Event: The Teahouse by Meng Jinghui at the 2019 Avignon Festival

The Teahouse, directed by Meng Jinghui Avignon Festival 2019, 73rd edition Overview The Teahouse (茶馆, Chaguan) is a play written in 1956 by the modern novelist and playwright Lao She. It stages more than sixty characters who meet in a Beijing teahouse, across three acts corresponding to as many decisive periods in Chinese history. First, the year 1898 and the decline of the Empire; then the 1920s, the era of the “Warlords”; and finally the aftermath of the Second World War, which corresponds to the resumption of the civil war. Time passes, the place endures. The teahouse reflects the changes of the city as much as it suggests its permanence amid the turmoil of History. * Lao She, born in 1899, is considered the author of “the common people of Beijing.” He is famous for his many novels, poems, and plays. He taught in London and the United States before returning to China in 1949 as a writer in the service of the communist regime. Lao She was one of the first victims of the Cultural Revolution: he died in 1966, officially having committed suicide by drowning. The Teahouse (1956) is considered one of his greatest works; in it the author deploys a speech that is at once popular and refined, an infinitely crafted language, astonishingly faithful to the soul of the Chinese people. * Meng Jinghui is an emblematic figure of contemporary Chinese theater: a pioneer of avant-garde theater in China, he is recognized for his creative, versatile, ironic, and committed artistic identity, which has opened new horizons on the Chinese stage. He directs both repertoire plays (Waiting for Godot, The Balcony, The Bald Soprano, The Four Dreams of Linchuan) and plays by contemporary authors (Rhinoceros in Love, I Love XXX, To Live), and his productions tour the world. Meng Jinghui is currently the director of several theater festivals in China, such as the Wuzhen Festival, the Beijing Fringe Festival, and the Contemporary Theatre Biennale. He also runs the Beehive Theatre. In addition, Meng Jinghui is a filmmaker, winner of the Special Jury Prize at the Locarno Festival for The Chicken Poet, and the author of two books on theater: The Archive of Avant-Garde Theater and The Archive of Innovative Theater. “During my youth, that is, in the 1980s, Chinese culture was directly, broadly, and deeply influenced by Western culture and art. The education we received was as follows: ‘keep your heart turned toward the homeland and your eyes fixed on the world.’ The theater creators of our generation aspire to portray in their works a form of humanism, a heroic spirit of freedom and romantic idealism. I think that what artists manage to express in their own right is the collision of antagonistic feelings that lie beyond reality, beyond any given space or time.” – Meng Jinghui The Teahouse “Our set designer, Zhang Wu, once said to me: a circle has neither a starting point nor an end. The same is true of time and of human beings. The wheel turning forward and the one turning in the opposite direction do indeed seem to symbolize progress, but also the reactionary forces at work within man. In my staging of The Teahouse, the characters on stage do not change from beginning to end. Their character, their impulsiveness, their thought, their confusion, their indulgence, and their hope do not change. Three eras, three whirlwinds, and three possibilities are laid out on stage as a cross-section. I have gradually come to believe that everything that happens in the teahouse is a dream. And the dream is the only reality, that is, an authentic and uninhibited reality.” – Meng Jinghui On stage, live electronic music and actors deliver an energetic performance, in keeping with the experimental approach characteristic of Meng Jinghui’s work. The show questions what it means to be human, what persists beyond places and eras, drawing fruitfulness from the very distance that separates our present from that of Lao She, the play’s author. Thus we are placed before a colossal set design, in which a nonlinear, fragmented, almost uncontrollable dramatic structure unfolds. And the director adds: “I regard the experimental approach as the aesthetic movement of a youth that never ends: enthusiasm, ideals, vigor, chaos, and lack of restraint. Silence is a terrible thing, and the silence of the young is worse still.” – Meng Jinghui For this 73rd edition of the Avignon Festival, which sets out to explore the theme of the Odyssey, we are taken on a singular journey: a human, poetic, and political adventure, through time and beyond a Beijing nonetheless traversed in all its dimensions. Information Dates: July 9–20, at 8:00 PM (no performances on the 11th and 17th) Venue: Opéra Confluence, Place de l’Europe, Avignon Running time: 3 hours (no intermission) Language: in Chinese, surtitled in French Ages 14 and up Direction: Jinghui MENG Based on a text by: Lao SHE Dramaturgy: Sebastian Kaiser Set design: Wu ZHANG Lighting: Qi WANG Music: Shan HUA Video: Zhigang WANG Sound: Shan HUA Costumes: Lei YU Assistant director: Huayi LI With: Minghao CHEN, Pengyi HAN, Qing HAN, Chang LIU, Xi QI, Wei XI, Yiteng DING, Hongwei ZHAO, Jing HAN, Shuo HAN, Hongfei LIU, Lin CHEN, Yudi WANG, Juncheng ZHANG, Junyi LIU, Zhiming ZHANG, Jingwen LI, Hongyu ZHANG, Yu TIAN Production: Meng Theatre Studio Co-production: Hybridités France-Chine Online box office for the 2019 Avignon Festival opens: June 11