the following two updates on godot and the nanfang daily’s cultural avant garde popularity contest give a sense of where fat bird fits into the commodification of shenzhen’s emergent cultural landscape. it also gives a sense of contradictions within this landscape and the various ways actors are positioning themselves to shape shenzhen’s cultural scene as well as to control the resources that have been both budgeted to and generated by that scene.
godot castupdate number one: godot, we performed on december 28 and 29. after both shows, members of the audience made comments about the play that point to diverse and sometimes contradictory assumptions about what shenzhen theatre should be. significantly, comments were grounded in the subjunctive (what theatre “should be”) rather than the declarative (what theatre “is”) because most of fat bird’s audience assume that shenzhen lacks culture and (therefore) fat bird is helping to establish the conditions for local arts. accordingly, most actively encourage fat bird, whether or not they personally like what we do.
from a professional director, trained in beijing and semi-retired to shenzhen, “not bad (还不错). godot leaves room for directorial interpretation so it was interesting to see what judi did with it.”
from an elementary school teacher, who hasn’t seen much theatre, “this was fun, but i didn’t understand what you were trying to do. maybe next time.”
from a foreign teacher, who doesn’t understand chinese, “now i think i’ll go home and read the script.”
how does this fit into the commodification of shenzhen’s cultural landscape? although fat bird began preparing godot outside official auspices, in september, cong rong (从容), secretary of the shenzhen theatre arts federation (深圳市戏剧家协会) approached us about participating in shenzhen’s creative creative december theatre (创意１２月剧场), program here. now, cong rong wasn’t given enough money to stage an entire festival, but in order to get funding next year she still had to produce a festival. this meant she had to come up with pieces that had been independently produced, but would nevertheless be part of creative december. she also decided to use most of the funding to produce two of her own plays, the language of flowers《有一种花的语言》and blue symphony 《蓝色交响曲》, hiring professional directors and actors at standard rates. this decision meant that she had to find collaborators who would work for a nominal stipend. her choices for collaborators included shenzhen university department of acting, the various cultural bureaus of the district governements, and fat bird. i’m not sure if she approached any of the district cultural bureaus, but she did approach shenzhen university and fat bird. shenzhen university had two plays that could go up in december, into the woods, and basement dwellers《坑人》, while fat bird was preparing godot. both the university directors and fat bird remain more interested in performance venues than revenue, consequently, the creative december theatre consisted of the aforementioned plays.
this is the second year that shenzhen has sponsored creative december (创意１２月), a program designed to encourage cultural development in the city, combatting or countering what has come to be ironically known as “desert theory (沙漠理论),” which refers to ideas about why shenzhen continues to lack world reknowned cultural institutions and artists. complete program and contacts, here. tellingly, one of the activities designed to encourage general citizen participation in creative december was an online competion to select the top ten shenzhen cultural activity brands (文化活动品牌), including: the much hyped annual china (shenzhen) international cultural industry fair (中国（深圳）国际文化产业博览交易会), the relatively obscure popularizing sociology week (社会科学普及周), and the provincially supported international tourism festival (深圳国际旅游文化节). all of the twenty candidates for best cultural activity brand have come into existence in the past few years. more interestingly, perhaps, is that efforts to create art and spaces for the arts in shenzhen are explicitly tied to developing cultural markets, even as shenzhen’s top cultural products (animation, computer games, advertizing) are dismissed as not being cultural precisely because these industries have been so commericially successful (see this entry for my take on fat bird’s participation in the 2006 cultural industry fair). at any rate, for the curious, the commplete cultural activities brand ballot is here although results have not yet been posted.
update number two: contest results, as you know, the nanfang daily nominated fat bird as one of shenzhen’s top ten cultural avant garde labels or tags (文化先锋标签), which i mistranslated as “postcard” in a previous post. thanks to a technological intervention, we placed second. it turns out that the voting was not limited by computer or site visits, so anyone who went to the site could vote for fat bird as often as they wanted. accordingly, i went the first night and happily voted one hundred times. however, by day two, we were already about 10,000 votes behind the leader and i gave up, realizing that i wouldn’t spend more time voting than i already had, the hard realities of clicking tempering what might have been my shameless pursuit of first place. on day three, one of our members downloaded an automatic clicker program, that hit the vote button once a second for as long as the program ran. given the final tallies, i suspect we weren’t the only candidate resorting to technology to buttress our populary. as qin wei said, “i’m not even computer literate and i found this program. of course the other candidates have already downloaded their own, if they haven’t already.” for those in need, an automatic clicker can be downloaded here.
this popularity contest was part of a two-day conference on the avant garde city (先锋城市). this conference ran both parallel to and within creative december, with a slightly different focus on cultural production, focusing on the socio-cultural meaning of the avant garde. this conference gained its political import from the fact that in 2005, the shenzhen bureau of urban planning published its 2030 urban development strategy (深圳２０３０城市发展策略), which called for shenzhen to become a pioneering global city with sustainable development (可持续发展的全球先锋城市). what’s interesting here, and the nanfang daily’s point of intervention is the word “xianfeng”, which is usually translated as “avant garde” and not “pioneering”, although both definitions appear in the dictionary. in previous development strategies, shenzhen’s pioneering function was described with the word “kaituo 开拓,” which originally meant (long, long ago) to remove rocks from a field but came to mean the emperor’s opening of new administrative territory. so in the eighties, for example, the first generation of shenzhen immigrants were called territory openers (开拓者: pioneers) and not the avant garde (先锋: pioneers). moreover, this is the first time shenzhen has explicitly called for efforts to strengthen its leadership position (vis a vis the rest of the country), which had previously been assumed, so that in the 1996-2010 shenzhen urban plan, for example, the city aimed to become an international modern city (国际现代化城市), which was, at the time, a pioneering position.
at the conference, expert guests produced two lists: one of china’s avant garde cities (shenzhen placed fifth overall) and one of shenzhen’s avant garde labels. alas, fat bird didn’t place in the top ten even though we performed “this body, this movements” at the conference and yang qian was one of the invited experts. neverthelesss, what was interesting here was that although the experts focused on creativity, they nevertheless designated the meaning of avant garde in political terms: “expermentation, investigation, tolerance, and freedom (实验、探索、包容、自由).” consequently, their list of cultural avant garde labels included, like the cultural brands of creative december, institutions rather than individuals.
the nanfang daily conference on the avant garde city was designed to provide a space for thinking critically about the position of creativity in shenzhen’s cultural development. in contrast, creative december was organized to promote city activities. consequently, this december fat bird participated in two very different versions of what shenzhen’s cultural landscape should look like. significantly, both these versions represent views held by shenzheners who are positioned differently with respect to the chinese state apparatus. the shenzhen theatre arts federation is connected to but not directly under the shenzhen bureau of culture, which makes them financially dependent on the city, unless they can come up with commercially viable theatre. the nanfang daily is connected to but not directly under the guangdong ministry of propaganda. this makes them answerable to guangdong, rather than any particular city. as such, the nanfang daily has actually created local markets for itself by being critical not only of shenzhen, but all of guangdong’s cities, except guangzhou, the provincial capital. when i asked several newspaper reporters why guangdong tolerated criticism of its second city,the response was usually a chuckle and then social analysis.
“guangdong doesn’t like shenzhen,” one explained, “because the city is too independent. it answers primarily to beijing rather than guangzhou.”
“it [the nanfang daily] is using media events to create a shenzhen market,” another reasoned. “the special economic zone daily and other papers still have to listen to the shenzhen government. the only way to compete is to create an alternative shenzhen voice.”
a more optimistic journalist suggested that there were a few officials who wanted to increase freedom of the press in china. “after all, if shenzhen succeeds in becoming an experimental, investigative, tolerant, and free avant garde city, it will be good for the country.”
synopsis: fat bird, like other shenzhen art groups and inviduals, survives by navigating these diverse political currents, which are shaping the city’s cultural landscape. sometimes, straddling the fence works. both the organizers of creative december and the avant garde city paid fat bird to participate in their events, making 2006 the first year we almost broke even! happy new year.
Shenzhen Noted 