The Young Theatre Artist’s Competition is a major component of the Wuzhen Festival. Twelve creative groups will be chosen to come to Wuzhen to perform a newly created work on a topic designated by the Festival. The jury will consist of luminaries and masters of the art. On the final day of the Festival, the jury members will choose a Best Play, which comes with a cash prize and give a Special Prize for the Most Outstanding Artist, which comes with a cash prize.

The purpose of the competition is part of the vision of the Festival Director: to establish a platform for the development of original theatre works by promising young artists. This platform is for passionate and potential young playwrights and performers to present themselves, learn from world theatre masters, and broaden their horizons.

This year, the Young Theatre Artist’s Competition of the Wuzhen Theatre Festival is regretfully only open to Chinese applicants aged 35 and under or presenting their first theatrical work. In future years it is hoped the competition will be open to young theatre artists from all over the world.

The Results of the Young Theatre Artist’s Competition of the 2015 Wuzhen Theatre Festival

The Award Winners of the Young Theatre Artist’s Competition:

Best Plays: Static; Ever Never

The Most Outstanding Artist: Li Bo (the playwright and actor of Montage)

Special Attention Award: Wedding Anniversary

Wuzhen Theatre Festival Committee

24th Oct. 2015

About Young Theatre Artist’s Competition

“By virtue of the Wuzhen Theatre Festival, we sincerely hope that more and more young and talented directors can realize their dreams. Wuzhen is the cradle of dreams, a little platform where the energy of youth can be on display.”

—Chen Xianghong

“It was very comforting to see the high level of the Young Theatre Artist’s Competition in the Inaugural 2013 Wuzhen Theatre Festival.”

—Stan Lai

“The new generation of theatre artists is the future of Chinese theatre. The Wuzhen Theatre Festival offers these young theatre directors a platform for expressing themselves, as well as an opportunity to learn and communicate with the masters of theatre arts.”

—Huang Lei

“The competition at times provided moments of startling beauty.”

—Shi Hang

“The Young Theatre Artist’s Competition empowered young directors with the strength to build their dreams.”

—Jia Xing Daily

"An interesting play with contents and guts. It plays with philosophy, showing through the brilliance of its drama that it has the tools to play. It reminds one of Waiting for Godot, but with more of a celebration of the actors' skills. It is the work of a mature creator, confident, moving its rows and columns around with ease. It is a philosophic carnival with an open scenario, a poor mouth that asks questions to the sky."

—Shi Hang, about the winner of the 2013 Inaugural Wuzhen Theatre Festival Young Theatre Artist's Competition Wuzhen Award, Chen Minghao, director of the drama BBMM

The Young Theatre Artist’s Competition

Wedding Anniversary

Director ⊙ Ding Jianfei

Performers ⊙ Zhao Xuan, Ding Jianfei, Dai Hua, Hu Wei

Producer ⊙ Zhao Xuan

Lighting Technician ⊙ Xi Ming

Produced by Zhao Xuan Studio

When we talk about love, what do we talk about——

When we talk about marriage, what do we talk about——

Will a vow of permanence really create a deep bond between a man and a woman?

Will the sweetness and desires of love perish one day from the mundanity of married life?

Zhao Yi and Luo Jiayi are a model couple everybody admires.

But when Zhao Yi met Gu Ran, a charming girl in the pouring rain, he felt something akin to love. Before Luo Jiayi saw Du Ming’s crystal clear eyes in her shop, she never knew such an unruly and unsettling man could be so appealing.

The marriage of Zhao Yi and Luo Jiayi is no longer flawless.

Zhao Yi and Gu Ran want to run away from their current marriages and start their own. Luo Jiayi wants to take Du Ming and make him her own.

On the other hand——

Zhao Yi is a man with a sense of responsibility. A responsible man doesn’t take an oath and then walk away from his family, leaving his wife to drift like falling leaves.

Luo Jiayi is a sensible woman. She understands that Zhao Yi did all he could to make her happy, and she has no right to turn her back on his years of efforts.

The couple finally makes a decision that settles their worries: on their anniversary, they happen to come simultaneously to the same solution—the perfect way to save their perfect marriage.

Wedding Anniversary——A story about love, you & me; about illusion and truth in marriage.

Cenotaph

Playwright & Director ⊙ Chen Xiao

Stage Manager ⊙ Cui Qikun

Performers ⊙ Chen Ziwen, Chen Zhu

Coordinator ⊙ Liu Siru

Arrangement ⊙ Chen Ming

Sound ⊙ KuangQie Sound Art Studio

One grave and two men. The grave-keeper meets the grave-digger. One is protecting his ancestral property, while another is digging for anything of value. Considering the vicissitudes of history, do they really know what they are doing? Will their identities change after this encounter? Who is the inheritor of the culture and who is the destroyer?

Zuo

Director ⊙ Wu Yao

Playwright ⊙ Geng Ziqi

Multimedia Production ⊙ Liu Chuan

Performers ⊙ Liu Chuan, Wu HaoLin, Liu Yong, Gu Junjie

We always know something only through the description of the thing, not the thing itself. The main characters in this play try with all their hearts to communicate how lost and confused the common people feel in their society. Should they simply inherit their beliefs from the older generation, or find their own, new way? Can they keep their hearts simple and pure when surrounded by such complexity and evil? How can the main character hold onto his compassion and kindness in a world so full of discontent and lies? From the outside, we are members of a group—but we are also individuals. The beliefs we inherit from periods of conflict may no longer be relevant. Have we considered that those beliefs, formed when surrounded by hostility and misunderstandings, may carry different meanings in different places?

The Amnesia

Director ⊙ Li Shoule

Playwright & Stage Manager ⊙ Shen Shinu

Performers ⊙ Li Shoule, Dong Chang

Lights ⊙ Sui He

Producer ⊙ Shi Linlin

In a place that has been immersed in rain for over a century, people have evolved with various differences. A genius doctor is enlisted to cure the amnesia of the next-in-line in a family with the most perfect bodies in the world, while the patient himself is in complete denial about his illness. During treatment, the doctor gradually uncovers the truth of the family's history: this highly-evolved family with a seemingly clean past used to be imprisoned criminals who drank human blood in order to survive a drought that had lasted for many centuries. Because of their amnesia, they had never admitted to their crimes. Not only had they been released, they had even become university professors who wrote books about human history. In the end, the doctor finally speaks the truth, only to be murdered by the enraged heir, who stares at the body with no idea what has happened—due to another bout of amnesia.

MULIAN

Director ⊙ Yuan Ye

Playwright ⊙ Zhou Jingjing

Musician ⊙ Liu Shuang

Performers ⊙ Yuan Ye, Wei Wei, Zhang Yanwei

The Fu family had been an honorable family and pious Buddhists. But Fu Luobo’s mother, Qing Ti, was said to be a greedy woman: she abandoned her vegetarian diet and began to eat meat, a profanation against the Buddha. As punishment in hell, she was tortured in a river of blood.

To atone for her mother’s crime, Fu Luobo chose to become a monk and a vegetarian, praying for all creatures.

The Buddha told Fu Luobo to go to the Blood River in the underworld and release the ghosts from purgatory. This would make him a virtuous man so that his mother’s soul might be released sooner.

When Luobo came to the river of blood, he encountered his father, Fu Xiang. Fu Xiang declared that he was God of the Blood River, and resisted Luobo’s attempts to help his mother.

The mother, Qing Ti, why did she kill the dog to eat? Was the rumor even true? Luobo, Fu Xiang, Xiao Hua and the goblin—were they really trying to save a soul, or were they covering up a cruel truth?

The truth comes out, a little at a time. The pieces of the story advance like sharp knives, cutting away at the seemingly merciful…

Who is insane?

Director ⊙ Shi Ermeng, Zhao Jie

Playwright ⊙ Shi Weibei

Performers ⊙ Shi Ermeng, Zhao Jie, Shi Weibei , Cao Xiaoyan, Jia Ying

Su Xiaocheng is in her final round of examinations to become a psychiatrist at Guangming Hospital, and her final test is to determine, in 30 minutes, who in the ward is normal.

After eight years of study and experience, she expects this final test to be easy, but she is proven wrong after she meets her unusual "patients": a man who believes he is the poet Xu Zhimo, the girl-next-door with an addiction to eating snacks, the beautiful heiress in constant fear that someone is trying to kill her, and lastly, the disturbed man with a clear mind.

These four challenge Su Xiaocheng to question: who is normal? Who is insane?

Montage

Director ⊙ Zhang Xiaoqing

Playwright ⊙ Li Bo

Performers ⊙ Li Bo, Wang Xinye, Leng Xinqing, Zhang Xiaoqing

Sound Design ⊙ You Yilin

Montage, adapted from highlights of 22 classic movies, places more emphasis on geometric patterns that are easily overlooked in film composition.

We reconstruct masters’ movie clips on stage and turn it into a new story by comparison, parallel, symbolization, and crossover. The story comes from one mistake made  by the father and the daughter. And thus it leads to some past events of the family.

Singing Alone

Director & Playwright ⊙ Wang Xueqin

Performers ⊙ Hu Xinyao, Yu Shutong, Lv Shouyu, Sheng Tingting

Design ⊙ Li Zhiqi

A stern reality is gradually becoming apparent as we stride through a society that is aging following the era of forced birth control; the one-child populations and the old-age populations are meeting face-to-face to an unprecedented extent. The two generations collide and conflicts arise. We are seeing not only the weighty realities of aging and of the birth control policy, but also, more importantly, gaining awareness of populations that have never assimilated during the process of social development. Ours in not an accidental modern landscape.

This play contemplates that “modern landscape” from the only-child perspective, which stems from a conventional “nuclear family” model and the collective memory. As a generation, the voices of only children are warm, but lonely. From birth, they have accepted passively the assignment of—and competition between—resources for family, education, financial security, and so on. They are joining the aging future in a very particular way.

This play is an experimental work. It wants to express the relationship between the only child and the aging. It will employ physical performance, documentary video, and post-interview sound. Perhaps the time has come to confront the inevitable in a society of “only”children and the aged: the alienation felt between the aging and the young is a specter that hovers over us where humans struggle for resources.

Ever Never

Director ⊙ Hung Chien-han

Playwright ⊙Feng Chi-chun

Performers ⊙ Cheng Li-ying, Chang Yao-jen

Lighting Design ⊙ Wang Fang-ning

Musician ⊙ Chang Yao-jen

We are always looking for the familiar in unfamiliarity.

We miss the perfect moment to say good-bye.

This is a journey of magical realism.

In an airplane flying to the North Pole, a mother is visiting her son, and a son is leaving his mother to work in strange lands: they meet and sit side by side in Fate’s hands.

Out of mutual regret and need, they share the past and the present during the long flight, shortening the distance between them. Words long unspoken pour out between these most familiar strangers.

"I feel nervous thinking of what to say to my own son! "

"Let’s pretend that I am your son. Practice."

If you are given an opportunity to talk to someone already gone, what will your first sentence be?

If our ability to love is doomed to end at a certain time, what is the nature of love?

"Don’t turn around… so I can talk to you properly."

Spark in the Pub

Director & Playwright ⊙ Cui Lei

Performers ⊙ Li Junbo, Wen Qi, Zhou Yang, Cui Lei

Musician ⊙ Mao Bowen

Graphic Design ⊙ Wang Haiyue, Wei Zhen, Wu Zhenpeng

God

Do not drink up that sorrow

Because desire is fire, smoldering in your hesitation

God

Do not rage from your sorrow

Because over time the pain will burn away

Come Together

Director ⊙ Chen Yow-ruu

Playwright ⊙ Chen Yow-ruu, Tseng Shih-yi

Performers ⊙ Tseng Shih-yi, Chung Pin-chiao

Lighting Design ⊙ Yang Yi-tzu

Musician ⊙ Liao Hai-ting

A pregnant woman, with some blood on her chin, walks into a small bank in a big city.

She finds out there is no money left in her bank account, so she talks to a bank clerk about taking out a loan.

That same day, the clerk had just been told that it would be his last day at work.

The woman persuades the man that they should rob the bank together.

And what happens next?

Static

Director ⊙ Wu Bi

Playwright ⊙ Wu Bi, Wu Jiuxi

Performers ⊙ Gao Mingbo, Wu Bi

Producer ⊙ Zhao Junyan

Director’s Assistant ⊙ Zhu Fang

One day, a sperm named JingZhi was told by his master that he should go out to find a little ovum. But JingZhi had a fear of the outside world because of all those stories he’d heard. He was afraid of that forever-dark vagina. His master patiently wised him up, and finally JingZhi set out on his way to find a little ovum, looking for the meaning of his life.