Liu Mei is a female cosmologist, while Du Lei is a beekeeper. Due to the twist of time and space, they meet endlessly in parallel universes, and their love story has moved towards 50 kinds of warm or regrettable endings because of the subtle disturbance of time. This is the work of New Wave theater director Wang Chong's "Parallel Universe Love Interpretation Method", which was staged at the Foshan Grand Theatre on the evening of October 21.
For the audience in the Guangzhou-Foshan area, it is not easy to see this work at the "doorstep". Affected by the epidemic, it was first postponed from January to June this year, then from June to August, and then rescheduled for October. The live hamster responsible for "reversing time and space" in the play even exhausted its life in the wait, so that the crew could only recruit animal actors before the start of the show. However, the enthusiasm of the audience has not diminished - after the 40 consecutive performances of "Existence and Time 2.0" in Guangzhou during the National Day holiday, Foshan finally ushered in the first New Wave drama directed by Wang Chong.
In 2012, Wang Chong, who had just turned 30, published the "New Wave Drama Declaration", and a number of his works with a very exploratory temperament blew a whirlwind inside and outside the theater circle. Nearly a decade later, the 39-year-old described nandu reporters as having reached a delicate "hurdle" and had a sense of crisis. In 2021, he sold his real estate in Beijing, "Blackout Pavilion", began to use WeChat, raised cats, and tried to "change a way of life and find a new focus of life". What remains unchanged is that he still reflects on the times in his works and interrogates the heart of the "present".
Wang Chong. Courtesy of respondents
"Understandable" New Wave drama
The Parallel Universe Love Deduction Method (hereinafter referred to as "Parallel Universe") is somewhat similar to the structure of the movie "Lola Run", but it transfers the montage technique to the live performance and vigorously pushes up the number of "restarts", which poses another magnitude of challenge to both the actors and the audience.
This kind of "extreme" is exactly what Wang Chong wants. On the stage of "Parallel Universe", he set up 13 cameras, 1 of which is in the center of the stage, and the other 12 are like 12 moments on the dial, around it, the male and female protagonists need to accurately move in the "parallel universe" composed of these shots, and the large screen behind the stage will quickly cut between the real-time pictures presented by 13 cameras, and the scene "generates" a film with 50 story directions. At the end of the performance, it is not archived. In 2015, when the play premiered in China, the 27-year-old heroine Wang Xiaohuan was selected by the media as the "New DramaTist of the Year" for her superb acting skills.
On the evening of October 21, Foshan performed stills of "Parallel Universe Love Interpretation Method".
When the love story of a man and a woman is repeated 50 times, almost deducing all the possibilities in a relationship, Wang Chong believes that the audience can easily find resonance in "Parallel Universe" and be pulled back by "a certain branch of a certain situation". At the same time, it also leaves a series of thinking questions for those who have a heart: Is it a drama or a movie that is staged in front of you? How are the two art forms related to each other? Where are the boundaries?
It may be said that the New Wave drama initiated by Wang Chong is characterized by "asking questions"; the questions entrained in the works always challenge the most deeply rooted concepts of drama. In his 2012 New Wave Theatrical Manifesto, he made it clear that the old is broken and new: "Our theater is on top of the wave, pouring into the old theater. The clear sea washed away the dust and dirt in the old theater, taking the pale red corpses away, leaving behind fish and beautiful shells... We ride the waves, explore the seas that no one has ever been to, and carve our names in every ray of fresh sunlight. The full text is less than 500 words, but it has a far-reaching impact, and there are still stirring waves when read to this day.
Standing at the time node of 2021, Wang Chong recalled that he and his friends had not yet formed a complete understanding of "New Wave drama", and even became a style genre, "that is, shouting this voice itself is very important." After nearly a decade of following this path, the uncoped picture of the Declaration is clear. In his words: "New Wave drama summed up, that is, to try to break through the boundaries of theater art in different directions, to explore its extreme form and the essence of theater existence; to borrow the rhetorical questions of 'what drama must be' and 'what drama is likely to become', to impact the traditional concept of theater, and to open up a new path for Chinese theater." ”
For example, "Parallel Universe" introduces a camera on the theatrical stage, "while shooting and acting", which is one of the typical methods of New Wave drama, which was born in the period when Wang Chong was obsessed with "theater image exploration"; in works such as "Thunderstorm 2.0" and "One Mirror Ibsen", similar attempts can be seen, but the style of image is different from the direction of exploration. In addition to combining drama with video, he also experimented with "abandoning the theater" and letting performances take place in unconventional spaces such as classrooms, corridors, and public toilets, or even simply online and in the process of network connection. In recent years, his "Minimal Drama" trilogy has also attracted a lot of attention and research, from "Tea house 2.0" with a limit of 11 audiences per show, to "Where We Come from, Who We Are, Where We Go 2.0", which canceled the live actors and let 4 audiences become characters, to "Existence and Time 2.0", which has just completed its premiere in Guangzhou, with 8 actors per scene, but only 1 audience, pushing the experiment of drama scale and viewing relationship to the extreme.
Many audiences are full of curiosity about his theatrical works, and they are afraid that they "can't understand", and Wang Chong believes that no matter how much they have watched the theater before, no one should have to worry about it when they enter the theater: "I think as long as the mind is open, it can accept such a form, and it can enter our logic and embrace every wonderful moment in the drama." ”
The spirit of "passing on the torch" and "2.0"
On the evening of October 19, Wang Chong was interviewed by a reporter from Nandu after a public event held at the Foshan Grand Theatre. Born in 1982, he said he began to have a "midlife crisis." But judging from his appearance and way of expression, it is clear that he is still a young man.
His plays also give people a sense of "youth", as if they are still in the rebellious period of youth, not succumbing to the evaluation standards of the box office, and refusing to follow all the rules. Wang Chong told Nandu reporters: "When doing any innovation, what is in place is very important. The "imaginary enemy" of New Wave theater is the kind of theatrical tradition that has been regarded as a classic by generations - "what you see is what you get", everything serves the script, pretending that there is an invisible wall between the actors and the audience.
Why is Wang Chong unwilling to "honestly" inherit the legacy of his predecessors in theater and have to start a new stove? His own answer was that it might have something to do with the way he approached theatre. The first drama Wang Chong watched came from Meng Jinghui, who was still in his third year of high school, and Meng's "Rhinoceros in Love" had just come out and caused a frenzy of performances in society; after stepping into the university gate in 2000, Wang Chong worked as an assistant for Lin Zhaohua, a well-deserved director from the Beijing People's Art Theater, but he was keen on the exploration of avant-garde drama, as early as 1982, he directed "no scenes", virtual situations, time and space interlaced drama works.
Wang Chong completed his undergraduate studies at Peking University Law School, but did not participate in the prestigious Peking University Drama Club. He said: "I went when the drama club recruited new people, but I heard that there was an interview, and I was ashamed to perform, so I turned around and left. Now that I think about it, missing out is not necessarily a bad thing, maybe drama has thus become a more distant thing for me, more sacred. ”
In middle school, Wang Chong was obsessed with movies, and in college, he was mixed with the stage art version of Tianya BBS. Through the Internet, he got to know Lin Weiyu, a doctoral student at the University of Hawaii who came to Beijing to "study Lin Zhaohua in residence", and thus had the opportunity to enter Lin Zhaohua's circle, and in his third and fourth years, he helped sort out materials in his studio and watched many of his works on the spot. "It can be said that it was Meng Jinghui who made me interested in drama, and it was Lin Zhaohua who made me think that this thing may become a career." Wang Chong told nandu reporters, "It is precisely because when sorting out the information, you need to look closely at the text and find that 'this drama is so powerful'." At the same time, he also systematically watched the performance video of Beijing Renyi, "That kind of traditional drama, some of which are quite interesting after watching it, but at that time I felt a bit of 'routine'; as a drama director, if your job is just to line up a play according to the script, it seems too simple, or there is no real challenge, in my eyes it is not worth pursuing." ”
In 1999, Meng Jinghui directed the drama "Rhinoceros in Love". The premiere cast is Guo Tao and Wu Yue.
With this in mind, after graduating from undergraduate, Wang Chong went to the University of Hawaii to study for a master's degree in drama, and in 2007 he went to the University of California to pursue a doctorate, and the following year founded the "Salary Transmission Experimental Theater Troupe". Interestingly, as a "rebel" of traditional drama, he used the meaning of "passing on the torch" to name his practice. Wang Chong introduced that what "salary transmission" hopes to inherit is the "spirit of experimental drama".
Most troupes with glorious traditions have "reserved repertoire", such as Beijing Renyi, there are a number of masterpieces passed down from generation to generation, such as "Tea House" and "Thunderstorm", which are also regarded as "family foundations" by artists. Wang Chong believes that classics are not insurmountable, and future generations should not only pursue the reproduction of the "original taste" of classic works, so that the theater stage becomes a "museum".
In 2012, when he published the "New Wave Drama Manifesto", he launched "Thunderstorm 2.0" - all the lines in the play are from Cao Yu's "Thunderstorm", but the character relationship has not been related to the original work, the play was rated by the media as one of the "Top Ten Influential Works" of the Chinese mainland Theater Drama in the 30 years; in 2017, he organized the performance of "Tea House 2.0" in a middle school in Beijing, inviting 11 audiences into the real classroom each time. Feel the plot presented by 44 actors (mostly ordinary middle school students) like an observer, the lines are still the lines of Lao She's "Tea House", but the background of the story has become a campus in the 21st century.
"I think 'Tea House 2.0' is a work that can represent me in particular," Wang Chong explained to Nandu reporters, "it best reflects what I said about respecting the master and respecting the original author in the spiritual core, and racking my brains to subvert the predecessors in the direction of the technique, especially the 'museum-style' drama that I regard as a stick." ”
In 2017, "Teahouse 2.0", which caused heated discussion in the drama circle.
In Wang Chong's universe, it seems that all classics can be "2.0", and now the title with the suffix has become a reminder to identify Wang Chong's works, and this is not just a word game. Wang Chong said that the meaning of "2.0" is "now", and drama should be an art in progress, walking with the times, always using the tools of contemporary people, and related to the existence of contemporary people.
Independent dramatists go to "forty no confusion"
Wang Chong's latest play is called "Existence and Time 2.0" – after deconstructing theater masterpieces, film history classics and world famous paintings, this time he chose to "annotate" the existential works of the German philosopher and thinker Heidegger. Ma Chuyi, who wrote the screenplay for her, is a high school student who participated in "Teahouse 2.0" four years ago, and now studies in the philosophy department of Chinese Min University and has begun to emerge in the theater circle.
Ma Chuyi told Nandu reporters that "Existence and Time 2.0" originated from Wang Chong saying that he wanted to make a "play of an audience". A group of theater friends brainstormed together and decided to make this "brain hole work" a "dialogue between an actor and an audience", and as a screenwriter, she began to think about what kind of story content could fit this performance format. From October 1 to 10 this year, the drama was performed in Guangzhou for 40 consecutive performances, and it also attracted much attention because it was "limited to 1 audience per show".
"Existence and Time 2.0", premiered in Guangzhou in October 2021.
"Are you going to say that I am really interested in Heidegger in particular?" It was genuinely interesting, but that was secondary. Wang Chong said. From his point of view, the focus of the play is still on the experiment of the relationship between the audience and the performance. However, in the process of creating the rehearsal, the originally envisioned "actor and audience 1 to 1" became "8 to 1", and Wang Chong also examined his past, present and future, and set up a "torture" at the end that hit the heart. He confessed to the Nandu reporter that the group drama also reflected his state of mind: "I am 39 years old, I am also confused, and I am also on a delicate 'kan'er', in fact, many things I want to ask myself, I want to say to myself." ”
In the past few years, Wang Chong is about to usher in the "forty not confused", driven by a certain sense of crisis, he began a series of changes: "Start using WeChat, and then the 'blackout kiosk' is also sold, now I live with my family, and I start to have cats... These are all things that happened this year. ”
The "blackout booth" was originally Wang Chong's small base in downtown Beijing, and there were no wires laid during the decoration, and the electronic equipment on the guests was not allowed to enter the door, and must be left in the safe outside the door, and the whole house needed to be illuminated with candles at night. This kind of "performance art"-like rule is a novel experience for many friends, and Wang Chong himself has insisted on it from 2017 to 2021. In the meantime, he hardly used his mobile phone, Weibo was completely stopped, only used an iPad to reply to emails, and relied on others to relay the necessary news. He once said that the purpose of this was to save distracted attention, especially for the drama he wanted to do about the "now", and the concentration of the spirit was crucial. Perhaps the epidemic has shaken this steady state, and it was only after the launch of "Existence and Time 2.0" that Wang Chong began to use WeChat to communicate with the outside world.
The financial situation of independent theater people often worries fans, in fact their creative funds come from investors or from commissioned projects of art institutions. In contrast to commercially highly successful stage productions, it can be perceived that their plays usually do not have complicated choreography. Wang Chong admits: "Sometimes, we have to pursue a simple beauty, or beauty based on minimalism; as for the development and growth (with the help of the power of commerce), we have actually tried, but it may not be that kind of person, it is indeed a 'work idea', or 'art declaration idea', or even 'Van Gogh idea'." "But the intricate details of the stage must be better than simplicity and imagination? In Wang Chong's view, it may not be.
"When we create, we often imagine that there is a 'god of drama' looking down from the sky, and 'she' is an axiomatic being who can judge what kind of theater art is worthwhile, meaningful, and truly innovative." Wang Chong believes that facing 'her' to create a play, such a description can accurately convey his own creative attitude.
"I did 'a play with an audience' and hope to do a 'play without an audience' in the future, which is actually an extreme attempt at 'the ritualism of drama'..." Speaking of the direction of exploration of interest, Wang Chong became a little gushing, but he laughed again, "These are wild ideas." Maybe it will happen next year, maybe it will be 10 years from now. ”
Producer: Nandu Instant
Written by: Nandu reporter Hou Jingjing
Stills are provided by Foshan Grand Theatre