26th August 2025,
Mehdi Shahedi
Essay, Iran, Theatre and Politics
Decolonizing Iraqi Theatre: Why We Need to Stop Quoting the West
Inherited Voices: A Theatre of Borrowed Authority
Recently, I’ve found myself drawn to a popular podcast on YouTube where an Iraqi...
10th July 2025,
Niloofar Mohtadi
Iran, News, Theatre and Politics
Curtain-Up in Taipei: A City Stages Its Own Tonys
In New York City, the window between May and June signals the arrival of Tony Awards season. Smaller venues often...
Feng Lu’s “L’histoire d’un Accident”, presented in Avignon 2025, offers a layered exploration of theatrical space inspired by Henri Lefebvre’s theory of spatial production. The play unfolds through a play-within-a-play structure, blending backstage conflict, parody, and audience disruption to challenge the boundary between fiction and reality. A planted “spectator” blurs the line between performance and life, turning spatial ambiguity into a central aesthetic strategy. Rather than seeking clarity, the production invites audiences to dwell in uncertainty, where ambiguity becomes an essential part of how space is experienced, performed, and emotionally understood.
Feng Lu’s “L’histoire d’un Accident”, presented in Avignon 2025, offers a layered exploration of theatrical space inspired by Henri Lefebvre’s theory of spatial production. The play unfolds through a play-within-a-play structure, blending backstage conflict, parody, and audience disruption to challenge the boundary between fiction and reality. A planted “spectator” blurs the line between performance and life, turning spatial ambiguity into a central aesthetic strategy. Rather than seeking clarity, the production invites audiences to dwell in uncertainty, where ambiguity becomes an essential part of how space is experienced, performed, and emotionally understood.
In 2025, the UK Chinese Opera Association marks its 10th anniversary, celebrating a decade of bridging tradition and innovation in Chinese opera. Founded by Joanna Zenghui Qiu, a former performer with the Mei Lanfang Opera Troupe, the Association has become a cornerstone of Chinese cultural life in the UK. Inspired by her lead performance at the British Museum’s first Chinese New Year event during the 2015 UK-China Year of Cultural Exchange, Qiu established the Association to preserve and promote Chinese opera on British soil. Through performances at venues such as Buckingham Palace and grassroots programs like “Chinese Opera Fans’ Home” the Association has flourished as both an artistic platform and a diasporic community hub.
In 2024, National Theatre of China in Beijing showcased an experimental avant-garde theatre work “Apple Tree” to talk about the tension in the contemporary marriage between a young Chinese couple. Their tension in the marriage was reflected when the wife is suffering from the unexpected miscarriage.The play is such a transnational one. The director Feng was educated in France when he was young, with established exposure to the French film and theatre. In this play and his previous productions, there are huge amount of Roland’s style of using montage and space changing.
Adapted from Lu Xun’s novel, the play takes the same name, “Zhu Jian” (Forging the Swords), and has become one of the most popular productions at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2024. The work was brought to Edinburgh by a group of student actors from the Central Academy of Drama in China. Director Fengrui Yang is currently pursuing his doctoral training at the Academy. The play is notable for its re-examination of the theme of vengeance, a central idea in Lu Xun’s novel. Lu Xun is one of the most influential authors in modern China featured with his social criticism writing style in the 1920s.
UK-China Performing Arts (UKCPA), one of the UK’s most prominent Chinese performing arts organizations, plays a crucial role in bridging Chinese and British performing arts cultures. Joanna Hangyu Zhou, the founder of UKCPA and a former national-level dancer with a permanent position at China National Opera & Dance Drama Theater, has emerged as a leading international dance artist in the UK. Following her graduation with a master’s degree from the University of Roehampton in 2016, where she specialized in dance studies, Joanna embarked on a journey of exploring innovations in intercultural Chinese and British performing arts through artistic practice and education.
