The Stage is Set for Beijing Fringe Festival, Sep 25-Nov 15

Last Wednesday, Sep 9, members of various performing arts organizations including the Beijing Federation of Literary and Art Circles, the Beijing Dramatists Association, and Beijing Youth Theatre Workers Association unveiled plans for the 13th annual Beijing Fringe Festival, set to kick off Sep 25. As is de rigueur for 2020, performances will be held both offline and online, with Youku as a partner and the official streaming platform. 

The announcement is welcome news for theater-goers who have been bereft of stage shows this year, and given how packed the event’s lineup is, folks certainly won’t have a problem making up for lost time. The festival’s flagship series, Drama is Present, includes 13 works that will be staged at various theaters across Beijing and two in Xia’an and Xiamen between Sep 25 and Oct 29.

In addition to the live performances, there will be six other series including Drama Online, Drama is Reading, Drama is Talking, Drama is Listening, Drama is Hi, and Drama on the Record, each of which looks at the nature of dramatic performance through a different lens. For instance, Drama is Listening uses music as a point of departure for theatre performances and includes sound artist Yan Jun’s Living Room Tour Special Edition, a conceptual auditory tapestry that eschews conventional instruments for found objects in the performance’s environment.

Likewise, Drama is Reading will feature table reads of scripts new and old, with a special homage to Albert Camus’s Caligula, while Drama is Talking will be an online/offline panel discussion in collaboration with the German-based Goethe Institute about “Post-Epidemic Drama.”

The newest addition to the festival, Drama on Record, is inspired by the boom in short-form video content made popular by social media over the past few years, and is essentially a limitless forum open to content creators all over the globe in response to a prompt that will be announced during Fringe Festival’s opening ceremony. 

For more information, and to see the full line-up of events, click here.

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Images: Hailey Kean (via Unsplash), CGTN