainstream and ordinary drama, even of contrast or criticism.. explaining what is not experimental theater is relatively easy: …mainstream, commercial, ordinary plays, very common dramas like these, they are not experimental dramas…. with this kind of background and comparison, I will try to choose to try a very different, experimental path of drama. For example, I tried to do two works with opera actors. The 2010 Hamlet Machine came from a postmodern East German text. In fact, no one thought about connecting this script with opera. But when I collaborated with four opera actors to perform it, it produced a miraculous effect… I studied Peking Opera with a professor from Nanjing Peking Opera Theater in Hawaii, and I am also interested in the history and politics embedded in the opera. The Hamlet Machine is essentially a poem about politics, so I combined it with Chinese opera and Chinese politics to make a performance with images, highly difficult texts, and the bodily performance of opera actors. Later, I started experimenting with live video & real-time editing on stage. I have been doing this kind of work for ten years.

When the pandemic hit in 2020, Zoom  transformed these works into an online theater. In April 2020, my four actors performed “Waiting for Godot” using Zoom in three different cities with 290,000 viewers. Other representative works include my recent Micro-theater Trilogy. …Teahouse 2.0 was done in the classroom, with only eleven people in the audience per session. Later, there were four audiences per play, or even eight actors facing one audience. There are already four or five different plays, so it is difficult to define what experimental theater is.

            ‘…When reading, the development of technology, and understanding of people and society are all considered, creating new works or interpreting scripts at this time will need to be done in three dimensions. With Teahouse 2.0, I knew that I wanted to create a very different Teahouse, so I chose to cooperate with middle school students and perform in real middle school classrooms. I know this is a particularly earth-shattering attempt. It is precisely because I know the status of Teahouse in the history of Chinese drama and how it speaks condescendingly to the public, that we take an opposite approach and only perform in front of eleven people. Such is the sense of confrontation of experimental theater. I combined the current social news about school campuses; students taking drugs, the campus becoming KTV, or teachers sexually abusing students, etc. It combines the history of theater with my own high school life and the news of school collapse that I read. The chemical reaction of these points in the theater makes the details of the performance richer and more comprehensive.

Sampan: You have presented your shows in more than 20 countries. How do you think the international community has received your work? What does having an international presentation mean to you and does it influence your creation of Made in China 2.0?

Wang Chong:

“…My favorite drama masters, Lunt Wilson, Suzuki Tadashi, Grotowski, and Peter Brook are all particularly international directors. Many of their works are cross-cultural, which means that actors and elements from different cultures are woven together to present to the world. When I was studying, these ideas deeply influenced me, making me think that internationalization is both good and necessary. This trend may have changed in recent years. The epidemic has reduced opportunities for international exchanges, and various countries have gradually become conservative, trying to leave opportunities for their own artists. But when there is less international exchange, people naturally think that national or local drama is the best, the only possibility. This is what I don’t want to see.

What’s more, overseas people don’t have many opportunities to watch Chinese dramas, so I believe that every time my drama group is invited and selected, there is a lot of hard work behind it. Many overseas organizations choose my plays because they think I can represent the real thoughts of Chinese people at the moment. Many classic dramas currently lack creativity and cannot represent contemporary Chinese ideas and may not be the most interesting for domestic or international audiences. So, I believe it is precisely because of this innovation-inducing context that our dramas become interesting and create intellectual tensions.

Sampan: Can you reveal a little about Made in China 2.0 to us? What has inspired you to create this project? Why did you choose to do a solo show?

Wang Chong:

            “…[T]he work is actually a novel work related to the different encounters I experienced when acting in each country. I use Made in China 2.0 to reflect on my creative experience in China and Australia. At the same time, because this is the first time for me to be a screenwriter and actor, and it is also the first time for me to tell my own history as a character and the story itself, so I have had a lot of worries and pressure. Thanks to colleagues in Australia who helped me channel my fears, I finally achieved such a brave presentation.

…Many directors stagnate after the age of 35 and grow used to repeating their past successful models. I don’t want myself to stop innovating so early, but rather to embrace more changes, more challenging work, and richer attempts. Although it is hard to say that a one-man show is experimental, it remains a rich attempt. In this performance, I will use video and narration to explore the relationship between fiction and reality, as well as the relationship between inside and outside of the theater.

Telling my own story may not be very important to the world at large, but it is a huge challenge for me personally… Although I used to work as a behind-the-scenes creator with actors; but when I really stand alone on the stage as an actor, the pressure is still great. I think such a challenge is very interesting, and when the project is completed, I felt that it was a very meaningful project, and a liberating one.