Discussion and photographs from the first session:
😤 As a theatre audience member, do you feel your seat growing more and more uncomfortable?
😍 Do you want to stand up and take a turn onstage?
😷 Or have you sat through a terrible play, angry but afraid to speak up?
😡 Have you ever had the thought, “Even I could do better than that!”?
😩 Or perhaps you want to challenge the script.
😏 You want the play onstage to develop along the lines you have in mind.
🖖 Or you relish criticism and self-criticism.
🙊 Or perhaps you find yourself in a difficult situation.
We have arranged a meeting of people from across the multiverse.
Try a theatrical mystery box.
We will break stories into fragments and repackage them,
turning them into doors through which everyone can enter, watch, read aloud, and rehearse.
The fragments come from:
more than ten scripts by previous initiators
classic plays
several unknown scripts that have never been performed
(Perhaps the actors for these unknown scripts will come from among us.)
your own work
(Bring it along, or submit it directly to our assistant Zhizhi.)
and
?
Through a partly improvised approach,
with help from two theatre professionals if you wish,
we will get closer to a character and become that character.
Perform scenes with strangers and build new connections.
Stir one another out of stillness.
①
Every participant will be an actor, with the right to play every role.
②
Every participant has a duty to offer their own views on the characters’ situations and the directing methods.
③
Two theatre practitioners will be at your service. They were actors; now they are audience members.
④
You are both actor and audience, both judge and prisoner.
⑤
Step into the performance at any time to put your ideas into practice, while responding in keeping with the character’s values and attitudes.
⑥
Perhaps we can correct the mistakes unfolding before us.
Together, we will blur the boundaries between audience and actors,
between life and theatre.
Bring the self you inhabit in theatre back into reality.
Time: Friday, 25 November, this week, 7:00–9:30 p.m.
Location: Wangjing, Beijing (add our assistant Zhizhi for the exact address)
Participation fee: introductory price of CNY 30
Places: 10 (first come, first served)
Registration: scan the QR code
A North Wind Production:
We relish criticism,
and we are good at it.
Against the sublime,
against commercialization,
against the mainstream.
We are committed to work that is “truthful, satirical, and absurd”.
We oppose political propaganda and moral coercion.
We hope you are fiercely combative.