For two consecutive years Jiading district will stage the Shanghai Interactive Festival of Theatre as part of the Shanghai International Arts Festival, reported Wen Wei Po, a Hong Kong-based newspaper on Sept 14.
Under the theme "We Built this City", this year's edition will run from Oct 21 to 29, featuring a variety of creatively designed events to engage the audience.
As a warm up to the event, some 1,000 spectators will take part in a 3-kilometer marathon on Oct 2. Divided into 20 teams and led by leaders dressed as famous historical figures and even cartoon characters, the runners will have to complete a series of tasks throughout the race to claim victory.
The festival will open with BLAM!, a foreign classical comedy adapted to suit local audience, and close with Semianyki, a clown comedy staged by Semianyki theatrical group.
Within the course of the event, the audience will be given a rare opportunity to have a peek behind the scene to observe how a play is created. Ada/Ava, a time-honored lightening group with a reputation for good stage technique, will showcase their latest technology, involving projection operation, shadow show, motion picture technique, on-the-spot demonstration and score for the theatre.
The festival also extends to the communities. The interactive theatre - We Built this City - will invite families to use the 3,000 cases to build a city, equipped with roads, skyscrapers, gardens, and other physical representations of a city according to their imagination.
In addition, three plays will be held in the communities. In the black show - 'The Solar System', Anna, the protagonist, and Gu Li, an alien, will take the audience to the planets and the moon. 'Kaiba!Hua'er!' , a dumb show, will highlight magic while 'Dahai Shenchu', adapted from Ernest Hemingway's 'The Old Man and the Sea', will be targeted at local schools.
A workshop dubbed Chuangke Marathon will stage two experimental shows. The first, 'Xianzong Yuansu', will utilize augmented reality technology where audience can participate in a visual imaging scene by directing their mobiles to the stage. And the second, a large-scale play - 'Mei' is an interaction between the audience and actors, making a tour to several true-to-life scenes.
Wang Hai, director of Live Dream, the company in charge said interactive theatre, is an interaction among technology, art and the humanities and it is their hope to make theatre more appealing to the young through the technology.
Director of the Publicity Department of Party Committee of Jiading district, Gu Huiwen, noted that the festival aims to promote originality and innovation in theatre, create a platform where artists both at home and abroad can communicate and invent a new mode combining traditional art with modern technology.