The Beijing Actors Workshop Sets the Standards Between Work and ‘Play’

If ever you find yourself floating or traveling through Beijing or longing for a destination to start an artistic phoenix growing from your soul’s ashes and plant some new roots, I would highly recommend a lengthier stop, to allow yourself to jump in with The Beijing Actors Workshop.The Beijing Actors Workshop is a very accessible and wonderfully encouraging environment to help foster artists of all kinds, into the camera’s eye as well as into the spotlight of the stage. It is a very international and eclectic group of participants that is constantly in a state of flux. The leadership core however has remained steady, with Patrick Pearce at the laid-back helm.

How has the Beijing Actors Workshop evolved over time?

We started with six people in an apartment doing loosely structured improvisations. Two years later, we’ve been through four apartments and six bars, and seen a sizable chunk of our group spin-off into a separate entity - the Beijing Improv group - and now the actors workshop typically gets about 20 participants out every Tuesday evening. We now charge for the workshop - 100 kuai a month - which is cheaper than tango lessons - and have three facilitators including myself preparing workshop material and leading them in a much more structured way. Our last public performance drew an audience of 150.

When you moved to Beijing did you have the idea to create the workshop before you got there?

No. A year after arriving, I met a German filmmaker, Jakob Mader, and we founded the workshop together as a way to bring filmmakers and actors together.

Is there any one main desire that you hope the workshop can instill on its participants?

A desire to be on stage or in front of a camera, and really enjoy the warmth of being watched.

What is your goal for the Workshop?

Our goal is to foster high-calibre artistic acting performances while creating a strong workshop culture. And have a blast doing it. I’d also like to see more filmmakers and playwrights workshopping their scripts. Ultimately, it would be great to have a large section of the workshop involved in an independent feature film.

Is this any different from what the workshop accomplishes already?

We have actors of different skill levels, so the quality is sometimes tough to achieve, and people in Beijing are really busy working hard at jobs or being sucked up into “must attend” social activities, or just plain leaving town, so consistent attendance can sometimes be a problem. But we are getting there.

Have you learned unexpected lessons by being the sort of ‘ringleader’?

That summer rooftop performances should factor in the “sudden thunderstorm factor”. That directing actors, organizing events, and dj-ing at them leaves me totally wiped out the next day. That actors have to feel you care deeply about them or they won’t perform their best.

What is the ’summer thunderstorm factor’?

We had been rehearsing at this bar with a rooftop terrace to die for next to a lake. The brilliant plan was to hold our public performance on on the terrace for June 24, a nice-and-warm sounding date. Little did I know this was smack in the middle of Beijing’s storm season. Heckava scramble to get everyone, lights and music into the cramped 2nd floor.

Do you try to approach acting in different ways depending on the cultural background of the actors
attending the workshop?

No. We bring everyone through the same exercises and techniques. With my method acting bent, I try to encourage Chinese actors to explore something a bit more true-to-life, as opposed to the highly expressionistic, almost operatic style that is the mainstay of acting in this country. But we also want people to feel free to adopt their own style based on their personality. So wonderful to watch an evening of very different styles.

Could you describe to me a typical workshop? A performance?

Participants arrive, mill around, drink and flirt a bit, and then facilitator 1 calls people to group together for the first half hour of the workshop, involving a combination of body movement, relaxation and concentration exercises. The focus is usually determined by what the group’s needs are. If we are preparing for a public performance, we might practice voice projection. Right now we are doing a series of classic Method Acting exercises related to sense memory. One involves bringing objects from home to which you have an emotional connection, and using them to help the actor create a private “personal space” with the workshop room in which he or she can feel free to do anything they might do when they are alone - pick their toenails, dance in their underwear, play air guitar - it’s about developing actor freedom.

After the first half hour, facilitator 2 kicks in with the main workshop topic for the evening. Recent topics have included character development, structured improvisation building blocks, script breakdown and subtext analysis, acting in front of a camera. Each topic involves exercises that people do on their own or in groups of two or three, and with a part of the time spent considering executions of the exercises on stage.

For example, a past workshop had participants arrive with a character prepared, presented that character to the group for no more than one minute, and then answer questions from the group to check for character consistency in his bio, back story and outlook on life. The next exercise had each participant choose a mind state for their character, such as anger, curiousness, desire, frustration, anxiety, ecstasy, etc. and prepare a situation with a clear reason for your character to be in that state, then enter the stage in that mind state, not speaking for at least one minute, just “being”, and then saying a line that feels appropriate to say, then exiting. Solo exercises and performances are very difficult to do well, and is a great way of evaluating an actors potential.

The third hour of the workshop is dedicated to “prepared performances”. The actors are to arrive with a script or structured improvisation (everything like in a scripted scene except without dialogue or a predetermined scene ending) ready to go. They take a minute to get into it and then perform it for the rest of the workshop. All participants are encouraged to give feedback, but we facilitators try to guide the feedback and help the actors come away with practical learnings to improve their performance for the next time they do it. These are the scenes, be them solos, duos, monologues, ensemble pieces, that we take to the public performances.

One recent workshop had two Chinese actresses dressed like homeless characters competitively scavenging an empty lot (bathed in bluish light and eerie whale music) for recyclable materials to collect and sell. One finds a 100rmb note, while the other finds a cell phone. On walks a Chinese businessman, obviously out of sorts and amnesiac. The girls both grab him and try to win his affections. Offerings of money or phone only cause the poor man to shirk in fright, until one finally extends a comic book towards him and he sits on the ground in boyish bliss. The girls are both getting cosy around him, it seems like street paradise, and then the man’s Western assistant enters the stage, shouting in German “Boss! We’ve been looking for you everywhere!”. He then grabs the boss on his back and exits the stage leaving the girls upset. Besides the German assistant, the rest of this 10 minute performance was without dialogue, and the Chinese expressionistic acting style lent itself well to the idea - a beautiful, poetic scene a la Chaplin’s Modern Times.

Why have you had to change practice and performance spaces on a relatively often basis?

Oh yeah. Our first venue, a beautiful film association cafe-bar, closed from lack of customers. Same with our luxury hutong bar with its private performance room, which died 4 months after opening. Renovations have bumped us out of several places, but I think the lesbian ladies at our last venue used renovations as an excuse to kick us out - not quite the right attitude fit. And then there are the classic Beijing “chai” or government-sponsored demolition operations, which caused our lakeside bar to lose it’s third floor terrace on account of new zoning regulations. Yugong Yishan is also scheduled to be bulldozed soon to make way for an Olympic parking lot, so we we will be happy to get in one last performance there before it goes under.

When and where is your next performance and who are the people that come to see it?

Our next show, entitled “Caught in the Act”, will be at Yugong Yishan in April. Our audience is made up of lots of friends and people who just want to come out and take part in something a bit different than the usual bar or club night. Definitely open-minded people, the culturally curious and so on. About half our audience is Chinese, but probably 2/3 of these have a good understanding of English. At least 3/4 of our acts are in English, but we hope to boost the Chinese content with more Chinese actors joining our group in the future.

What is in the future for the Beijing Actors Workshop?

Right now, we have public performances every two months, and we’d like it to happen once a month, create a regular rendez-vous for our audience.

You are originally from Canada. Were you involved in the ‘art scene’ here? What has living in Beijing been like for you?

I’ve been a filmmaker for several years, so contributing to the art scene in Montreal, and Paris for six years, in my own way, getting lots of folks to put lots of unpaid hours into idealistic short films and the like. Beijing has been a love-hate relationship. Besides being a cheap place for any kind of artist to live and work, Beijing has a freshness and openness to new people and ideas, as well as a kind of migrant-city energy that makes it a super stimulating crossroads for creative people and projects of all kinds. On the downside, the fast track of frenzied development China is on leaves little room for beauty and art of living, and I miss these in countless details of life back home. If I never eat rice again, I won’t miss it.

Do you approach art differently now that you are in another country or because you are older?

Indie filmmakers work outside the system. This is our freedom and our curse. My projects, mainly a documentary feature right now, are 100% independent still because I am paying for them with my job. However, I am thinking more and more about how I can get a foot into the system and have people pay me to do my projects, and still keep the artistic integrity I feel they deserve.

What other projects are you involved in?

My time is mostly sucked up by a documentary feature on the changing community dynamics of a Beijing area factory zone over 50 years, from it’s military Mao period to it’s current day art-district function. Elseways, I’m in postproduction on two short films I shot in Montreal and Paris, one narrative and one experimental. I also program films for Cherry Lane Movies, a Beijing film club that shows recent and repertory Chinese features and documentaries about China for mostly foreign audiences with directors regularly coming out to do Q&As. Otherwise helping out occasionally on other people’s films, and directing and producing corporate videos to pay some bills.

- euphoreador -

contact me
josh (at) indyish (dot) com