I’ve awarded a grant to Fan Shen. She writes:
Creation has always been my passion, my way to interact with the world around me and I have been writing ever since I could remember things. I grew up in China in an era when drastic changes were constantly happening with a widening gap between the rich and the poor. My working-class family background and my gender have made me one of the marginalized with less access to social resources and less visibility in society. But writing has helped me to find my voice, the voice of the marginalized.
At the age of 10, I was sexually assaulted. This trauma brought me years of depression and having been exposed to the very dark side of human reality and emotions at a very young age, I once again found my strength and resistance in creation. I taught myself to paint as a way to let out my anger and grief. Because of this, painting has since then become a way of expression and healing for me.
Creation through writing and painting has helped me to understand myself, and the world around me. At first, I wrote about my own experience and reflections, but gradually I started to write about human conditions, the shared human experiences of pain and love, convictions, darkness, and transcendence. I want to grasp the truth of our time, to reflect the reality of society and human conditions in it. I care specifically about how political powers invade private lives, and how private individuals make their daily resistance to the power.
Luckily, my creation has not just offered me self-healing, but also attracted external recognition of my creativity. I was admitted by the Royal College of Arts in the UK because of my painting. At the age of 18, I was awarded the national first prize in the New Concept Writing Competition, one of the most prominent writing competitions in China. As a result of this award, I was offered to choose to study at any top university in China. Quite fatefully, instead of choosing the highest-ranked comprehensive university, I made my choice for Shanghai Theatre Academy. I was expecting something that would channel my passion and light my life.
And I was right about my expectation. Theatre turns out to be the art format that is closest to my heart. I see theatre as the deep dialogue of souls, the most intensive and emotional format of story-telling and expression. Theatre reveals the most essential and painful issues of its time, and it attacks and embraces the audience in the most drastic way. In theatrical creations and performances, I can transcend myself from merely a victim, a survivor, one of the oppressed, to someone who has grasped her situation and the world around her, and more importantly, has the agency to change fate. There is somehow a redeeming nature in theatre that my mind resonates with.
During my undergraduate education, I read and watched theatre extensively. My undergraduate thesis was on Edward Albee’s theatre work where I discussed the reflection and critiques of theatre works of his time when people were pursuing social status and wealth at the cost of alienation and neglect of humanity. I am particularly in love with modernized theatre works, because they are much more decentralized, telling stories of the insignificant and depicting the absurdity of reality. Rooting deeply in the concerns for social problems, modernized theatres carry so much more power to make an impact on the audience. The boundary between the audience and the performers can be blurred, and theatre, therefore, becomes a resistant action toward social and economic injustice.
With this view about theatre, I found Lars Norén’s work particularly interesting because he made such a detailed observation of the everyday life of the impoverished. His take on living theatre and his focus on family and personal relationships created such powerful stories and emotions that I can truly relate to. I have also found a lot of inspiration from reading the works of Ingmar Bergman and Susan Sontag. Bergman has inspired me with his inexhaustible curiosity and compassion for humanity, whereas reading Sontag has helped me liberate myself from my past traumatic experiences. I feel that strength as a creator, and that I share that passion to create works that can truly connect with the audiences.
During and after my time at Shanghai Theatre Academy, I have actively taken many internships/projects in theatres and film companies where I have become experienced in taking many different roles in theatre creation. In collaborative projects, I work closely with the director to help decide on many factors for the play. I also work as a team player with other production staff and actors. Mostly, I would hold leading roles in collaborative creation projects, both as the playwright and as the dramaturgy. For example, in the original play *White-tailed Crow*, I wrote the script and also sorted out the themes, rhythms, cores, and expressions of the play from a critical and creative perspective. This award-winning play is currently being performed in Shanghai as I am writing this cover letter. I have had several solo productions and exhibitions as well.
On one hand, I seem to be a budding young creator in the local theatre scene, ready to devote myself to theatre creation, on the other hand, I do struggle a lot with the limitations in the world I live in. In my mind, theatre is about sincerity, actions, queries, and resistance. My background and experience have facilitated me to see from different perspectives on very complex situations, and I love to keep using theatre practice to interfere with social problems, being a voice of resistance. But the resistance has been so restricted by censorship in China. I have been longing for freedom in the creative environment for a long time. This is why I am preparing for the application of theatre master programme abroad. I really want to try to live and study in a performance art environment in the real world’s social, political and economic conditions.
I am very excited to receive the grant and have the chance to chat with professional theatre maker. I have made a play which will show on stage at Shanghai soon. It is a drama about human insecurity and existence. It is about an old lady, who leaves her previous life to build a new one in the middle of a desert, after she has made her move. The story gathers a group of people who are an intellectual, a peasant. a dumb girl who and some merchants who are angles. They are lost. At the end of the story, when death takes everyone, there are no concrete answers to whether these people are saved, but the audience can get that in listening the old woman has unwittingly saved these disturbed people.
It was because I had felt a great wave of unease and loss these years. There is no hope, no security, no way back for creators, yet theatre has always been rooted in my soul again, and I feel that what I actually want to do is to appeal the hope. I’m calling for a power to listen, to see, to understand others. I think that in the midst of the modern spiritual crisis, listening itself contains a great power. What I am calling for is also communication, listening, the substance of love.
Now, several of the plays I am working on are about:
-Pneumoconiosis workers in China;
-The voguing dance of underground transgender people and its power to create families;
-One of my previous novels, which is being censored, is about a woman who hangs herself for a pearl and benevolence.
-A work about secretly ill children, a group of children who committed suicide in the internet corner of the millennial, and another group of people who witnessed the suicide of children.
-A work about micro-society and political experimentation, the whole society is the inner externalization of a person in power, about an extremely mediocre person who is held up on the altar by the times, and his heart will provoke feedback in every corner of society.
With this said, I truly thanks to Mr.Yeoh, and I hope to complete those works and get in touch with theatre makers. Please feel free to contact me [BY: I will pass on any messages]