With TEEN in Beijing

In connection with Assitej's Artistic Gathering in Beijing this August, TEEN was invited to the festival. Together, five of the TEEN young people from Norway, Italy and Denmark traveled and over the course of five fantastic days we got to see a lot of the festival, the young people participated in an event about language in the performing arts together with an American youth theater and we were guided around by the festival's volunteers, many of whom were studying to become translators, to the biggest sights.

Beijing is huge, but luckily we stayed very centrally, just a few meters from the China National Children's Theatre and the Forbidden City.

Imagining the Future

Assitej Artistic Gathering and China Children's Theater Festival with the theme "Imagining the Future " opened with a series of speeches and screening of the performance of The Mermaid in East China Sea, by China National Theater for Children. The following day, the conversation between our European TEENs, Childrens Theatre of Charlotte from USA and the Chinese children was held. It was led impromptu by Yang Cheng, the Chinese director who had worked with the youth company from the US, and our own Nora Heyerdahl. It was all about language - spoken language, physical language and communication - and it became clear that culture is also a linguistic barrier that takes time to overcome. It's gratifying that China is interested in projects like TEEN, which is about democratization and making room for new voices, criticism and not least young people themselves. We hope that this interest continues to grow, and with it the understanding of what it means to actually give young people a voice. We would have been delighted to collaborate with more international young voices, including Chinese ones.

China National Theatre for Children

China's national theater for children is located a short distance from the Forbidden City, right in the center of Beijing. This was the Assitej Aritistic Gathering's headquarters and meeting point during the festival. The theater has existed since 1956 and is the only state-owned theater for children in China. It has a permanent ensemble, two auditoriums, and stages both classics and newly produced works.

Large halls and small audiences

In addition to the opening performance, we saw The Snowman Who Wanted to Meet the Sun with Tandarica Animation Theatre from Romania, China Idiom Storieswith Children's Theatre of Charlotte (USA), 24 Grandmas with Xi'an Children's Art Theatre Co. from China, Yao Yao, Brush Theatre from South Korea and Sunny Ray and the Magnificent Moon, Arena Theatre Company from Australia. What several of the performances had in common was that they took place on very large stages compared to Norwegian conditions, and not all the performances were dimensioned for this. The National Theatre for Children was well accustomed to children's audiences, and was good at accommodating them. At other venues, we found that steps were eventually taken to ensure that the little ones got the most out of the experience, even if the form was unfamiliar or the auditorium was large. All the performances we saw were for young children, it would have been interesting to experience Chinese performing arts for young people!

Chinese tourist season

The week in Beijing was at the end of the Chinese summer vacation, and there were many Chinese tourists there. For example, the Forbidden City admits 80,000 people daily and has around 14 million visitors a year. We really appreciated that Assitej China set up several sightseeing tours for us, and it was nice and interesting to spend the day with Chinese students who were volunteering at the festival. Absolute highlights were the visit to the Great Wall of China together with the American Youth Theater and the day in the Forbidden City.