Downstream Garage: The Shanghai theater the authorities love to hate
Even if we ignore Downstream Garage (and we wouldn’t be the first), Shanghai’s theater scene last year was bursting with sound and fury. The four government-sanctioned theaters staged 50 lightweight romantic comedies, 11 recycled TV plots and six Agatha Christie plays. If we include acrobatic circus, historical skits on a catwalk and Disney kitsch, all that’s missing from the Shanghai stage is intensity, originality and relevance.
Downstream Garage owner Wang Jingguo prefers to call his 'theater' “a free laboratory for artists, a ground for performances that would otherwise be stillborn or deformed by commercial gravity.”
But then, that's if we ignore Downstream Garage.
Back(stage) story
Downstream Garage owner Wang Jingguo says his theater isn’t a theater, he prefers to call it “a free laboratory for artists, a ground for performances that would otherwise be stillborn or deformed by commercial gravity.”
The space is striking, amorphous and expansive. The stage is open on three sides with the upstage bordering a greater loft behind. The feeling is intimate (most productions are quite small) but the space seems to expand limitlessly into the surrounding shadows.
The venue’s owner, Wang, is stocky, garrulous, combative and passionate. His first love was painting but he was drafted into arts administration. He became a Party cadre and a powerful figure at the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center and then Shanghai MOMA.
In Chinese theater, a political pendulum swings between experiment and reaction. Wang rode this pendulum too far, helping to organize radical performances in the late 1980s (including the infamous "Last Supper" in 1987). Soon afterwards he was denounced and dismissed. In 1990, Wang Jingguo left China with only US$300 and his paintings.
Trial and error
Ten years later, Wang was in the midst of a successful career as a designer in New York when his friend Zhang Xian, the renowned underground playwright, convinced him to come back to Shanghai and start a theater.
In 2000, Hard Han Café was born. It was the first private theater in the PRC. The shows were popular. Many performances were extraordinary, including daring productions of Zhang Xian’s own plays. However Shanghai culture authorities were uncomfortable with an independent theater and demanded an unattainable performance license. In 2002, Wang was forced to close.
In 2005, Wang and Zhang tried again.
Practice makes perfect
Downstream Garage opened its doors in the depths of a workers’ tenement near Longhua Temple. This time there was no attempt to attain a performance license. Wang told the authorities: “I’m like Lei Feng [a model soldier from the Cultural Revolution]. We act selflessly and take care of young artists. I’m doing your job. Why should we need a license?”
Downstream Garage is the only place in Shanghai that provides free space for performers to try anything. Artists and theater collectives come from all provinces. The shows are sometimes messy or militantly absurd. Sometimes they are breathtakingly radiant. And the art is maturing. We see the emergence of a homegrown variant of physical theater, a process that enables the artists to encrypt the literal in an evocative cascade of movements.
Performers cannot charge for tickets, and the theater, unsurprisingly, is always on the verge of closure. Wang refuses sponsorship of any kind: “I’ve yet to see an investment with no strings attached.”
Shanghai theater on the fringe
In 2006, Downstream hosted the international Fringe Festival in China for the first time, creating a rare opportunity for the Shanghai public to see experimental work from all over China and abroad. This led to an explosion of physical theater collectives and dance performances centered at Downstream.
The government’s 60th anniversary paranoia pulled the plug on all foreign acts during the 2009 Fringe Festival, but week after week, every seat was filled for artists and ensembles like Li Ning, Brand Nu Dance, Grass Stage Group and Fan Troupe.
In spite of meager resources (and a certain municipal hostility) Wang and Zhang both insist that Downstream will always be there for emerging artists. “When an artist applies for a show, I have only one criteria -- they must be earnest,” says Wang Jingguo. “If later, they go further, they become somebody, then my work is over.”
getting there
Downstream Garage
3/F, No.100, Lane 200 Longcao Lu, near Longwu Lu, Metro Line 1 Caobao Lu Station Exit 4 & Metro Line 3 Longcao Lu Station Exit 1
龙漕路200弄100号3楼 近漕宝路, 地铁1号线漕宝路站4号口和地铁3号线龙漕路站1号口
tel +86 21 6408 9520
