In June 2020, I began travelling to Shenzhen to work with Living Theatre, a group founded by my good friend Cao Leilei. We met in Beijing in 2013, when we were planning a play adapted from Molière: Absolutely Precious. (A few years later, she brought that production to Shenzhen.)
2020 was, of course, a special year in our collective memory. Just as summer was approaching, Leilei called and asked whether I would come to Shenzhen. There was a group of interesting people there, curious about acting. They lived in Shenzhen and worked in different fields; none had trained professionally as an actor. Like most people in Shenzhen, they were very, very busy… with work, with family. But they wanted to steal a little time each month to explore theatre with me.
I accepted her invitation, and we began our first workshop together. In the introduction to that first workshop, I wrote: “Open the door, step outside, reconnect: the day has finally come!” The workshop’s name and its theme were the same: “Reconnecting.”
In the French theatre training I received, an actor is both a performer and a creator. If actors cannot establish a connection with themselves, with their inner lives and with the world outside, then the relationships onstage cannot truly exist, nor can any life genuinely worth witnessing emerge. In this workshop, I wanted to invite these people to experience what it means to connect with themselves and the world around them—deeply, comfortably, freely. Through reconnecting, they might discover, or rediscover, the immense vitality each of us already possesses. What we can explore and experience in theatre holds true in life as well. That was my hope for Living Theatre.
And so we began, in the bright June sunshine of Shenzhen. From June 2020 to the time of writing, we moved from regular workshops lasting two or three days each month, to readings and adaptations of classic plays (Molière, Georges Feydeau, Chekhov, Bergman), and then to collective creation through improvisation. We made works of our own: Sunny, Sunny II (I—Shenzhen), and Sunny III (Scenes from a Marriage).
Living Theatre is these people: Leilei, Zhao Yong, Nandao, Xue Yang, Zhou He, Yijie, Luoluo; and these people too: Feifei, Xiaotian, Li Fan, Yajiao, Xiaoxue, Yuanyuan, Xiaoyue, Xiaoying… The connections we rebuilt were never broken again.
Now back to the early autumn of 2023. Living Theatre and I had been travelling together for three years. Over that time, Living Theatre had become part of the lives of this group of people. I was fortunate to witness how theatre lit up their lives like the sun.
The classic texts played their part: the precious works left to us by great writers nourished everyone. But the credit also belongs (most certainly belongs) to the participants themselves. In those precious hours stolen from everyday life, they seemed to become children again—simple and unguarded. I began to imagine where I might take them next…
Then I thought of a book that had accompanied me since childhood: The Little Prince.
At the beginning of the book, Saint-Exupéry wrote a dedication. Those few lines gave me a clue: he says he wants to dedicate the book to an adult who understands everything, who needs comforting, and who is his best friend. He says he wants to dedicate it to the child that adult once was.
So I sent everyone in Living Theatre a copy of The Little Prince. I wanted to dedicate both the book and the work we were about to create together to the children they had once been.
And so, in October 2023, we began our search for the Little Prince. This work would stay with us until the spring of 2024. Continuing our practice of improvisation and writing in the moment, we would gradually reconstruct the Little Prince’s experiences on each planet, all the way to Earth, through the pilot’s account. But we wanted to reconstruct more than the events themselves. We wanted to find different, and the most fitting, ways of conveying the immediate sensations each encounter brought: through words, music, movement, drawing…
Our search for the Little Prince began by gathering whatever childhood photographs we could still find: speaking with the children we once were, and looking to them for traces of the Little Prince. Only then, perhaps, might we have the chance to speak the book’s final words: “He has come back.”
Sifan Shao
11 January 2024