Arts Center Amphitheater
Theater by the Sea
The 2022 Aranya Theatre Festival repertoire was officially announced on May 16. This year's drama festival will have 4 major sections, 28 plays by 31 Chinese and foreign directors, and a total of 75 performances. The release of the program list indicates that the theatrical feast on stage in Aranya, Qinhuangdao has entered the countdown to one month. It is worth mentioning that this year's drama festival will adjust the proportion of outdoor performances to more than 60%, and 2/3 of the theaters are outdoors, and the audience and the theater face the blue sky and the sea together.
With the theme of "Moments and Eternity", this year's Aranya Theatre Festival hopes that this adventure about drama and dreams, about the realization of life and passion, will become an important moment in everyone's mind. The festival will continue to be chaired by Ma Yin, the founder of Aranya, with Meng Jinghui, Zhang Ziyi and Chen Minghao as the artistic directors, and dramatists Liu Chang and Yang Ting as artistic planners. The theater festival will continue to have four major sections: theater art, cross-border art, living art, and public art, creating a younger, more fun and more creative theater art scene with diversified and creative art forms. In addition to the diverse special guest plays and the "Migratory Bird 300" landing on schedule, this year's Aranya Theatre Festival has added two other iconic theatres, the White Theatre (Auditorium) and the Cruise Ship Theatre, and the landmark buildings and the vast sea will become a new theatrical landscape.
Frankenstein
The first Chinese version is available
In the most core theater art section, this year's drama festival will invite 31 Chinese and foreign directors to bring a total of 28 specially invited plays and 25 environmental dramas to read aloud in 11 days from June 16. The director's lineup gathers the top and emerging forces in the domestic and foreign drama scenes, including: Dominique DeRomgul (Ying), Li Ren, Chen Minghao, Meng Jinghui, Fei Bo, Yang Ting, Gao Yanjinzi, Ding Yiteng, Li Jianjun, Li Xiaoyun, Liu Chang, Shao Sifan, Su Xiaogang, Zhou Xiaoqian, etc.
Among them, six major blockbuster plays will constitute the loudest artistic heartbeat of this year's Aranya Theatre Festival. As the originator of science fiction, "Frankenstein" has been staged at the British National Theatre and swept the world, adapted by the famous British playwright Nick Deere the science fiction novel created by Mary Shelley 200 years ago, directed by the famous British director Dominique deRomgul, and Li Ren as the Chinese director, bringing together the top Chinese and British artists to jointly launch the first Chinese version. This time, as the opening play, the Aranya Theater Festival premiered at the Lonely Outer Theater. Meng Jinghui's "Waiting for Godot" re-examines this absurdist theatrical masterpiece from a new perspective, and after nearly 70 years, Samuel Beckett's classic masterpiece will also be on the stage of the Aranya Theatre Festival as the opening drama and premiered at the A Theater.
Ballet Hamlet
Will be presented by the sea
In addition, "Red" directed by Chen Minghao and the environmental work "Walking Clouds" directed by Gao Yanjinzi are all performances that cannot be missed. And the large-scale ballet "Hamlet" performed by the National Ballet of China will be presented at the seaside as the closing drama, which will be "alive or dead?" This eternal problem is left in the solitary theater; Yang Ting's "Parasite", co-starring Hao Lei and Ma Tianyu, will also be staged as the closing drama in the A theater.
In the cross-border art section, the newly upgraded Drama House 2.0 version will integrate more fields of creative expression, waiting for the audience to move in. In addition, the newly created Aranya Theatre Festival Quadrennial (AQ) and 2022 Stage Art 9+9 Exhibition, initiated for the first time by stage designer Zhang Wu, will take "Theater from Outer Space" as the theme, use space as a language to communicate and explore, and use rich morphological structure to ferment fertile theatrical soil. Not only that, but the "Aranya Theatre Festival xDDC LIVE" special presentation series will conquer Aranya's night with a gorgeous musical performance. At any time, at the seaside where the tide rises and falls, artist Wang Zhigang will open up another sensory experience with a multimedia art installation.
"Migratory Bird 300"
There will be a new dreaming foothold
In the art of living section, the "Migratory Bird 300 Project" jointly initiated by Liu Chang, Zhu Sha, Zheng Jing and Chen Minghao returned after a year. What is most expected is that the famous architect Ma Yansong will draw a design manuscript for the migratory bird habitat Shacheng, recreating an exclusive field for the most romantic, poetic and vital "migratory birds" to generate imagination. At the same time, Aranya will rebuild the sand city, upgrade the wetland stage, and create a new dream foothold, 300 "migratory birds", 300 hours of uninterrupted creative scene, showing multi-dimensional proposition cross-domain linkage, writing new possibilities for drama.
The Public Art section will invite veterans from a wide range of fields to explore the relevance of theatre and the present. Hosted by the famous host Lu Yu, the seaside dialogue will have a cross-border dialogue with senior people from various fields, using the sea and sky as the background to carve out the magic of the abstract realm with thinking. In addition, cruises, campfires, seaside screenings, workshops, theatrical experiences... A variety of activities will also be open to welcome every living life to express their love for drama and life.
In addition, this year's special focus is on the play "Cherry Orchard", co-created by body artist Wang Ying and 9 Contemporary Dance Company choreographer Zhan Li, derived from the playwright Chekhov's masterpiece of the same name, and will be premiered in Aranya's new theater, the Cruise Ship Theater. The performance of "Cherry Orchard" is specially set at sunrise and dusk, and the audience will gather at the most romantic time of the day, sail to the sunrise and set the moon, and immerse themselves in the doomsday carnival of "Cherry Orchard".
Guest repertoire
Six series of 28 specially invited plays
Around the theme of "Moment and Eternity", this year's specially invited plays of the festival are divided into six series, namely: "Immersed Sea", "Reflected Sky", "Absurd Cloud Map", "Dancing Wind and Rain", "Brilliant Islands" and "Roaming Ships".
Among them, "Immersed Sea" includes "Frankenstein", "Red", "Hamlet", "Walking Clouds" and Liu Chang's "Timon of Athens"; "Reflected Sky" includes "Parasite" and Ding Yiteng's "Daze", Shao Sifan's "Yi'e" and other plays; "Absurd Cloud Map" includes "Waiting for Godot" and Li Jianjun's "Diary of a Madman", Yang Ting's "Lies, High Heels and Insanity", Su Xiaogang's "Oedipus King", etc.; "Dancing Wind and Rain" Including Yu Erge's "Looking for Frank", Li Ning's director and choreographer's "The Last Toe"; in the "Brilliant Islands", there will be "Love Encounter Game" directed by Sun Yucheng, "Isolationist Amusement Park" directed by Li Luka and "I LOVE YOU..." directed by Zhou Xiaoqian; "Roaming Ship" presents "Cherry Orchard" directed and created by Wang Ying and Zhan Li.
In addition to the above 28 specially invited plays, there are 25 environmental dramas read aloud for free to recruit audiences, bringing audiences a more immersive limited theater experience in Aranya's unique aesthetic public spaces and architecture.
This group of articles / reporter Guo Jia co-ordinator / Man Yi