China National Acrobatic Troupe’s new magic-acrobatic drama Dreammaker: Secret Realm premieres on New Year’s Eve
The Beijing News (reporter Liu Zhen) — On December 31, 2022, "Dreammaker: Secret Realm," a new magic-acrobatic drama produced and performed by the China National Acrobatic Troupe under the Beijing Performance & Arts Group, had a successful premiere at the National Center for Local Opera Performance as one of the works in the first "Great Theatre in Beijing" showcase season. In telling the story the creative team drew together artistic languages including magic, acrobatics, ballroom dance, drama and song and dance, using a structurally distinctive narrative to recount the strange encounter between today's "Beijing youth" and the "Beijing swift" in the "spiritual world."
The play's poster.
The "game designer" Hu Linglong and the "screenwriter" Swift both hold the professional identity of "dreammaker," using their imagination and skills to build dream stories that are either illusory and bewildering or thought-provoking, and in the end drawing enlightenment and the strength of a butterfly-like transformation from the dreams they have made themselves. Working from the characters' "professional identities," the play distils the concept of the "dreammaker," which both sums up the characters and the plot and carries a deeper echo of real-life "arts workers" and, more broadly, of all those who "hold a dream" and "hold to it."
A still from "Dreammaker: Secret Realm." Photo courtesy of the China National Acrobatic Troupe
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 holds that art in the new era should not leave traditional magic and acrobatic skills at the audiovisual level of "formalism"; within the bounds of what is reasonable and plausible, it should give due attention and expression to the ordinary yet meaningful life stories of Chinese society today. They therefore found the distinctive symbol of the "Beijing swift" and studied its habits closely. The swift's characteristic of "never landing" struck and inspired the team profoundly, and they took the "swift" as the prototype for the "spiritual strength" of the work, using a great many magic effects, supported by mysterious stage design, to create a stage atmosphere of "magical realism."
The choice of the "secret realm" as the story's theme has a real-world source: "Secret Realm," the magic act starring the China National Acrobatic Troupe's gold-award magicians Hu Bo and An Yanyan, which won the Magic Act Gold Award at the "Golden Chrysanthemum Award National Magic Competition," the highest honour in China's magic profession. That act not only carries an important part of the magic in "Dreammaker: Secret Realm"; as the plot unfolds, the production also gives the "secret realm" a richer meaning. The "secret realm" is the "utopia" that the game designer builds in the online world to escape his panic at the real world, a place where he can be comfortable and where his love of birds can be satisfied. At the same time the "secret realm" stands for the place where each of us, wearied and perplexed by real life amid the tangle of society, can moor and rest the heart for a while. The work gives the "secret realm" no black-and-white definition; it acknowledges objectively the brief and illusory beauty of this realm and seeks to extend full understanding to ordinary people whose hearts are tired. Yet the story finally comes to rest on leading the heart, after that short rest, back onto the track of facing reality with courage.
In the online "secret realm" that Hu Linglong has built, the "swift" can "land" and feel what it is to "run," but in time it comes to miss the days of "flying without stopping"; what the swift's endless flight in the secret realm seeks is something "real." The story's "villain," Black Hawk, is the "clear-headed character" who questions the secret realm and plots to leave it from the moment she appears in it. Through their choices about the idea and the practice of "love" and "freedom," the protagonists achieve "harmony between people and birds" on the plane of "reality" and "oneness of person and swift" on the plane of the "spirit," finally attaining the transformative growth of "harmony with oneself" — an attempt to convey the insight that "a complete life is a life truly lived."
The premiere of the new magic-acrobatic drama "Dreammaker: Secret Realm" was held simultaneously as a live online broadcast and an in-person performance.