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Avant-Garde Heterotopia

2024; The MIT Press; Volume: 46; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1162/pajj_a_00711

1537-9477

Cheng Zhen, Eason Lu,

Spatial and Cultural Studies

Aranya Theater Festival, Qinhuangdao, Hebei, China, June 15–25, 2023.The first Aranya Theater Festival commenced in June 2021. After being canceled in 2022 due to the pandemic, this theatre festival finally struck its second pose. Spanning eleven days and boasting a star lineup of artistic directors, fourteen international and twenty-four domestic productions were woven around the theme of "Howls and Whispers." Although it has only been held twice, the festival has already become an indispensable cultural phenomenon.The town of Changli County, home to the Aranya Resort, lies on the distant outskirts of Qinhuangdao City, nearly two-hundred miles from Beijing. It stands seventeen miles from the nearest train station of Beidaihe and largely lacks public transportation. The name "Aranya" finds its roots in Sanskrit, symbolizing a secluded haven traditionally found in forests, the wilderness, or distant lands. Within the confines of its walls, this community unfolds as an oasis for the burgeoning neo-middle class of Beijing and its neighboring cities, creating a utopian retreat in the North China Plain. Outside the timeframe of the festival, Aranya, an economic and cultural exclave, caters to a specific demographic: property owners and qualified resort visitors. It offers not merely real estate but a groundbreaking form of community organization that transcends the acquisition of property. Cultural tourism real estate has witnessed significant growth in the post-pandemic era, particularly in China. The Aranya Theater Festival was organized to capitalize on this trend, presenting a collage of displaced cultural landscapes, including European-style pedestrian streets and postmodern hotels, as popular leisure options. At a time when theatres around the world are facing funding cuts and declining prospects, the Aranya has prospered with its theatre festival, becoming a unique space—or heterotopia—in the theatre community. Despite its prosperity, the festival reveals a host of internal complexities and contradictions, which makes it an intense, incompatible, contradictory, and transforming Foucauldian heterotopia.Meng Jinghui, the festival's main artistic director and China's most renowned avant-garde theatre director, marked the premiere of his latest piece, Twelve Love Poems, with an outdoor spectacle staged adjacent to the iconic Aranya edifice, the Lonely Library. Remixing Molière, Pablo Neruda, and Albert Camus, this one- hundred-and-twenty-minute opus aligns with Meng's "badass" artistic lineage, telling a love story as social commentary and incorporating live music and vernacular humor. The story revolves around two sisters striving to capture their romantic fate. Rebecca, the elder sister, battles between elopement and attachment to her paranoid husband. Selina, the younger, rebels against an arranged marriage by having her lover pose as a doctor to win her father's approval. Neruda's and Camus's quotes are woven into the piece as monologues and rock-and-roll arias. Extending to the roof of the library, the central rectangular stage situates the love story between two massive objects: a replica of Botticelli's The Birth of Venus on the left and a colossal Coca-Cola bottle on the right. Setting them apart, Meng seems to question where romance goes: is it toward the divine or the consumeristic? Twelve Love Poems has the actors darting back and forth between the two symbolic extremes, engaging the audiences in a similar dilemma.The coast played an immersive role in Twelve Love Poems, imparting an additional stratum of sensory engagement. Alongside the seashore and outside the Aranya Community Hall, another artistic director and important member of Meng's badass cohort, Chen Minghao, presented his carnivalesque production, Red. Drawing inspiration from John Logan's biographical play, Chen's Red beckoned patrons to converge at the epicenter of the stage, offering them indulgence in the delights of cake, wine, and dance in a spirited manner. Following Red, on a temporary seaside stage, Chen Minghao continued his commitment to revelry by presenting Romeo and Juliet and Sea, an adaptation of Arthur Brooke's poem "The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet," commissioned for the inaugural Aranya Theater Festival. Emphasizing elements of burial and sacrifice, Chen imbued his rendition with distinctive ritualistic gestures: bulldozers showered the enfolding actors with cascades of sand. Motifs and props such as skeletons and mannequin limbs were scattered over the beach. Performers in angelic costumes were sprayed with dark-hued pigment dispensed from a pesticide pump. In a particularly surreal moment, a flock of sheep was set into circular motion while the actors executed choreographed balletic movements in concentric patterns. As the narrative reached its climax, Chen treated both cast and spectators to the indulgence of a roasted whole lamb.The crucible that the audience experienced, sitting through this phantasmagoric funeral commencing at 3:00 a.m. was rewarded when the first light of dawn penetrated the sky. Chen orchestrated a denouement wherein the actors, trudging through the sand, made their way into the sea towards the sunrise, an enthralling procession that the enraptured audience followed. The production bears a Chinese title that literally reads as "Romeo and Juliet by the Sea." The subtle modification in English insinuated that the sea was not relegated to the mere backdrop but rather a leading actor, whose primary function was to supply the sunrise. During the inaugural Aranya Theater Festival in 2021, the premiere of Romeo and Juliet and Sea encountered wide criticism, primarily due to the gloomy weather that deprived the audience of the anticipated sunrise. In retrospect, the ritualistic and convivial stagecraft was eclipsed by the magnificence of the natural spectacle. What was once deemed tedious by viewers two years ago metamorphosed into an experience that the present-day audience deemed worthy of their enduring patronage, while the actual performance became the prelude to the sublime moment.Aranya provides abundant experimental spaces for Meng's avant-garde cohort, artists who closely collaborated with him. They belong to this collective community bonded by the recognition of what Claire Conceison refers to as "communal fucking-coolness."1 The festival featured works like Yang Ting's Fictions, Pumps, and Lunacles; Ding Yiteng's Blue; Su Xiaogang's Talk to Her, adapted from Eugène Ionesco's The Chairs; and Xiao Han's Brain Death Buffet. Over recent years, this badass cohort has been scrutinized by an increasingly perplexed audience. Paradoxically, this enigmatic quality has cemented their status as avant-garde pioneers in China's theatre landscape. The challenge they face is striking a delicate balance between preserving their avant-garde ethos and securing the commercial and social recognition that has made them popular at Aranya.Aside from providing experimental opportunities, the festival claims to make community building central to its mission. However, Aranya's attempt at community- focused theatre unfortunately proved futile. Xiao Nian Qing Company's production of IO was staged at the Theatre of Dionysus, a venue modeled after the ancient Greek open-air theatre of the same name. The play adapts the Greek myth of Io, a mortal priestess of the goddess Hera in Argos who caught the desire of Zeus. In response to Hera's supervision, Zeus transformed Io into a heifer. The young theatre company aspired to reinterpret the age-old tale from Io's vantage point, providing a nuanced feminist lens. Staged in a classical venue that was augmented with modern lighting and acoustics, the performance elegantly navigated the canonical text with the assistance of a Greek-style chorus and hip-hop rapping, illuminating pressing gender-related social issues. However, the real drama happened at the curtain call when director Shao Sifan introduced the chorus members as property owners of Aranya. Instead of the expected celebration and applause from the audience, an awkward silence filled the air. The amateur performers' passion for theatre was not warmly received; instead, the overtly loose nature of the performance led the audience to question whether they had paid for the self-amusement of a privileged community.The festival also featured productions that extend beyond the boundaries of the Beijing-centric theatre hub. Hong Kong-based Zuni Company's Read Sing Eileen Chang showcases the most prominent multimedia approach to portray the Chinese-born, American writer Eileen Chang, blending elements of rap, traditional pingshu storytelling, and breathtaking projections. The production represents Chang not just as a seminal writer but as a cultural icon who epitomizes the bourgeois lifestyle of Hong Kong. Anchored by the narrative framework of Chang's last essay collection Dui Zhao Ji [Reflections: Words and Pictures], the show opens with Chang reminiscing about her pre-revolutionary days—a period of carefree beauty and unbridled genius. This serves as a poignant parallel to the nostalgia for a glorious, bygone era, which in turn mirrors the decline of a once-vibrant intellect. However, while the production resonated with middle-class aesthetics, fetishizing elements like clothing, footwear, and hairstyles, it conspicuously glossed over the socio- political turbulence that was integral to Chang's oeuvre. This reduction transforms what could have been a nuanced portrayal into mere visual and sonic spectacles, sidestepping the complexities that made Chang a compelling figure in Chinese literature and history.KULA Compagnie Transnational Theatre's adaptation of Peter Handke's anti-play, The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other, features twelve actors from six countries portraying over three-hundred roles. Without a single word, these roles encapsulate the myriad facets of human beings capturing them with a rigorous poetry of movement, bodies, light, colors, and imagery. The actors navigate a temporal in- between, reconstructing a European agora, a public space where the experience of participants is as incommensurable as the festival itself. Representing the international facade of the festival, The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other joined Twelve Love Poems and Red as one of the opening productions. Yet a closer look at Aranya's program, which proudly endeavors to introduce international theatrical works to Chinese audiences, reveals a notable Eurocentric tendency: out of the fourteen invited international productions, a dozen were European. While elements such as censorship and scheduling certainly played their roles in the lineup, one would still be curious if and how Aranya will expand its theatrical worldview in the years to come.In a style that resonates with KULA Compagnie's work, Beijing-based New Youth Group's A Man Who Flies up to the Sky II, directed by Li Jianjun, juxtaposes more than twenty characters who have little in-depth interaction in life. The production uses a non-narrative approach to freeze-frame snippets of life on stage, highlighting the unbearable loneliness and perplexing absurdity of communal existence. In a surreal climax, a gorilla disrupts the human routine by shattering the prominently framed proscenium stage, which resembles a box-like television, thereby interrupting the slideshow mundanity of everyday life. As a metaphorical resonance of the festival itself, it is unsurprising that the irreconcilable internal chaos impulsively calls for a blunt rupture to end the real-life drama. Towards the end of the events, a little theatre production Here Is the Message You Asked For . . . Don't Tell Anyone Else;-), infused with Gen Z digital culture elements, encountered intense unrest at the curtain call when the audience furiously demanded refunds. The incident added another layer of controversy to the festival's aftermath.The festival's curation revealed an ambition to nurture emerging theatre works, exemplified by the unit of Migratory Birds 300. Ambitiously aiming at incubating fresh and diverse artistic pursuits, the project built a "sand city" at the north end of the Aranya community. Hundreds of young artists made, presented, and lived amidst their creations for an uninterrupted three-hundred hours. The light-hearted gathering was characterized by a sense of youthfulness, exuberance, and freedom, where the participants simply embraced the present moment. Accommodating these less privileged artists in seaside tents with minimalistic life supplies, the Aranya Festival endeavored to varnish the temporary sandcastle as a collective utopian dream. This, however, was no more than a romantic fantasy of young artists, expecting them to be satisfied living on carbon dioxide as long as they have their "art." The festival took a distinctive approach to achieving "lifelike art," diverging considerably from Allan Kaprow's original anti-bourgeois intent when he coined the term. Rather than art distancing itself from capitalist aesthetics, life itself manifested an expensive and commercialized facade.Ten years ago, the Wuzhen Theatre Festival in Zhejiang pioneered a vision for theatre festivals in China. Modeled after the Avignon Festival, audiences could enjoy high-quality performances and indulge in a travel experience away from major theatre hubs. Following Wuzhen, Aranya advances its own cultural and economic paradigm, seamlessly merging cultural tourism, site-specific performances, and real estate development—a model increasingly adopted in the peripheries of urban centers in China. As a nascent theatre festival striving to set itself apart, Aranya's curation underlined self-awareness and self-reflexivity as its unique gesture: site-specific productions like Red intentionally involved the festival's location as one of its significant aspects; Mister Non-existence in Utopian satirized Aranya's self-claimed artistic utopia; nearly two-dozen staged readings repurposed residential and commercial spaces into environmental theatre venues. Deliberately focusing the audience's attention inward, the festival provided a space to construct, dissect, cultivate, and critique. Communal and private, familiar and innovative, nostalgic and invigorating, utopian and dystopian, such contradictions are inherent in this heterotopian walled-in enclave. The multifaceted lens of Aranya extends beyond a mere theatre festival to encompass an emblematic paradigm of fresh approaches to organizing artistic production and sociocultural experience. This heterotopia of theatre will continue to stage and question the ambitions and dilemmas of contemporary China.