Where does Chinese-language theatre go from here?

“If it dies right here and now, do we throw a party or hold a wake?”

Directed by Liu Xiaoyi and co-created with the inaugural graduates of NAFA’s BA (Hons) in Contemporary Chinese Theatres, Temporary Chinese Theatres brings together six emerging artists standing at the threshold between student and practitioner.

As audiences dwindle, new work becomes rare, and linguistic borders blur, has Chinese-language theatre slipped into a small circle sustained mostly by love? Where, then, do “contemporary Chinese theatres” go next? Perhaps the contemporary is, ultimately, only temporary—a provisional site that appears and dissolves: brief, fluid, evanescent. The very structures and currents once hailed as “contemporary” may soon stand as fleeting ruins of the passing present.

Meanwhile, how do these six graduates look back on their years of study, and how do they imagine their futures as artists? Temporary Chinese Theatres is neither a paper nor a manifesto. It is a love letter written in the moment, a not-quite-finished obituary, and a live experiment by a new generation about presence, thresholds, and disorder.

A joint production by Emergency Stairs and the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA), University of the Arts Singapore (UAS). The BACCT—Asia’s first three-year undergraduate programme conducted primarily in Chinese. This production continues Emergency Stairs’ vision of arts education as a laboratory for experimentation and innovation, and as a living space for cultural research and renewal.