A production involving non-professional performers will be staged in an exciting new space, Zhang Kun reports.

A scene from One Fine Day, at National Theater of China in Beijing in 2020. (LI YAN / FOR CHINA DAILY)

One Fine Day, originally scheduled to be the opening production in March for the new Young Theater in Shanghai's Yangpu district, held rehearsals via web conference as most of the city is still under lockdown due to the latest COVID-19 outbreak.

Since the play was conceived by director Li Jianjun in 2013, it has been performed in Beijing, Hangzhou in Zhejiang province, Shenzhen in Guangdong province, and Hong Kong.

For me, this play is a unique and beautiful process. It is an irreplaceable experience because it is about real people and real life. It has greatly nourished me as a creator.

Li Jianjun, director

In each city, the director recruited a group of people with no theater background to share their real-life experiences onstage. Each person would carry a receiver and a transmitter and host his or her own independent channel while on the stage. Every member of the audience would similarly receive a headset and a radio and switch channels at any time to listen to whichever narrator they wanted to listen to.

Among the 20 storytellers in Shanghai are a young hearing-impaired woman, a retiree from Shanghai Shipyard and a video game blogger. When they were recruited, Li and his colleagues interviewed each online. After a few rounds of interviews, they added new anecdotes and vivid details to the outline of their stories.

"Eventually we will take them back to the context of the theater, and let them tell about their lives with others doing the same on both sides," Li says.

Directing the production is different from working with professional actors, he adds.

"We don't want to adjust their postures or voices, but to inspire their wish to tell stories, identify themselves with what they are telling, and help them to think about life."

The newly renovated Young Theater in Shanghai's Yangpu district will focus on showcasing dramas. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

The outbreak of the pandemic has forced some to withdraw from the show, but for those who have stayed on, the new and different experiences are there to share.

In 2013, when the first production of One Fine Day was presented at the Fringe Festival in Beijing, the play won wide praise from China's theater scene.

"Each actor in this play was so ordinary and yet so beautiful, so frank and real, so peaceful and with such great rhythm," says Meng Jinghui, a leading artist of China's avant-garde theater.

He praises the production as "a most handsome modern dance, a symphony of voices, and a lost journal you picked up on the metro train".

In the past nine years, the production has involved more than 100 narrators of ages ranging from 16 to 91.

Li, the director, says he views One Fine Day as an aesthetic experiment.

"We have created a set of rules that remain consistent, and invited different narrators to tell different stories. We have accumulated more than 160 stories so far," he says. "What's special about this play is that it keeps answering the question: What is the relationship between theater, or art, and our real contemporary life. For me, this play is a unique and beautiful process. It is an irreplaceable experience because it is about real people and real life. It has greatly nourished me as a creator."

Li says he wanted to provide an opportunity for people to step onto the stage, a place that once belonged exclusively to professional actors and stars. Not many people understood his concept in the beginning. In 2016, when One Fine Day was presented at the Power Station of Art in Shanghai, no more than 200 people attended each of the two shows held, and most of them were art industry professionals.

"This time at Young Theater, we can have up to 1,000 people. It will be a proper mainstream show," he says.

Young Theater was scheduled to celebrate its grand opening in March. By choosing One Fine Day as its opening production, the theater hoped to highlight its involvement in the local life and culture of the city.

Located at No 1155 Kongjiang Road in Yangpu district, the building used to be Yangpu Theater, which went through a makeover in 2018. Relaunched as Young Theater, the space is focused on showcasing dramas.

Li Jianjun, director. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

Young Theater will be managed by Shanghai Grand Theater, the prime performing art center in the city. According to Zhang Xiaoding, general manager of Shanghai Grand Theater, Young Theater will have two performing spaces: the main space with 1,020 seats, and a multifunctional small hall that can hold more than 160 people.

"Yangpu district is home to renowned universities such as Fudan and Tongji and we hope to nurture a healthy ecology of theater art in this area," Zhang tells China Daily. "We want to expand the boundaries of theater, incubate new productions and attract young emerging artists to experiment with their wildest ideas."

Upon its completion next year, the West Bund Grand Theater will join Young Theater and become the third member of the Shanghai Grand Theater family. According to Zhang, the new theater on the West Bund will be focused on musicals.

Although the city already has Culture Square, a theater dedicated to musical performances, it alone is not enough to support the entire musical industry, and this explains the need for another venue, Zhang says. With musicals being the most popular theater form for today's young urban audiences in China, the market needs more quality productions, creative talent and outstanding creative teams, she adds.

Besides being a performing arts center for musicals, the new West Bund theater will also become a creative hub for Chinese musical productions.

"Our management team for the West Bund Theater is already working on the incubation of several original Chinese musical productions, and we will also work on the adaptations of foreign productions into Chinese, such as the South Korean musical The Brothers Karamazov," Zhang says.

On World Book Day, on April 23, the three theaters jointly presented a 12-hour livestream that featured artists, authors, and theater professionals who introduced their favorite productions.

"We introduced Shanghai Grand Theater's online program to stay connected with audiences during the lockdown," Zhang says. "We also took the opportunity to introduce the two new sister theaters and their respective social network identities. We hope each theater can develop its distinctive characteristics and reach its own heights to meet the diverse demands of the people. Together we will be able to develop the market and help the city's live-show industry achieve a healthy growth."

Contact the writer at zhangkun@chinadaily.com.cn