APRIL
The extension of reality through multimedia performance, blending audiovisual theatre, live acting, installation, and projection. Its central aim is to investigate both the potential and the limitations of theatre as a medium and as a tool of communication. By deconstructing narratives, questioning audience habits, and using new media meaningfully, the project probes how theatre can expand or expose its communicative boundaries.
Speech, body, and fragmented dramaturgy are interwoven, sometimes reinforcing, sometimes contradicting each other. Language demonstrates theatre’s communicative power but also its contextual dependency. Multilingual or fragmented texts allow the body to supplement or resist what language alone cannot convey. Bodily energy, rhythm, and voice operate as universal communication modes, while narrative deconstruction destabilizes fixed interpretations, creating immediate and sensory experiences for the audience.
Archival materials are reframed as fictional stories. For example, the scenario “If You Woke Up and April Was Stolen” draws from the collective memory of Shanghai residents confined during the 2021 lockdown. Documents, images, and voice testimonies are transformed into fictionalized experiences, highlighting silences and gaps while reimagining how history can be embodied and performed.
Multimedia layers sound, image, and presence, expanding theatre’s sensory environment while revealing its limitations. Visual projections, installations, and live actions are not mere decoration—they actively engage audiences, highlighting interactions between body, space, and technology. Movements and gestures are fluid and unpredictable, avoiding fixed postures. Trajectories begin at audience peripheries and activate the entire space, making identity, action, and space interwoven and perceptible as layered, immersive phenomena.
CONCEPT/DIRECTER/DRAMATURGY/ SCENOGRAPHY DESIGN
JIaming Wang
PERFORMERS
Jacob Zang, Hongyi He, Yi Tang, Sheron Luo, Lishuang Yang
DRAMTURGR & ACTING CONSULTANT
Oleg Mirochnikov
SET DESIGN AND MAKING
Xiaoran Luo
ASSISTANT TO THE SET DESIGN
Lynia Cao, Mia Huo, Teresa Si, TT Tang
LIGHTING DESIGN
Check Him Lam, Yichen Wang
COSTUME DESIGN
Hongyi He
AI & INTERACTION DIGITAL DESIGN PRODUCTION
Fu Jie, Yinwen Xu
STAGE MANAGER
Lishuang Yang
SOUND TECHNICIAN ENGINEER
Kristina Kapilin
MOVEMENT CONSULTANT
Athina Vahla
LIGHTING HEAD
Luke Cunningham
SOUND DESIGN
Linyue Lin, Check Him Lam
COORDINATION HEAD
Faust Peneyra, Shao Kai Wang
ART HAPPENS
Athina Vahla, Michael Breakey, Yui Yamamoto,
Peter Brooks, Mina Alacalioglu
STUDIO THEATRE, UALCCI