Western scholars have summarized the immersive drama in 3I, that is, "Intimacy, Immediacy, Imagination" (intimacy, improvisation, imagination); and these three characteristics are expressed in the immersive theater as panoramic spaces, interactive performances and multi-line parallel and freely switching story threads. Take "Sleepless Nights" as an example, a multi-line narrative based on 1 hotel, 6 floors, 90 rooms, 3,000 drawers, and more than 20 actors through different moving lines - each audience can arbitrarily switch the story lines, characters and spaces they follow. This kind of mobility and openness not only releases the boundaries of traditional theater, but also promotes the construction of a new ecology of urban culture with the emergence of immersive theater in Shanghai, leading the cultural industry to steadily move towards the positioning of Asia's performing arts capital.
At present, Shanghai has gradually formed a theater city cultural field centered on People's Square, with Asia Tower, Big World, Shanghai Grand Theatre and McKinnon as the inner circle, and Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center and Shanghai Film and Television Park as the outer circle. Among them, the Asia Tower is the representative of the new space for performing arts in this urban cultural field, also known as the "Tavern Theater". Different from the traditional theater, there are more than ten small theaters in the Asia Building, each with its own unique repertoire, the most famous of which is "Apollonia", the entire theater simulates the bar space, the audience orders a glass of wine, sits around the bar, three musicals perform on the "bar", the audience holds a camera, wine glasses around the fingers, zero distance to look up at the performance, this specific space and new form of viewing makes young theater lovers flock to it.
In 2021, asia tower hung up "Star Space No. 1" for the first time, and "Apollonia" performed 380 times a year, with more than ten actors, and took the stage in different stages, which also attracted the audience to go to the pursuit many times. Other immersive theaters have followed: Star Space 2332's mirror-type immersive drama "Frankenstein Project", Star Space 55's composite theater composite immersive drama "Janiskiki", people's grand stage (next to the north of asia tower) Star Space 6's environmental resident musical "Santa Rukia" and so on.
As a result, small theater groups with the Asia Tower as the core area are gradually formed, and the clusters and radiation areas of these theaters are based on specific blocks of the entire urban space, which is quickly reminiscent of Broadway. New York's theaters are divided into three types: Broadway, which performs classic plays, Off-Broadway, which has a small production cost and creative new repertoire, and Ultra-Broadway, which performs experimental small plays.
In contrast, the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center and the Shanghai Grand Theatre are mainly based on traditional classic plays, while Asia Tower, Big World, McKinnon Hotel, etc. are outside the Shanghai theater circle. The emergence of these theaters and the revival of drama show that in Shanghai, whether it is a theater based on traditional plays, an immersive small theater, an exclusive theater, or even a theater that integrates variety shows, talk shows, movies and other forms, it has begun to take shape and has a relatively complete range of types. Shanghai has formed a "theater +" urban cultural field, and the formation of this format is largely completed by breaking the boundary and reorganizing the concept of "immersive" theater and traditional theater.
Looking back at history, Shanghai had "four major stages" as early as the 1930s, as well as a quarter of the number of cinemas in the country, when the core cultural and entertainment areas in Shanghai were concentrated in the junction of Xizang Road and Nanjing Road, and radiated the Bund, Zhapu Road, Huaihai Road, Maoming Road and so on. Compared with the aforementioned People's Square cultural circle, Shanghai's urban cultural core area did not arise out of thin air. Immersive theater and its new type of performance relationship constitute an important part of Shanghai's current cultural and entertainment ecology, and continue to spread and exert efforts in the city's cultural core.
Immersive theatre has also been performed in other cities across the country, and even long-term resident performances (such as Chengdu's "Chengdu Stealing Hearts" and "Gold Fishing Dinner", Guangzhou's "The Ten Gifts No. 10 Gift Shop", etc.), but Shanghai is really combining immersive experiences with urban complexes, public spaces, and simultaneously exerting efforts in the multi-track of immersive drama. Whether it is the imported "Sleepless Nights" or the "Lane 1992" opened at Raffles City on the North Bund, from independent and exclusive theaters to grafting with commercial established spaces, immersive drama has been combined with Shanghai's urban space in a larger and broader dimension.
Developed by the Twist team, "Barbershop" and "Lane 1992" are carried out using the spare time of the commercial space (after 22:00), while the commercial business space is transformed into a theater space. This model greatly expands the possibility of combining commercial space and theater, and also fully reflects the cultural city positioning of Shanghai Metropolis. In addition, there are outdoor immersive dramas such as "Gunshots on Sinan Road - Towards the Light" and "No. 19 Wukang Road" with the Zhou Mansion as the real historical scene, which "destroys" the existing theater and places the audience and actors in the urban space for performance, and the boundaries of the theater are extended while being hidden.
The flourishing of immersive theater in Shanghai has a certain inevitability. First of all, Shanghai's cultural industry gene has been inseparable from the temperament of modern metropolis since the opening of the port; secondly, the diversity of Shanghai's urban space has also provided more choices for immersive theater; third, the rise of immersive theater echoes the entertainment tone of the entire era: from the earliest secret room, to the rise of scene script killing, to the popular variety show "Star Detective", "Detective Detective", etc., as well as the script killing movie "Fame Liwan", etc., have become the cultural soil of immersive theater and nourish young people.
The immersive theater absorbs the form of these cultural entertainment products, such as "The Big Star of the Universe" (Asia Mansion Star Space No. 8) is to combine the variety show form with the small theater; "Labyrinth of Hearts" not only borrows from the movie, but also introduces the image of the peeping perspective, and the part of the audience that is obscured by the stage building is filmed with a camera, observed and then cast on the stage, which greatly expands the audience's perspective, and at the same time, there are audience seats directly located on the stage, and this seat is different from what most audiences see.
In short, immersive theater has found a magic weapon to integrate and even cover other cultural products - space, because the core of immersive theater is theater, and the transformation of space is the most direct immersive and immersive for the audience and participants. Of course, the immersive drama in the Asia Mansion is quite different from the "Sleepless Nights" at the McKinnon Hotel and Meng Jinghui's "Mermaid by the Backwater", because its rapid absorption and integration of other forms of mass entertainment seems to be getting farther and farther away from the "canon" of immersive theater.
Even so, the significance of these plays to the exploration of immersive theater is far greater than deviating from the so-called "canon", which restarts Shanghai's urban cultural genes from another dimension, which is the most current and the most vital.
The data shows that in Beijing in 2021, more than 20,000 plays were staged. In the same year, Shanghai held nearly 40,000 commercial performances, with an average of more than 100 performances per day. Shanghai's theater performance data ranks first in the country, with a permanent population of more than 20 million and a high-speed rail one-hour living circle radiating nearly 300 million. The cultural production practitioners corresponding to this data are far from sufficient. In 2019, the Shanghai Bureau of Statistics counted fewer than 220,000 employees in major cultural institutions, less than 1% of the permanent population in Shanghai, compared with the population engaged in cultural industries in New York and London, which accounted for 5% of the city's employed population. On the other hand, from the perspective of statistics, the total profit of the culture, sports and entertainment industry in 2021 is 57 billion yuan, accounting for less than 2% of the total profit of Shanghai's entire service enterprises above designated size. For every $1 increase in the box office on Broadway in New York, the surrounding industry adds $7 in additional revenue.
Culture is Shanghai's soft power, and the cultural industry is the hard power to drive the city's cultural economy. The continuous fermentation of immersive cultural products in Shanghai is gratifying, and the creation and revival of urban cultural blocks brought about by immersive theater and immersive theater, the cultivation of cultural industry talents, and project support should be urgent priorities.
Author:Gong Yan (Professor, Shanghai Normal University)
Editor: Xu Yang
Planner: Xing Xiaofang
Editor-in-Charge: Li Ting
*Wenhui exclusive manuscript, please indicate the source when reprinting.