China National Acrobatic Troupe’s new magic-acrobatic drama Dreammaker: Secret Realm premieres on New Year’s Eve, exploring ‘form and spirit’ in technique and story
China News Service, Beijing, 1 January (reporter Ying Ni) — Dreammaker: Secret Realm, a new magic-acrobatic drama produced and performed by the China National Acrobatic Troupe, premiered in Beijing on the evening of 31 December 2022 as a production of the first "Great Shows in Beijing" showcase season.
A New Work in Tribute to Arts Workers
The "game designer" Hu Linglong and the "scriptwriter" Swift in the drama 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 enlightenment and the strength to grow and transform within the dreams they have made. Drawing on the "professional identity" of its characters, the drama distils the concept of the "dreammaker", which both sums up its characters and plot and carries a deeper echo of real-life "arts workers" and, more broadly, of all those who "hold a dream in their hearts" and "keep faith with something".
The China National Acrobatic Troupe assembled a lead creative team headed by the young director Fan Yupeng to create Dreammaker: Secret Realm as a whole. The team held that artistic creation in the new era should not leave the traditional skills of magic and acrobatics resting only on the audiovisual level of "formal effect"; rather, on a reasonable and well-founded basis, it should give due attention and expression to the ordinary yet deeply meaningful life stories of Chinese society today. They therefore hit upon the distinctive symbol of the "Beijing swift" and made a careful study of its habits. The Beijing swift's characteristic of "never landing" struck and inspired the creative team greatly, and the "swift" became the prototype of the work's "spiritual force".
In telling the story, the creators drew together the artistic vocabularies of magic, acrobatics, ballroom dance, drama, song and dance, using a structurally distinctive form of narrative to tell of the strange encounter between a "Beijing young person" of today and the "Beijing swift" in the "world of the spirit". Through extensive use of magic effects, supported by stage design full of mystery, they created a stage atmosphere of "magical realism".
A Gold-Award Cast Bringing Together Top-Level Skills
The story's theme of the "secret realm" has its real-world source in Secret Realm, the magic act starring the China National Acrobatic Troupe's gold-award magicians Hu Bo and An Yanyan, which won the Gold Award for a magic act at the "Golden Chrysanthemum Award National Magic Competition", the highest honour in China's magic profession. The act not only carries an important part of the magic presentation in Dreammaker: Secret Realm; as the plot unfolds, the work also gives the "secret realm" a richer range of meanings.
The "secret realm" is the "utopia" that the game designer in the drama builds in the online world to escape her panic at the real world — a place where she can be comfortable and satisfy her love of birds. But the "secret realm" also stands for the place where each of us, weary or perplexed in the face of real life amid the tangle of social existence, can let the mind moor and rest for a while. The work does not give the "secret realm" a black-and-white definition; it acknowledges objectively the brief and illusory beauty of this "secret realm" and tries to extend full understanding to ordinary people whose spirits are tired. In the end, however, the story comes back to leading the mind, after a short rest, onto the track of facing reality with courage.
The "Beijing Swift" Makes a Stunning Appearance at the New Year's Eve Show
In the online "secret realm" built by Hu Linglong, the "swift" can land and feel what it is to run; but in time the "swift" still misses the days of endless flight, and what it flies on seeking in the secret realm is something "real". The villain of the story, the "Black Hawk", is the "clear-eyed character" who from his first appearance doubts the secret realm and plots to leave it. Through their choices about the idea and the manner of love and freedom, the protagonists achieve "harmony between human and bird" on the plane of reality and "oneness of human and swift" on the plane of the spirit, and in the end they gain a growth and transformation that brings them into harmony with themselves.
The Beijing swift is also known as the "footless bird": its legs are weak, so it must stay in flight for long periods. People have made this special habit of the Beijing swift a byword for the spirit of "never landing", and an echo of the industrious and courageous character of the Chinese people. We once moved swiftly through a life that pressed ever forward; and although a brief "pause" has brought us "temporarily to ground", we have Light in Our Hearts, and we look forward to "flying on" once we restart, in pursuit of life's hope. That was the special New Year's blessing the company gave the audience at the final curtain: "Cross over tonight, restart on New Year's Day; let us fly together, fly on, towards new hope."
The premiere of the new magic-acrobatic drama Dreammaker: Secret Realm was held simultaneously as an "online livestream plus offline performance", with livestreams on several platforms reaching more than 1.5 million online viewings. (End)