New magic-acrobatic drama Dreammaker: Secret Realm premieres on New Year’s Eve; the ‘Beijing swift’ stuns the house

On December 31, 2022, the new magic-acrobatic drama Dreammaker: Secret Realm, produced and performed by the China National Acrobatic Troupe under the Beijing Performance & Arts Group, gave a successful premiere at the National Centre for Local Opera Performance as one of the productions in the first "Great Theatre in Beijing" showcase season. The creative team brought together the artistic languages of magic, acrobatics, ballroom dance, drama, song and dance, and with a distinctively structured narrative told the story of a present-day "Beijing youth" and his strange encounter with the "Beijing swift" in his "spiritual world."

The China National Acrobatic Troupe assembled a creative team headed by the young director Fan Yupeng to create Dreammaker: Secret Realm as a whole. The team believed that artistic creation in the new era should not leave traditional magic and acrobatic skills at the audio-visual level of "formal effect," but should, on a reasonable premise, attend to and express the ordinary yet deeply meaningful stories of today's social life. So they found the distinctive symbol of the "Beijing swift" and studied its habits carefully. The swift's characteristic of "never landing" greatly moved and inspired the team; taking the "swift" as the prototype for the work's "spiritual force," they used a great many magic effects, supported by stage design full of mystery, to create a stage atmosphere of "magic realism."

In the play, the "game designer" Hu Linglong and the "screenwriter" Yuyan both hold the professional identity of "dreammaker." With their own imagination and skills they build dream stories that are by turns illusory and thought-provoking, and in the end they gain inspiration and the strength to grow within the dreams they themselves have made.

The play's theme of the "secret realm" comes from Secret Realm, the magic act starring Hu Bo and An Yanyan, gold-award magicians of the China National Acrobatic Troupe, which won the gold award for a magic act at the "Golden Chrysanthemum Award national magic competition," the highest honour in the Chinese magic profession. The act not only carries an important part of the magic in Dreammaker: Secret Realm; as the story unfolds, it also gives the "secret realm" a richer meaning.

That evening the premiere of the new magic-acrobatic drama Dreammaker: Secret Realm was presented simultaneously as a live online broadcast and an in-person performance.