Drifting Chaoshan Theatre School

Shanzhai MFA: Dongcun Xinfu Experimental Theatre

8 – 22 August

No. 758, Changle Road, Shanghai

Building on the survival wisdom of traditional Chaoshan opera troupes, “Shanzhai” is Dongcun Xinfu Experimental Theatre’s core methodology. They learn from Chaoshan opera, a centuries-old Chinese theatrical tradition whose travelling, semi-nomadic performers carried their costumes, instruments, and stage props in a handful of trunks, moving from village to village and constructing temporary stages wherever they arrived. While shanzhai is often understood through the lens of imitation or copying, Dongcun Xinfu approaches it as a grassroots spirit of adaptation, resourcefulness, and collective self-organisation. Like forms of para-content that circulate around, reinterpret, and extend existing content, the shanzhai troupe treats performance not as a fixed original but as something continually remade through movement, encounter, and local participation. This mobile way of life remains a vital link connecting contemporary descendants with histories of maritime migration and cultural exchange.

Dongcun Xinfu Experimental Theatre produces performances within different locations and communities through continuous travel, open recruitment, temporary stage-building, and local collaboration. Members of the troupe often occupy multiple roles, becoming puppeteer-carpenters, musician-drivers, or writer-cooks. Alongside its artistic practice, the troupe operates through what it calls a “Drifting Economic Model,” establishing local cycles of workshops, handicraft production, and performance that make labour visible and directly compensated. In this model, artistic production and livelihood are not treated as separate spheres but as mutually sustaining forms of collective practice. In Shanghai, the Theatre will recruit a new troupe through the summer Shanzhai MFA programme, with an open call launching in July. Participants will collectively form a temporary troupe, learning, rehearsing, and performing together as part of an evolving experiment in collaborative theatre-making.

About the Artist

Dongcun Xinfu Experimental Theatre is an open, itinerant performance collective originating from Dongcun Village in Jieyang, China. Centred on the lives and experiences of women in county towns, the collective transforms traditional performance forms into platforms for contemporary expression. Drawing inspiration from Chaoshan Iron Rod Puppetry, folk rituals, and the working methods of the Jieyang-based Xinzhengshun Puppet Troupe, Dongcun Xinfu traces a lineage in which Chaoshan puppet theatre itself emerged as a condensed adaptation of live opera.

Following this logic of “producing through imitating,” the collective embraces Shanzhai not simply as copying, but as a vernacular methodology of adaptation, improvisation, and reinvention. One early project transformed the empty bed left by a Chaoshan grandmother in Dongcun into an intimate, portable puppet theatre—a narrative space parallel to everyday reality that carried the stories, memories, and lived experiences of village women.

Miaozi, one of the initiators of “Shanzhai MFA”, has been actively involved in the ceremonies, performances, and experiments of the project. She has also initiated art practice projects such as “New Women in Dongcun”, “Love as a Club”, and “Urban Qilin”. These practices take the so-called “DIY traditional customs” as the method path, based on grassroots cultural production methods, relying on collective participation and local knowledge to reshape existing cultural forms, and continuously reconstruct traditional customs, local opera, and local folk culture.