Qintai 9/23: Being an Onlooker of Dream of the Red Chamber

Jingfu Shi took a sip from her cup. 「I』m under the gun,」 she sighed.

Shi was also among the ones who shed the most tears after the performance of Dream of the Red Chamber on September 23.

The gun, she mentioned, was not the opera she had assisted in directing, but the live TV broadcast.

「It is uneditable. What if something wrong in the performance or in the transmission? All of these create stress,」 said a manager of Wuhan Qintai Grand Theater on the condition of anonymity, who admitted that live broadcasting was daunting to them, too. Yet the opera was, as he described, 「the biggest project in history」, so the last show 「shall be felt by the Wuhan people, even if they feel it at home in front of the TV screens.」

The theatre house, therefore, was fixed with broadcast cameras and the camera operators from Wuhan TV Station stood by on their headphones even two hours before the performance. Such scene to me was a visualization of the pressure, which finally drove me from the seating area to the wing space of the backstage. While being an onlooker there gave me a chance to view differently...

英文版全文 FULL TEXT：Qintai 9/23: Being an Onlooker of Dream of the Red Chamber

中文版全文：《琴台9.23：一場歌劇〈紅樓夢〉的旁觀》

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