Chinese theater in spotlight

A scene from Mary Zimmerman's White Snake. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Chinese theater reaches a narrower audience compared with the country's cinema, but it is no less vibrant and chaotic, as Raymond Zhou discovers in a bid to chronicle it.

Chinese theater has seen uneven development in recent decades as live performances are concentrated in bigger cities and touring companies disappear from small towns and rural areas.

This isn't unique because even the far more popular entertainment－movies shown in theaters－has vanished from a large swath of the Chinese population that derives now its main recreation from TV.

Just like the film industry, theater is experiencing a top-down boom that starts from the biggest metropolises－with one exception. The Wuzhen Theater Festival, in its second year, has firmly established itself as a showcase of theatrical art in its most diverse and compelling forms.

Although just an hour's drive from Shanghai, it has the feel and advantage of Cannes or Sundance in that it attracts top talents in the field and a legion of loyal theatergoers.

A joke went around that if a bomb were to drop on Wuzhen during the 11-day event, Chinese theater as an industry would be wiped out. To which a contrarian view soon emerged: If that happened, Chinese theater as an art form would be saved. Obviously, it came from a cynic who didn't believe in turning the art into a carnival-like activity.

Cities like Beijing and Shanghai can arrange a dozen or two shows into a festival every month if they want to. And indeed the 6th Theater Olympics, held in Beijing through November and December, incorporated many existing shows in its lineup. But the core of its programming was filled with plays that were conceived by the festival's founders.

Names such as Tadashi Suzuki and Robert Wilson had been drummed into theater students in China, who had never seen their actual stagings－until now. The result was shocking: The treatments were so different from the style familiar to audiences that some expressed their discomfort in very unpleasant ways.

One student who attended a performance of Suzuki's Cyrano de Bergerac asked the Japanese master if his directorial approach amounted to "blasphemy". And during a performance of Robert Wilson's staging of Krapp's Last Tape, there was almost an audience revolt as swear words were hurled at the stage where Wilson himself was giving a solo performance of Samuel Beckett's play.

People openly questioned whether the revered foreign artists were simply being "too pretentious". At the Wilson show, organizers even checked every mobile gadget to make sure they were turned off, but it started almost half an hour late, a sign of lack of respect for the audience according to some.

Then the performance itself, starting with a 15-minute eating of bananas, puzzled many and angered some. The ensuing debate among China's theaterati may be the most fruitful: It pointed to the Chinese preference of realism in theater, which was imported from the Russian school of Stanislavski and elevated to the pantheon of tradition through a century of practice.