In the dimly lit bar, the bartender walks sideways between the tables with plates and the bartenders busy behind the bar. Guests face the stage and sway their bodies to listen to the live restless rock music.
After the song was finished, the lead singer began to talk about his north drift experience and love story, and the "bar owner" came out and urged him to go on stage while interacting with the audience. In an immersive atmosphere where drama intersects with reality, a theatrical music live show "Burning" that takes place in a bar kicks off the New Year's Eve premiere of 2022. The stage is close at hand, and the actors sit next to the audience, whether they perform, sing, change clothes, invite the audience to drink and fist, and have a random chat with the audience, they are as close as part of real life. The rhythm of the entire musical also improvised with the different reactions of the live audience.
The Stageone Bar, which opened in Beijing last November, is the first music and drama bar created by Happy Twist in China, and "Burning" is the second immersive drama staged here. Happy Twist explores drama with this retro style bar - superimposing the functions of the bar and drama, emphasizing the social attributes of ease and pleasure, and also closer to the needs of the younger generation for new consumption scenes. The plays staged here, whether it is the script, the stage or the overall design, will be customized according to the bar space.
In fact, throughout Beijing and Shanghai, this new type of performing arts space is becoming more and more diverse, more and more beyond imagination.
According to the statistics of 100 "good places at the doorstep" of Shanghai citizens and 100 "new spaces for performing arts" launched by the Shanghai Municipal Bureau of Culture and Tourism, there are 18 new spaces in shopping malls in Shanghai, 19 new spaces mainly in bars, tea houses, restaurants and hotels, 16 new spaces in cultural and creative parks, and 9 new spaces in bookstores, museums and art galleries.
These new spaces are scattered in different corners of the city, they do not have the "sacred sense" and "ritual sense" of the coliseum, but they are closer to life. People no longer need to gather specifically to the theater to watch performances, young people can watch a talk show downstairs in the company after work, they can watch a play while clubbing, and they can watch a musical in the lobby after eating hot pot in the mall.
Under the vigorous ecology of China's emerging performing arts space, drama is everywhere. Whether it is office buildings, shopping malls, barbershops, coffee shops, bars, galleries, restaurants, a wave of new performing arts spaces has formed, and the city is becoming a huge theater.
New space for performing arts, smaller and more flexible
As early as three years ago, Happy Twist, who has been deeply cultivating young consumer groups, was looking for new tracks outside of the coliseum performances, exploring how to do some unconventional theater models.
"Young people pay attention to novel experiences, and the performance space of traditional theaters that sits in danger is already difficult to satisfy and stimulate young audiences." Liu Yuanyuan, general manager of Happy Twist Performance Business Center, told First Finance and Economics that after the epidemic, the regular performances of many large theaters were restricted, which accelerated the trend of flexible performance space.
In September last year, Happy Twist launched the immersive drama work "Crazy Barber Shop", which was performed in Moon Bay of Ruihong Tiandi in Shanghai. This suspenseful mystery drama from the United States is the longest performed play in American history. 200 spectators walking into the barbershop not only means being involved in a murder, being interrogated on the spot, being an actor, and enjoying haircuts and nail polishes.
The other "Stealing Hearts Dinner" is an immersive comedy experience of drama + interaction + catering. The audience enters the banquet, the table is decorated with flowers, candles, and gorgeous chandeliers create a sense of ceremony for the night feast. Throughout the performance, magic and cabaret are interspersed, and the audience can also enjoy snacks and drinks between performances, eating and watching. Liu Yuanyuan introduced that "Stealing Hearts Dinner" has toured more than 500 times across the country. When the play was staged in Shenzhen, all the tickets were sold out, and if it was calculated according to 80 seats, the revenue of a single ticket alone reached more than 40,000 yuan.
Opening a bar in Beijing dedicated to performances is a further exploration of the success of these two immersive plays.
"We want to make the experience more enjoyable for the audience." Liu Yuanyuan said that the reason why Happy Twist wants to open a real bar is to make a theatrical experience of "really listening to really seeing and really feeling", where the audience can order a glass of wine mixed according to the plot, and the distance from the stage is within reach, "The interaction of this bar drama will be stronger and more intimate." After watching the performance, the audience does not have to leave the stage, and can continue to drink, chat, and socialize. ”
Prior to "Burning", the opening performance of Stageone Bar was the bar-themed experiential comedy "Drunken Heart", the core of the story of the play is slightly drunk, and the story takes place in the bar. In Beijing alone, "The Drunken Heart" has performed more than 100 times in half a year. Liu Yuanyuan said that some viewers brushed more than a dozen times in a row, not only to see the freshness of the picture and look at the form, but to discover the effect of each different random drama.
For Happy Twist, the performance and creation of the Coliseum is still the main line, and the new space attracts the younger and more playful post-00s consumer group.
"The advantage of the new space is that it is easy to excavate, hundreds of square meters can also be done, no need for square area, and every corner can be a performance area." A shop in a commercial complex can be created into a new performance space. Liu Yuanyuan said that at present, Happy Twist is still incubating new projects, and it is expected that there will be 2,000 performances in new spaces across the country next year.
The urban stage, everywhere
On Hankou Road in Shanghai, in an ordinary Asian building, there are 9 small theaters, which are known as the buildings with the highest performance density in Shanghai and even China, and are also a paradise for theater fans.
Performance planner Yao Shuo made a special trip to the Asia Tower to see the performance and found that the night here was more popular than the daytime. Many plays are selected at 10:30 p.m., which is basically the time period when the post-00 audience begins to entertain, and the surrounding commercial atmosphere is very lively.
In August 2020, the ambient musical "Apollonia" premiered on "Star Space 1" in the Asia Tower, when the theater could not be opened during the epidemic, and producer Han Kun played an innovation with the mentality of trying it out, allowing the audience to drink while watching the play, and the story took place in the bar. As a result, this drama has become a hit during the epidemic, and until now it is often difficult to find a ticket. Yao Shuo found that a female audience member at the scene watched it more than a dozen times, just to get to different card division configurations and experience the same fun as collecting cards.
"Some commercial complexes that were not good in commercial formats and had low occupancy rates are now being revitalized by new performance spaces." Yao Shuo told First Finance and Economics that traditional shopping malls such as Aegean and Raffles City have opened children's theaters and comedy theaters, and most of these commercial complexes are located in the bustling center of the city, making it very convenient to go out to see performances, coupled with the popularity of talk show performances, it has also brought a number of unconventional new performing arts spaces.
At the end of last year, Yao Shuo planned a "New Performing Arts Festival" for the public, located in China Resources Times Square in The Yaohan Business District in Pudong. In 2017, the veteran mall was designed by Japanese designer Daisuke Sato to transform it into a theater-based shopping mall. In the "theatre" atrium, stand-up comedy, improvisational theatre, musicals, operas, children's dramas, Acapella and rock 'n' roll take turns over the course of a month, with Shanghai's most active performing arts groups and labels taking the stage.
"New performance is art immersed in commercial spaces, breaking with traditional performing arts forms. We made full use of the space so that people who had not seen the show before could watch a performance by the way when they ate and went shopping. Yao Shuo calls this form "theater around", every moment, there are no fixed restrictions, no boundaries and limitations.
He invited Hahaland, Shanghai's first resident comedy show club, to quickly attract the mall crowd to the front of the stage with a fast-paced comedy of five minutes. The team behind Hahaland is a group of young people who graduated from the Shanghai Theater Academy, they usually reside in the Asia Building, the venue is also a retro bar form, their comedies are short, frequent, fast way, watching the drama without any threshold and burden, is to socialize and entertain young people, to reduce the pressure on life, to make happiness simple.
Lightweight is the direction of Hahaland's comedy, they only do local, do not tour, do not even need publicity, for the audience to build five fan groups, each group of 500 people, each performance tickets can be quickly sold out. These low-cost, relaxed and pleasant performances are scattered in the streets and alleys of the city, becoming a new place for entertainment consumption of the post-90s and post-00s.
Will the performances in the new space have an impact on traditional theatres? Yao Shuo found out that it would not. In December last year, when he sat in the audience and found that the attendance rate of the Chinese original musical "Human Disqualification" premiered at the Shanghai Grand Theatre was particularly high. For an original premiere of a Chinese musical, such achievements show that the traditional theater still has a stable audience, and the sense of ceremony and the charm of large-scale productions of professional theaters are still irreplaceable.
Next year, Yao Shuo wants to do version 2.0 of the "New Performing Arts Festival", where public music and dance performances are still staged in the atrium of the mall, while the barbershop, bookstore and florist inside the mall will become a new theater space, allowing the public to watch the performance more immersively.