My first conversation with Wenhao took place while I was on a high-speed train back to my hometown. His WeChat friend request read: “Hello, I’m Qu Wenhao, a playwright from a theatrical desert.” I later saved that sentence as his contact note. Whenever we chatted, it gave me an inexplicable sense of déjà vu.
After we had spoken a few times on WeChat, Wenhao really did come to Beijing from Shandong. The theatre was then preparing Kill the Rose, the eighth play incubated through p4U. He talked to me at length about his six scripts and his own life: setting up a theatre society at university, writing plays and rehearsing them. After graduating, he had moved between theatre institutions and various organizations in different places. When he described unscrupulous employers withholding his wages, his voice grew especially forceful; bitterness and helplessness ran through his anger. Only then did I begin to understand how his desert had formed. He refused to accept it. He was still holding on to the belief that an oasis would appear.
As he was leaving, he got halfway down the stairs, came back to hand me a book, then left. Looking at the green-haired, white-faced Joker holding a camera and photographing me, I had an obscure sense that the revolving door of fate and theatre had turned once again at that moment.
I don’t like theatre. Perhaps it’s because I’m poor: I haven’t seen many plays, and I’m reluctant to spend money on them. Even now, I can count on my fingers the shows I’ve paid to see. On the one hand, I find it “too highbrow”; on the other, so much of it seems shoddily made, a sheer waste of both time and money. After watching, I find it has no connection to my life, does nothing to change how I see or understand things, and doesn’t even give me anything to talk about. These awful, worn-out preconceptions only began to break down when I started practising in the theatre myself.
P4 Theater incubated eight and a half plays in all: Shadow Counterpoint, Pixel Echo, Hamlet Mirror, Displace, Cocoon, Howlers on the Rooftop, A Centrist’s Self-Help Guide after Failed Love, and Kill the Rose. If I have time later, I will gradually write out the stories of how these plays came into being, including, of course, that final half-play.
What moved me most while making these plays was the entanglement of life and theatre. Every play born at P4 began with living people who took the initiative to recruit others and organize themselves; each was worked into being, bit by bit, within the space P4 had created. Theatre comes out of life and returns to life. We let it grow slowly in this way. We do not use a fixed set of standards to judge what is supposedly good or bad, but we must ask ourselves whether we are sincerely confronting every problem that comes our way. First, be brave enough to lay yourself bare through practice. Then turn back and seriously examine yourself anew.
In June this year, a host of complicated circumstances meant that our theatre space at Diaosutai could no longer stay open for use. It reverted to the photography studio it had been before, and plans for the ninth play, which Wenhao was to initiate, were cancelled as a result. Later, I rented another very small office in Wangjing to continue with new projects and social practice. The idea of “North Wind Theatre Reform” also began to take shape. Wenhao and I started recruiting new friends at the office, preparing to shoot his script Iceberg. The recruitment process was full of wonderful surprises. We could feel the rapport that came from sharing a purpose, and the company quickly found its rhythm. But I was busy with several things at once, so I left most of the organizing to Wenhao and gradually withdrew. In mid-September, I suddenly received a call from him: preparations for the play had run into trouble again, and the performance venue had fallen through once more. I could feel that all-too-familiar helplessness and frustration surfacing again at the other end of the line.
The next time I saw him was at a performance of Purple Action’s Duel Club. Afterwards, we talked late into the night at a breakfast shop in Wangjing. He was still so determined to make theatre. He believed it could certainly support both him and his company; that many people would appreciate his plays; that one day the stories of poor people would be told onstage again; that something different would happen. At three in the morning, the cook preparing breakfast was deftly kneading dough, then cutting it, over and over. I had completely lost track of what Wenhao was saying and was staring blankly at the dough.
A month later, Wenhao asked me again: shall we make a play together? I said, sure, but before we do it this time, we need to talk. What kind of theatre do you actually want to make? He struggled for a while before saying: I want to make poor people’s theatre. For poor people to watch, for rich people to watch, for the middle class to watch—but it belongs to poor people. I said, all right, let’s write the manifesto together. Let’s start a company. This time, let’s not divide people into professionals and amateurs. People with no acting background should be especially welcome to perform. Anyone who shares the company’s values is welcome; we’ll work on the basis of that common ground.
Here is the manifesto Wenhao wrote for the company:
We need people who:
Do not use theatre to elevate themselves or advertise their own importance.
Are good at criticism and self-criticism, and take pleasure in both.
Have an independent aesthetic sensibility.
Respect the impulses and desires of a production’s initiator, and let them resonate and spread.
Use characters to express their own concerns, bringing their own thinking into performance and creation.
Do not detach themselves from the people.
Love theatre in freer, less constrained ways: escaping established rules.
Influence theatre, and allow theatre to influence them.
Never conceal their views or intentions, and never avoid contradictions.
I read it and thought it over. There really was nothing I wanted to change. So today, Wenhao and I are inviting you on the basis of these nine principles. If these words move you, we very much hope you will join us. North Wind Theatre will hold ourselves and one another to demanding standards, growing through mutual criticism, rehearsing, and taking further action.
In the future, North Wind Theatre will express itself with greater flexibility and mobility, using a wider range of media to expand the boundaries of theatre. We will try to communicate what we most want to convey in the plainest, most direct ways, reaching each person as deeply as we can.
Let us become audiences and actors together,
or, to put it more directly, people who act.
Let us begin expressing ourselves together.
Enter theatre, enter life.
Bring theatre into life, and life into theatre.
Bring a future into being together.
Don’t let stereotypes jam that revolving door of fate and theatre.
Come, leap into the living river of fate.
Let us flow together, move together!
Join North Wind Theatre
Scan the Captain’s QR code
The company has already begun planning new work, with performances intended in the near future, and we urgently need actors. I want to stress here that professionals and people with no acting background alike are living people who experience life. We do not expect you to play a radically different character entirely divorced from your actual experience. We ask only that you return truthfully to yourself and, as the manifesto says, express yourself simply and naturally.
Wenhao has listed the roles we currently need on the “North Wind Theatre Reform” WeChat public account. You can also scan the QR code below to add him directly; put “theatrical desert” in your friend request.
Can’t wait to perform
Come water the desert
