Hong Kong

I went to Hong Kong from May 25 to 28 to attend the 5th annual Chinese Shakespeare Festival at Chinese University of Hong Kong. I'll blog about that soon, but here are some pictures.

Rain and Shine in Beijing

The play has been progressing at its usual fitful pace, with the usual irritations; this last week, as I was conducting rehearsals in David's absence, we get kicked out of the Democracy Building once ("dragon lady" insisting we had no reservations); got double-booked in our customary rehearsal room (we were able to persuade that class meeting there to take an adjacent conference room); and had to resort for one rehearsal to the corridor of the fifth floor of the computing center. This caused some consternation to the geeks passing by at intervals, especially as the scene we were rehearsing involved the actors lying prostrate and chanting to an imaginary "Great Clock." The computer folks must have thought that they stumbled into the secret rituals of some strange cult.
When the people entrusted with procuring props for us failed to do so, Molly (the stage manager) and I hit the town on Saturday in search of someone to build stilts and make sticks for us. When we finally located woodworking and construction materials shops in a dusty back alley (think Home Depot, third-world style), they acceded to our peculiar demands after much back and forth, animated discussion, and flagrant attempts to price-gouge. Apparently, I made too prosperous and Occidental (Joe's term) an impression, so the price went up the moment they laid eyes on me. But Molly and I -- she's half my size-- drove a medium-hard bargain ("...ok, if they ask 500 yuan, they'll have to throw in the painting and delivery..."). Heaven knows what they'll fabricate for us. Still, we were promised delivery by early next week.
Meanwhile, I blocked through all of the scenes that demanded athleticism (stilt-walking, roller skating, building human pyramids) and formal dancing. To say that this challenged my directorial proficiency would be putting it mildly, but we got through it, and the actors exhibited their usual enthusiasm, if not always the most spot-on physical coordination.
On Thursday night, I had been summoned back to UIBE, the Beijing University of Business and Economics, by the formidable Prof. Sun, for the finals of the Beijing-wide university short play competition. It was raining as I piled into a taxi with the students from Beida who were also presenting a scene. When I arrived at the theatre, what I assumed to be a rather low-key affair turned out to be an enormous extravaganza, with a 600-seat theatre filled to the brim, presenters in formal attire, TV game-show style, video projections, blaring music, etc. One of the solicitous students organizing the show asked me if I was one of the judges. Not to my knowledge, I replied. But of course it turns out that I was indeed, although Prof. Sun had neglected to inform me of this circumstance. (Which was a bit awkward, as a Beida team was competing as well. However, I found out that this kind of conflict of interest is not only not a problem in China, it's in fact expected that competing teams try to stack the jury in their favor. Why rely on merit if you can use influence? In fact, we were being plied with party favors and little snacks all the way through.) As we watched the pieces, all of them contemporary American plays of a signal lack of literary or dramatic distinction, Sun, sitting next to me, would render judgments under her breath in an effort to sway my opinion. "This team chose a very stupid play," she would say with admirable frankness, "they don't know what they're doing." At the end of it all, I was invited to the stage to give feedback -- Sun and I doing a kind of Mutt and Jeff number together. To my surprise, the team from Peking University won and was awarded an 800 Yuan prize. They were all convinced that it was my doing (in actuality, with scrupulous honesty, I had assigned them second place), and we celebrated at a Yunnan restaurant out the south gate long past midnight.

Blogspot is still blocked in the mainland, so updates will have to wait until I can access the VPN.


-- Post From My iPhone

The Cowboy Rides into Town

The blog's been out of commission because I've had some serious trouble logging in; Google's sites seem to have had problems in all of Asia. Right now, I'm at Starbucks (again) on Tuesday afternoon, and using the UF VPN, which makes the network think my computer's actually in the US. Ah, the virtual life!
Much has happened, and lest I once again get too far behind, here's a digest of it all. Currently, I'm by myself in Beijing. After having come back from Arkansas on Wednesday, Joe Graves departed again for Taiwan on Sunday, this time with David in tow. (Upon entry, Joe was slightly delayed at the airport due to the Chinese authorities' almost militant over-cautiousness about the H1N1 virus -- vulgo, swine flu -- of which there have been a total of 3 (!) documented cases in China, none fatal. If you think that's being unreasonable, let Joe tell you about the time the bird flu hit and they quarantined campus from one hour to the next...no one allowed to leave or enter for 3 months!)
So, I've finally met Joe, who is technically the producer of our show. (David, of course, knew him from being in a play with him at Oregon Shakes many years ago.) He is tall, craggy-faced, sloppy, profane, and entirely charismatic. A full-blooded actor and adventurer, he came to China about seven years ago to do a show and stayed to create an institute, and now has ambitions to establish theatre departments on campuses around China, using their childlike devotion to Shakespeare as leverage. (He tells an unbelievable story about the first Chinese translator of Shakespeare that would need a blog post to itself, or perhaps a movie.) Joe has been able to charm money out of people and do the almost impossible, organizing tours of English and American theatres in China, directing Western and Chinese plays at the People's Art Theatre in Beijing and many other locations around the country, and so forth. He sees himself as a spiritual anarchist (scion of a Baptist preacher, no less), hedonist, and holy fool, and somehow, with his amiable but tough-minded persistence, he is able to puncture that skein of bureaucratic intransigence that otherwise envelopes everything here.
His intervention now has restored our performance dates, at least approximately, at the Centennial Hall theatre on campus. We'll be performing from June 2-4, which is precisely 2 weeks from now. This prospect leaves me somewhat beathless, seeing as we haven't even gotten through the whole play, and have virtually none of the props necessary, haven't talked to the lighting designer, etc. On the other hand, the costumer has come and measured, and promises delivery of the costumes by the 25th. In David's almost weeklong absence -- he and Joe are giving Shakespeare workshops around Taiwan -- I am conducting what must be the most difficult part of the rehearsals (I say this as a mere statement of fact). All of the scenes we've thus far avoided because they involve props (stilts, roller skates) and a good measure of acrobatics and athleticism now fall to me to block through. This continues amid the usual problems associated with rehearsals here -- students who suddenly discover they're unavailable for the evening, rooms that are double-booked or guarded by some dragon with a serious animus against theatre, etc. Fortunately, the actors (when present) are good to work with and quick to pick up ideas. (If they were slow-witted, I'd despair.)
Of course, I'm also covering David's classes, so I'm somewhat beleaguered this week. On top of that, Professor Sun (remember her from a previous post?) once again requires my services on Thursday evening, this time to judge the intercollegiate drama competition at Beijing U of Business and Economics. I'm sure I'll have something to report about that...
Just when David comes back, I myself will leave for Hong Kong from May 25 to 28 to attend the finals of the 5th annual Chinese Shakespeare festival at HK Chinese University. Hardly do I return from that excursion, and we get ready to open.
Speaking of excursions, we did get to go to downtown Beijing on Saturday (finally) to see a magnificent exhibit of Turner paintings on loan to the Beijing Art Museum by the Tate Gallery in London, and we rode the subway home.

Far away so near

If I've been remiss about keeping up with the posts on this blog, it's in part because communication, even from China, is now so easy and multifaceted -- email, Facebook, Skype, cell phone, etc. -- that the only true impediment to it is the government's arbitrary (and easily circumvented) censorship, rather than cost or distance, and the blog is just an outlet among several. As long as I'm at Starbucks or any number of other wifi locations off campus, or as long as I use my TA Joe's Netpas (yes, one "s") login, the world is at my fingertips and I can Skype from my iPhone to a landline, update my Twitter account, or exchange any amount of data with anyone (I typically download Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann of MSNBC in the background on iTunes while I'm slurping my overpriced iced mocha.) Setting up the blog, I admit I was still entertaining a romantic notion of China as the quintessence of remoteness, a notion that harkens back to Marco Polo's day, but in reality it's very much part of the connected globe, and so the idea of writing a blog with dispatches from far away, as if it were as tentative and fragile as a message in a bottle, has been washed up by a data tsunami on a digital shore littered with such bottles.
I'm not sure that the metaphor quite holds (water), but anyway...The other reason I've let time elapse is because we've settled into a kind of routine of teaching, rehearsing, shopping, scrounging for food, etc. Even doing a play in Beijing becomes remarkably normal after a while. Until Joe Graves returned yesterday (more about that later), David and I had been effectively orphaned and made in many small and large ways to fend for ourselves. Our presumptive contact and minder Sebastian has been nowhere in evidence, and so getting anything done, from figuring out banking, shopping, and procuring cell phone cards, to obtaining a faculty ID (which identifies us as "foreign experts"), necessary to get past the guards at the campus gates, has been dependent on our own resourcefulness or the kindness of strangers.
Especially going to restaurants is still something of an adventure. Don't ask what our favorite dishes are; to our knowledge we haven't ever ordered the same thing twice (mostly because we can't recall what we ordered before). We usually have to order by pointing at some picture or other and hoping that what looks appetizing in the photo isn't fried bees, snake soup, or old turtle stew (I'm not making these up; we've actually encountered these, though not ordered them). The staff is often a bit impatient with our evident inability to speak even simple Chinese, and in fact seems puzzled that there could be such a thing as a non-Chinese-speaking person.
In one restaurant, to which we've gone several times, they smile indulgently at us when we come in, which we are willing to endure because the dishes are good and cheap (8-10 yuan). It's better than being spoken to at high volume in rapid Chinese, as if we were simply hard of hearing, and we'd understand if whatever was being said were repeated often enough with no change of inflection and no attempt to add an explanatory gesture. Who knows what we've actually ordered and eaten these last two weeks. Sometimes you just have to eat a spoonful of peanut butter or a yoghurt to reset your stomach. There are certain things we haven't been able to find. I am nonplussed that there seems no cinnamon anywhere (to put on my oatmeal). David is on a futile quest for limes for his gin and tonic. The last time he bought limes, they turned out to be mandarins with green skin.
The traffic is absolutely stark raving mad, and they'll just as soon run you over as look at you. We marvel at how such a thoroughly collectivized society, with its professed ideals of social equality and mutual respect turns so utterly Darwinian when loosed on the streets. Traffic signals mean nothing, and pedestrians are at the bottom of a food chain that starts with busses at the top. The simple rule is: get out of the way of anything larger than you. Our assumption is that the street is a kind of primal scene in which the Chinese compensate for all of the other psychic pressures in their life.
These are minor irritations, of course. (Well, ok, I guess if I were flattened by a bus, that would be a major irritation.) The students, by contrast, are very much aware of the world outside, and seem very conscious of their place as the elite in a rapidly transforming society. They strike a balancing act -- we have interesting discussions about this in class -- between pride in China and loyalty to its post-Maoist principles, and their sense of being players on a global stage, the values of which they have to understand, if not embrace.
In the next post, I'll write about rehearsals and Joe's return.

Summer Palace

The trip to the Summer Palace on Thursday was our first real outing from campus, and we treated ourselves to a taxi ride there, which cost 12 Yuan (about $1.75) - not extravagant. Last time I was at the Summer Palace was in 1998, on the Bear Treks trip with Caron, and we rushed through it, barely getting an impression of the the enormous park-like area that bounds the three lakes. This time, David and I took about 3 hours to stroll around, saw some performers on the great outdoor stage that was host to magnificent Peking Opera performances in the time of the empress dowager, walked the length of the great Long Corridor with its 14,000 paintings, had an outrageously overpriced and awful microwaved lunch (when Chinese food in China is bad, it's really, really horrid), climbed the steep steps to the Tower of Buddhist Incense with its 16th-century multi-armed Buddha statue (to which we donated money to incur benevolence for our enterprise), saw many locations the poetic names of which were matched by their serene beauty (the Hall of Virtue and Longevity, the Cloud-Dispelling Tower, the Tower of Listening to the Orioles, etc.), and returned to campus in late afternoon. I've posted some pictures here, both from outside campus and the Summer Palace. (Click pictures to enlarge!)

Summer in the Air

If you've been following this blog on the edge of your seat (and who hasn't?), wondering what next will befall our intrepid travelers, relax a little, reader. Summer has officially begun in China, things are heating up, and with it there's lots of good news from Beijing.
On Wednesday night, when things seemed a bit bleak, we got a phone call from Joe Graves from Arkansas (he's playing Treeves in Elephant Man there at the Rep). Joe, who founded the PKU Institute years ago and has been through the ups and downs of Chinese bureaucracy, put our minds at ease on several fronts. First, he's back next week Wednesday, which will make everything so much easier for us. Secondly, he thinks the space problem can be solved and we'll be able to get Centennial Hall or some equivalent venue. Third, he assures us that, yes, of course there's a budget, and we'll meet with designers as soon as he's back in Beijing. What's more, he will deal with the classes when he's back, so we don't have to agonize about how to evaluate these students on whom we've been dropped willy-nilly. Finally, he has some treats in store for us (at this point, his mellow baritone over the phone is starting to sound like Santa Claus). He will take David on a trip to Taiwan in late May for a theatre festival there; once they have returned, he will send me off to Hong Kong as guest observer at the All-China College Shakespeare festival, into which 200 Chinese universities have entered scenes (12 are selected to perform). Colin McPhillamy, our predecessor in teaching and directing here, will be one of the judges, so I'll get to hang out with him in HK for a few days.
As you might imagine, Joe's intervention makes a lot of difference to our mood. (He also shares a story that puts the Dragon Lady episode from the Democracy Building into perspective. Apparently, Dragon Lady and her husband live on the premises of that building and protect it fiercely, especially from activities they judge frivolous, such as theatre rehearsals. Joe says that at one point he was so low in her estimation that he felt he should apologize to her, so he bought some roses and memorized a phrase of abject self-abasement. When he handed her the flowers, she eyed him with unconcealed horror, backed away slowly, and threw the roses in the trash! Apology not accepted, presumably.)
In rehearsals, we lost a few cast members who were alternates and one who was a principal, but we were told this might happen due to the heavy schedule of the students. We are now down to exactly nine cast members, the minimum for the production, and know that this is a potentially precarious situation. On the other hand, the cast is having genuine fun with the play, and every rehearsal fuses them into more of a close-knit ensemble.
On Thursday, after my morning class, we finally ventured afield from campus, to the Summer Palace of the last empress dowager, Cixi. I'll post a few pictures and a description later.

Slings and arrows...with some pictures from PKU mixed in

Well, it had to happen. When we finally arranged a meeting with Sebastian Li, Joe's assistant who is supposed to look after us but who is mysteriously absent most of the time, to nail down some facts about performance dates and space and designers for the show, it all started unraveling. Sebastian had neglected to book the theatre in Centennial Hall on campus that was to be our venue, and now it was all booked up for the weekend we were promised performances. Sebastian, who bills himself the "production manager" but seems to have no idea that in America, this lapse would be grounds for instant dismissal, is a sympathetic young-ish man with long hair and a constantly beatific smile, who seems to actually hear requests you make and is quick to make you any promise ("no problem"), but is challenged quite substantially on the follow-through front. He takes this disclosure of the theatre's unavailability as if it were some kind of natural event independent of his volition, and helpfully suggests that we perhaps try a venue at another university, where we don't have to sell tickets to cover the rent. This last is said as if selling the tickets is David's and my business; I can already picture myself with a vendor's tray in front of the South Gate of campus hawking discounted tickets to "Einstein's Dreams." Sebastian is also unsure whether there is any budget for the show, and we generally don't get the idea that it has high priority for him compared to whatever else is going on in his busy life. David and I take all of this with a remarkable degree of equanimity, reader, as if we were masters of a Zen-like fatalism and self-restraint. In truth, we are simply surrendering slowly to this down-the-rabbithole feeling because we've become accustomed to how it all works here (or doesn't), and know that howling and gnashing of teeth will get us nowhere. It's as if it would be slightly impertinent to point out that both of us have cleared our schedules, made a few sacrifices, and traveled thousands of miles here to make this happen. At one point, I say to David, "maybe this will be a staged reading yet...", and David acknowledges it with a chuckle. Are we somehow atoning for all the productions we have done that have gone so well?
Meanwhile, we spend more time in classes and on class assignments than on rehearsals, because it is so difficult to get students together until 9pm. The rehearsals we do manage are actually good fun, though fitful, but we don't quite know yet if the actors retain anything at all. (Small triumph over bureaucracy: in need of a silk sheet, which is a key prop for the show, but finding nothing else handy, we take one of the ubiquitous propaganda banners down in the classroom where we were rehearsing. David now carries it around in his backpack.)
On Monday afternoon, I see a white-haired older gent climbing the stairs to my floor and, recognizing him for a professorial type, introduce myself. He is Tom Rendall, a retired English professor from Nova Scotia who with his wife Barbara lives on my floor. They invite me to their apartment, and I learn that he's taught for 5 years at Beida, after 4 years in Macau, so he knows his way around the institution. They are most gracious, and on Tuesday, Tom takes us over to the English department to introduce us to the secretary, Sophie, and inquire about getting us faculty ID cards as well as a mailbox. Then he shepherds us to the office of the Dean of modern languages, Dr. Chang, whom we meet and who may be able to help us with our space conundrum. We feel a little less out in the wilderness after these encounters. Since it's David's birthday, we decide to finally venture out the East Gate in the direction of Wudaokou ("the Wu"), which is the restaurant and bar area close to Beida and Tsinghua University. The Rendalls have recommended an Indian restaurant, the Ganges, to us, and we find it after some searching and have a delightful meal there, with actual cocktails.
When we return to campus at 7:30 to begin rehearsals, our stage manager calls with the news that she's been shut out of the classroom building where we're supposed to be by an officious dragon who claims she knows nothing about any rehearsals.
David and I look at each other, take a deep Zen breath, and repair to my apartment where we break out the scotch and watch an episode of Rome on my computer.

A few pictures

My "home," Shao Yuan no. 5

All Quiet on the Chinese Front

Not much to report this Monday morning, except that's it's a new week in Beijing. We had no rehearsals between Thursday and Sunday evenings because students had mostly left for the long holiday weekend, so David and I got some time to ourselves, spent hours at wifi central (aka Starbucks, where we should be paying rent by now, or at least get a mailbox). In my case, I had a good amount of grading still to do, and spent much of Sunday compiling final grades for upload to UF's server before Monday.
Saturday's adventure was braving the shop-happy masses in the vast underground mall at Zhongguancun, Beijing's largest. I needed a mattress pad to offset my unforgiving bed, and we had a few other items on the list, such as hand sanitizer (we've read about swine flu here, too, and want to be ready for germ warfare!), wine (the Chinese now make a palatable cabernet under the "Great Wall" label), cinnamon (needed to make my breakfast oatmeal less bland), cheese (who doesn't need cheese?), etc. All this and much, much, much more (did I mention "much"?) can be found at the Carrefour, the French-owned but thoroughly chinesified super-mart that anchors the mall. I got the mattress pad for 99 Yuan (about $15), and then we ascended to the food area, where you duck careening shopping carts, low-hanging signs, and shouting salespeople to stock up on every manner of meats, fruits, spices, rice, and tea. The din and the smells are unbelievable. It's a perfect mix between a traditional outdoor market and a Western-style supermarket. I'll post some pictures when I go next.
Sunday rehearsal was quite satisfying, although we find we can't move as fast with these students as we can with our own. It is not for lack of unerstanding; their command of English is quite sophisticated. Rather, there is a discrepancy in theatrical sensibilities that we well have to find a way to bridge. For now, some practical considerations are also challenges, in particular trying to coordinate everyone's schedules. But that's boring, and I won't trouble the blog with it.

Where did the week go...?

I notice these posts are getting a bit long, and I'm falling behind. No wonder: in the first five days after getting off the plane, I taught 5 classes, gave one guest lecture, and conducted 3 rehearsals. I also (occasionally) washed, slept, ate, and learned fluent Chinese. Ok, the last is not true, much to my chagrin. I have little confidence in using the language beyond "ni hao" (hello) and "xiexie" (thank you). I can identify some characters (the ones for "China," "Beijing," "exit," "West Gate," etc.), but it's not enough not to feel like an ignorant boob.
So, the rest of the week in quick review...David Gardiner (my co-director, to those of my lurking blogophiles who don't know the whole story) arrived Tuesday night, while I was out on loan to Professor Sun, and got dragged off to a drama competition himself, most of which was in Chinese. I didn't see him until next morning, somewhat the worse for wear. Wednesday afternoon we had two sophomore writing classes on the schedule, which we split. I should perhaps briefly explain about these classes that they're usually taught by Joe Graves, who is currently at Arkansas Rep, and that Joe had hired an ex-RSC actor from New York named Colin McPhillamy to do the teaching this semester. Colin left quite suddenly and under somewhat mysterious circumstances before I arrived (I had skyped with him once or twice while still in G'ville to get the briefest orientation about the teaching. He is now somewhere in Australia...we seem to be holding down the fort for a number of fugitive characters.). So, with about a month to go in the semester, David and I are now the de facto teachers of these classes, if not the teachers of record. The students of course expect us to know what's going on -- do we have a lesson plan? -- will there be exams? -- to which our extremely professional and reassuring answer is: "Uh, we'll see...we don't really work here..."
In the writing class, I had them first compose a collective story based on elements of the dramatic plot (exposition, complication, climax, etc.). They would write one element and then pass the story on to their neighbor. Then I passed out an article from the NY Times about the government's homogenizing of given names. Their homework for next week is to draft a letter to the editor in response.
On the rehearsal front, we met on Wednesday night for a read-through at the North Chemistry building (which is where the English department is headquartered. Of course.) We have nine members of the cast and several alternates, in case we lose students in the rehearsal process, which is a very real possibility, given their schedules. Before reading the script, we did some physical/improv exercises with them, like "building a machine," mostly to condition them for ensemble work.
On Thursday, I taught another oral English for freshmen in the (bloody early!) morning. The quote of the day came from one girl who said: "I must tell a joke. Do you know who is the American actor Gary Oldman?" (He's British, of course.) "You look a little like him. I think he is...charming (giggle giggle)." I accepted the compliment humbly. These students are simultaneously whip-smart and naive, a very interesting mixture.
During the afternoon, David and I wandered outside campus to a part of town called "Electronics City," which you have to imagine like a souk, if it were transplanted into Blade Runner. You are accosted from all sides by salesmen and -women trying to lure you to their stands, except they sell laptops and MP3 players and cell phones, not spices and silk. David got himself a new battery for his laptop after some haggling (de rigeur). Then we went on a quest for the Carrefour (a kind of French-based superstore chain), which, it turned out, is part of a vast underground shopping arcade that could be anywhere in Globalistan. By the time we had found it, we were too hungry to shop for anything, so we backtracked and found an Indian restaurant. We hesitated at first -- is it even right to eat Indian food in China?-- but it smelled very good and had a cheap lunch buffet. So we rationalized it by saying that at least we were on the same continent.
At evening rehearsal, we had only for actors, the others having left for the long Mayday weekend, but we had a good time improvising with them through one of the chapters/scenes of Einstein's Dreams which we are thinking of adding to the play. If we can harness the enthusiasm of that evening, we can do the play.