And this year, the Tianjin Grand Theatre is preparing to push Polish culture from April through to December. What other stagings from Poland are going to be brought to the Chinese audience?
I would like to invite Lupa’s staging of Heroes' Square, (A)pollonia by Warlikowski, The Martyrs by Jarzyna, Paweł Passini’s Hideout, and the opera The Passenger by Weinberg. I am also thinking about Twarkowski’s Acropolis and a few other productions and concerts by the Sinfonia Varsovia with Krzysztof Penderecki. We would like the sketch out the entire landscape for the public. It was a community initiative from below and real interest that lead to such a large scale presentation of Polish culture. It is a unique project which we are working on right now, and it is also a way of reaching out to the Chinese intellectual elite, whose interest in Polish culture keeps on growing.
How did your own fascination with the theatre begin?
As a teenager I worked in a metal processing factory in the south of China. My family is from the region, and that is where they also live. Later, I studied portrait painting at the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts, and memory of my student years was recently refreshed when I found my old notebook with sketches done some 30 years ago. I taught at a pedagogical school, and I conducted classes of listening to symphonic music, and finally, thanks to the famous conductor Li Delun, I obtained a job at the Beijing Concert Hall. The post of Beijing Philharmonic director had just become vacant, after the previous director prepared a politically incorrect display on Tibetan Buddhism.
The party had a programme of supporting culture, but in reality very little was realised. New cafés and restaurants were opening up all the time, but no one wanted to invest in culture. I wanted to change this.
How?
Before I became the head of the concert hall, it would give about 60 concerts per year. Towards the late 90s, when the government introduced two labour-free days, the number went up to 510! We played concerts in the afternoons as well as in the evenings, we organised days with classical music, and the tickets sold very well, even those for standing places! And it was then that a new team emerged, and with it – new problems and new ideas for managing the concert hall. It was a time of difficult talks, and the situation got worse every day. In the meantime, I became the director of the Forbidden City Concert Hall in Beijing, as well as the Grand Theatre of Nanjing Culture and Art Center. I also became the vice-president of the Chinese National Symphony Orchestra. Unfortunately, my managing skills were apparently insufficient, and after one and a half years of directing the orchestra, I was arrested and sent to jail for 5 years. I was a very loudly commented on affair in the cultural world.
When I was freed in 2006, there was no place for me in Beijing anymore. So, I came back to Tianjin and there I began anew, organising cultural events in the theatre, opera, and music. China began to change, and each city had its own cultural ambitions, each city wanted its own stages and a theatre, but there were not enough professionals who could programme the repertoires. Theatres soon became a burden, seats were empty. A huge stage was built in Tianjin, too, and this became a great opportunity for me. I did not want to go commercial, I bet on the ambitious kind of art.
And was that a good strategy? Does culture play along with the Chinese system of business and politics?
When it comes to politics, every system has a place for showing significant works. Even that which was impossible to show some 20 or 30 years ago, such as art connected to sexuality, has now become standard. In classical music, theatre and in dance there is nothing to be censored, the government is open even towards problematic issues concerning religion.
And the economy? The problem lies here. The Chinese government devotes significant amounts to culture, but this money is not always invested in the most effective way. For the three years during which I managed the stage, I spent more than I was earning because quality is something that costs. We invited orchestras from Philadelphia, Chicago, Dresden, and we try to capture the newest trends and the latest phenomena in global culture. We do a lot with a small team, luckily our efforts are being noticed. We are judged very well. Audiences come to our theatre from across all of China.
The talk was conducted by Marcin Jacoby, December, 2015.
Written with the collaboration of Anna Legierska
Translated by Paulina Schlosser