Fringe festivals are excellent places to discover fascinating international performances. Beijing’s Central Academy of Drama production, Love in the Cracks, at C Arts Venues, C aurora (main house), is a multimedia performance integrating dance, dialogue, livestreaming, and robots to create a vibrant onstage world where one man tries to heal his relationship with his mother.
Lin Chuan is an AI scientist working on a project called ‘Shadow of Nüwa’, named for the goddess of the sky and stars who made people out of yellow clay. In the myth, the four pillars of heaven crumbled, leading to the destruction of a large part of the earth. Nüwa pitied human suffering and used five elemental stones to repair the sky, though it was an imperfect job. The phrase ‘Nüwa Mends the Heavens’ is a popular poetic Chinese phrase relating to courage and wisdom. In Love in the Cracks, Lin Chuan must gather his courage and his wisdom to complete the test run of ‘Shadow of Nüwa’, which requires him to delve deep into his most painful memories.
Much of the story takes place in a virtual liminal space, created onstage by three dancers in LED-laced costumes, a small robot, and a camera which projects Lin Chuan against a silvery backdrop. The backdrop itself is beautifully used as scenery, for instance, during the raging storm that takes Lin Lan’s life on the high plateau, but also serves as the screen where we see ‘real’ people or objects projected. Occasionally, the projections are a computer loading screen, but mostly, it is Lin Chuan’s face, creating the sense that he is looking through a screen into the virtual world where his AI program re-creates his parents’ marriage, his lost older brother, and his mother’s last thoughts. Though mother and son parted painfully, the program allows him to apologise to her in the tender last scenes of the show.
This is a multimedia or transmedia performance, so there are not only LEDs in costumes and a livestream onstage, but a robot around one metre tall, who appears at the beginning of the show, then serves as the physical representation of ‘Shadow of Nüwa’ at the end (it also does a little breakdance). While many of the physical and digital parts of the show integrate together very well, the robot seems more like a gimmick; there are moments where it integrates effectively, but it could be used much more throughout as the avatar of an AI-created virtual world.
However, Central Academy of Drama’s work is haunting and beautiful, using a simple story with complex physical and digital elements in a way we can expect to see much more often in the years to come.
Listings and ticket information can be found here
