LookOut Festival: Explore the Gender Universe from Beijing

1. About the Festival

As children, we are carefully instructed on how to look, speak, and act according to the gender we are assigned at birth. From then on, gender is unavoidable; it affects most aspects of our lives, including the schools and jobs available to us, our salaries at work, and who we can choose as a partner. Yet, gender remains an abstract concept to many. Though most know it means more than just an M or F on ID cards, that “more” somehow remains unclear. 

In order to illuminate the more obscure aspects of gender, we have started the LOOKOUT Project and are now launching the LookOUT Festival. 

This festival is organized by Ibsen International, co-organized by China AIDS Walk and in collaboration with the Faculty for Dramaturgy and Applied Theatre Studies of the Central Academy of Drama. It will begin on July 6th in Beijing and consist of 18 total performances over the course of 4 days. This year's theme "Beyond" is an invitation - to look up and imagine a world without restrictions.  

2. Program

Day 1: Friday, July 6th (Opening Day)

16:00 Lecture on Men & Masculinity

19:30 Opening Performance, Dance, Two Room Apartment

21:00 Opening Reception

Day 2: Saturday, July 7th

13:00-20:00

Drama Bruce, Brenda and David

Drama Kua Nan (Transgender)

Documentary Theatre on Freedom Crawlers

Sound Installation Men Space

Documentary Barbie Doll

Day 3: Sunday, July 8

13:00-20:00

Panel Discussion: Women, Representation & Power on and off stage

Video Installation The Little Match Girl

Scenic Reading Playground

Musical Drama YiJi-A Self that Differs

Video/ Sound Installation Grrrrrrrrrrrr 

Experimental Short Video Untitled-3

Closing Performance

Day 4: Sunday July 15  

14:30-16:00 Choir Theatre Selling Peanuts

19:30-21:00 Choir Theatre Selling Peanuts

Scroll down for detailed introductions to performances. Follow us on Wechat and stay tuned for more information on specific shows.

3. Get Your Passes Here

This festival is not-for-profit. All participants need to hold valid tickets. Although the estimated income from selling tickets won't cover all costs of organizing this event, we try our best to set affordable prices with the hope to engage a wider audience in discussing gender related issues. All proceeds will go directly to offset costs of venue rental, sound & lighting tech team, and supporting community-based art groups to perform publicly. 

Single Day Pass will be good for enjoying one day's program. 150 RMB at the door and 99 RMB for an early bird.

Three-Day Pass will be good for all programs from July 6-8 (Note: a few performances require reservations). This pass also includes an invitation to the Opening Reception and After Party. Great chance to interact with artists! 399 RMB

Love Pass is for those who can't make it in person but would like to donate to China AIDS Walk. We'll pass along your kindness by giving tickets to those in need but with limited resources. 100 RMB

• Tickets can't be changed or refunded once booked;

• Venue info will be provided within 3 days prior to the event through the means provided when booking tickets;

• An e-ticket will be automatically sent to you once you've made a successful payment; Please change and check your tickets at the venue 30 min before the show starts;

• AliPay and Wechat Pay are both supported;

• If you encouter any problem when booking tickets, please contact [e-mail]

• Please scan the QR Code below or click on Read More to get your passes.

ReachOUT presents stage works by emerging and established artists which reflect on gender related issues.

LI Yinan

Selling Peanuts (2018) 

Choir Theatre, 90'

SELLING PEANUTS is situated in contemporary China and it tells the fictional story of Yang Yang and the struggle to reveal his gender identity to his mother. She is afraid that the son’s coming out may compromise the social reputation she worked so hard and suffered a lot to achieve. SELLING PEANUTS interweaves this mother-son conflict and its social anxieties with the condition of Philippine labor workers, forced to live under very harsh conditions and treated as outsiders by the majority. The play is born out of the encounter between the director Li Yinan and the Beijing Queer Chorus. Central to this artistic approach is the attempt to avoid simplistic stances, such as taking the LGBTQ community’s standpoint and speaking for them, but rather exploring the power mechanisms that lead to discrimination/mobbing of certain social groups.

*Tickets for this show sold separately. Please use the below QR Code to book your tickets for Selling Peanuts.

Niv Sheinfeld and Oren Laor 

Two Room Apartment (2012) 

Dance, 50'

The work was chosen as Best Performers of the Year by the Israeli Dance Critics' Circle for 2013. “Two Room Apartment” brings Sheinfeld &Laor to the stage for a duet that reflects on their relationship as partners in life and as creators. Both personal and political, the work examines boundaries in various contexts: physical borders such as between territories or between two rooms, but also non-physical borders, such as the one between life and performance, and the boundaries that the individual sets for himself. The work uses a simple dance language and a minimalist aesthetic, and explores the notion of life as a framework in which a precise, almost compulsive repetition of customs and behaviors takes place.

The work suggests a new and contemporary reading to the original performance created by Liat Dror and Nir Ben Gal that premiered in 1987 in Tel-Aviv. It is considered a milestone in the development of independent Israeli choreography, and it also received impressive international acclaim: the work had won several awards at the time, among them the Bagnolet Competition for Choreography. 

Marie-Caroline Hominal

Grrrrrrrrrrrr (2018)

Video/Sound Installation, 8'05"

Grrrrrrrrrrrr  is the first video of an installation of 4 videos around the theme of the tiger figure. In Marie-Caroline Hominal’s work, she have been very much interested in the notion of identity and therefore to work on an animal figure gives me the possibility to go beyond the duality male-female.

LI Ning

Untitled-3 (2013)

Experimental Short Video, 14’

It’s a challenge for a novelist to create multiple characters. In order to make those characters pop, he lives, he observes and he grows.

Sometimes, he couldn’t tell whether he is the novelist himself or the character in the book .

I told him all those personas are part of him, and they are the alter egos buried in his subconscious. When he’s telling a story of a female, he embodies her.

It’s also a search for existentialism where we discuss the righteousness of the existence of identity.

TIAN Gebing

Barbie Doll (2004)

Documentary, 115'

Barbie Doll is the only documentary film directed by independent theatre director TIAN Gebing. This is a film pieced together with recordings of real life.

The shooting began in the summer of 2003 mainly in an ordinary three-bedroom apartment in Beijing where a group of young people live and enjoy each other’s accompany. Most of the subjects in the film were born in the 1980s. They are immigrant to the city to chase their big dreams. The camera entered the very private part of their lives. The leading couple in the film is totally confused with their own sexual tendency. They are having difficult relationship together and finally drift apart.

“Barbie Doll” is the name used by the leading character in his nightclub dancing job. The film emphasize on the “variation” of the society. The “variation” happens between language used, social role, the expression, the sex identity, real people, cartoon, dolls and the reality. The film epitomizes the city which is experiencing “variation” and emphasizes the acting and fictional disposition of real life. For the first time ,time, the concept of “film theatre” is explored in a film.Thefilm. The first editing of the film was viewed in April of 2005.

TRYOUT is a platform to support performances centered on gender by young talents. We give young artists a venue, a small production grant, and support them develop their work from ideation to execution. The 2018 edition of TRYOUT is realized in collaboration with the Faculty for Dramaturgy and Applied Theatre Studies of the Central Academy of Drama.

WU Jiareng

The Little Match Girl (2018)

Video Installation, 120'

This work originates from the famous Little Match Girl by Danish writer H.C. Andersen. Two performers (one boy and one girl) try to sell matches to passers-by with different strategies in different locations in the urban Beijing (subway/night market in the city/CBD area). Like that girl in the cold dark night in the original story, these two performers only have one purpose, which is to sell out all their matches. In the exhibition space, two projectors alternatively play two performers’ selling matches video documentaries and them telling the story of The Little Match Girl. The projected video image will adopt the real-life proportional scale, while two live performers on site will mimic the opposite sex’s posture from the video.

ZHAO Junyao

Bruce, Brenda and David (2018)

Drama, 60’

This works is born out of a non-fiction literature work. In the 1960s, Bruce and Brian were twin brothers, due to an accident in the circumcision procedures, Bruce got his penis burnt severely; their parent heard the suggestion from expert to raise Bruce as a girl, also tried to strengthen his feminine features, but Bruce’s instinction constantly fought against the family, society and the fate, until he got back of his own body and identity as a man again, he renamed himself as David. Adopting magic show as a form, the performance involves magician skills into the creation.

GONG Dingqi

Kua Nan/ Transgender (2018)

Drama, 60’”

This works starts with the community of transgender people, tries to uncover their experiences of family abuse, school violence, all kinds of social discrimination and their obstacles during the medical services through investigating their stories, and observing their work and life. The whole performance uses shadow theatre as a form, but not limited in the use of shadows. The main scenography includes 4 framed screens which can slide and move flexibly, creating unique visual experiences by the light projected on the screens leaving shadows and different combinations of the 4 screens, plus performers’ physical performances telling real stories of the transgender.

WANG Zirun

Men Space (2018)

Sound Installation, 30’

What I have been focusing on is the social image of “Internet Diaosi “ (Chinese: 屌丝) is a Chinese slang term, often used in a comedic manner, that refers to a young male of mediocre appearance. Born in a humble family, he has no car, no house, and no connections). How do they portray themselves will be shown in a “virtual presence” manner in this artistic exhibition and installation? I will not use “difference in aesthetics” and “scorn over different classes” to represent my stance, instead it is shown in edited videos to present their “own individual image under their own personal awareness”. 6 mobile phones are fixed on the walls, 3 put horizontally for the sound broadcasting and the other 3 put vertically for video screening.

CHEN Xingchi

YiJi-A Self that Differs (2018)

Musical Drama, 60’

Every one’s birth announces their farewell to the freedom, commencing another kind of restraint. We cannot choose our biological sex, but we should have the right to choose our gender. Day and night, two very different times and spaces. Day is hypocritical, undetermined reality, flesh in masks; while night looks authentic, soulful and coverless. Day belongs to the man; night goes with the woman. But woman wants to take back the control over the body, the man is hesitating. Innumerable suspicions and self-denials are pouring over this little world; the man and the woman who live inside the same body are feverishly fighting against, finally ferocious fists and teary yelling bring both down. 

WANG Aoxue

Playground (2018)

Scenic Reading, 45’

This works originates from Lin Yihan’s biographical novel Fang Si-Chi's First Love Paradise, exploring the issues of child abuse. Many victims, after the abuse, chose to be silent in order to keep the reputation intact; Therethere are also victims choosing to commit suicide so to kill the suffering for good, just as the gifted Taiwanese writer Lin Yihan. When she was 13 years old, she was enticed into sexual intercourse by her tutor, afterwards she carried this tragedy all through her life, until shortly after her novel was published, sheand she called her life off by hanging herself. sheShe said: “I forgave him for myself to live on, but you can notcannot forgive him for more girls to live on. 

DONG Zheng, FENG Taojing, GAO NiShunZi, HUANG Xinyi, LIU Zhiheng, XU Li, XUE Ming

Crawlers (2018)

Documentary Theatre on Freedom, 60’

Start questioning Lu Xun's text What Happens After Nora Left Home, the first question came up: can people live freely? Observing the people around us, we begin to think about the factor that limit freedom. What will the people do after becoming aware of their own limited freedom? There are various thoughts and answers about free life in the "world" we live in. Under the government's wave like propagation and the noise urging people to crawl up, we want the theater to speak of the multivariate and sincere things.

Creative writing workshop for LGBTQ+ youth. Under the guidance of dramaturgs, LGBTQ+ youth learn the basic principles of dramaturgy and script-writing, to tell their Coming OUT stories in the form of short monologues. The workshop takes place in different cities across China in collaboration with local organizations; each session is followed by a script reading event. During the LookOUT Festival we will present some of the monologues produced during the workshop.

SpeakOUT ٭ Cross-disciplinary lecture series. What does it mean to “perform gender” in daily life? How does the body “talk” on- and off-stage? How are gender norms changing world-wide? And how will this process play out in the future? In this lecture series, experts from the academic world, the performing arts and the cultural sector SpeakOUT on matters of gender.

Organizer: Ibsen International

Co-Organizer: China AIDS Walk

In collabration with Faculty for Dramaturgy and Applied Theatre Studies of the Central Academy of Drama

Supported by: Royal Norwegian Embassy in Beijing, Goethe-Institut China, Frontier Center

Artistic Director: Fabrizio Massini

Co-Curator: Hege Randi Tørrensen, LI Yinan, Kai Tuchmann, Martin Yang

Executive Producer: LAI Huihui

Producer: Jennifer Zhang

Tech Director: WANG Qixu

Graphic Designer: Jiago Li

Tickets: CUI Zixiao