Expats
Staying cheeky with chinglish puns
By Lara Farrar (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-12-10 13:35
Composing plays that appeal to both Chinese and foreign audiences is not an easy feat. Elyse Ribbons should know.
The 29-year-old actress and playwright from Detroit, Michigan, is the founder of Cheeky Monkey, one of only a handful of Beijing-based theater companies producing original works in English and Mandarin that center on contemporary life in China.
"One of my goals is to be a bridge between China and the West," Ribbons said.
"I feel like there are so many misunderstandings."
Her plays infuse humor into the cultural encounters that make up everyday experiences of many Beijing residents.
I Heart Beijing, her first production which was staged in 2007, follows the lives of Chinese and American roommates, tracing the bond that develops between the women as they grow to understand each others' lifestyles.
"The difficult part is trying to write theater that is comic for Chinese people," Ribbons said.
"That is something I am definitely struggling with."
Ribbons also organizes the annual Shifen (10 minute) Theater Festival and has acted in several Chinese television series.
She is the host of a program on Chinese Radio International.
Since Ribbons, who is fluent in Chinese, first arrived in China seven years ago, she has seen the changing face of Beijing's contemporary theater scene and experienced the struggles many stage producers brooked to sustain their art in the country's capital.
A major challenge is money.
While large theater groups receive a mix of government and private funding, small companies frequently find it hard to make their operations profitable, Ribbons said.
"Making theater here financially viable is very difficult," Ribbons said.
"Doing theater in China often involves dealing with no sponsors. It is not as financially rewarding for theater companies to do shows here."
Ribbons has invested her own money into Cheeky Monkey.
She has had sponsorship for productions, but finding funds in recent months has proved more difficult because of the financial crisis.
To keep a steady revenue stream, Ribbons sells scripts to studios in America and also does private performances for corporate events.
"You can make more money teaching English," she said.
Adding to monetary obstacles is a local audience unaccustomed to paying high prices for tickets. Ribbons charges around 100 yuan per performance.
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"A lot of expats earn oodles of money but most of us don't."
A large portion of theatergoers in Beijing are expatriates who attend Broadway productions imported from the United States or traditional forms of Chinese theater, such as Peking Opera, she said.
"The Chinese theater scene is still in its infancy," Ribbons said.
"There is not really a good audience base here."
However a growing share of young Chinese are beginning to attend plays produced by an emerging scene of small-scale contemporary productions.
"Recently little theaters producing shows are becoming really big among younger audiences, which is a growing audience," she said.
"I would relate them mostly to college productions. They don't try to be anything more than that. They are really cool and are very experimental."
Yet producing hip plays that capture the zeitgeist of modern life in China is constrained with the time it takes for government approval of the productions. Often, by the time a play is staged, a particular issue grows stale.
"It is hard to do a show that is contemporary right now and have it be up anytime soon," Ribbons said.
"The whole approval process for theater, film and television needs to be easier. That is one of the reasons why China's cultural mark is stifling."
Ribbons said she is still optimistic about the future of contemporary performances in Beijing.
For now, she plans on staying in the city, producing plays with a cultural mix of the West and the Far East.
"Beijing is my inspiration for writing theater," she said.
"It is a very visceral city. I can't take credit for any of my work. It is all Beijing. I am just the hand that writes it down."
