How unexpected even in our post-Weinstein world to encounter a revelatory exploration of gender inequity emanating from an avant-garde Beijing based theatre-maker! Yet this, and considerably more is what Wang Chong’s Théâtre du Rêve Expérimental, offers New York audiences with Thunderstorm 2.0. As the title suggests, Wang Chong has reinvented a classic of Chinese modern drama into a multi-textured cinematic experience intended to resonate with a digitally saturated contemporary culture.

The core of the story however needs no updating. “This is a theme that transcends time and space… Rich guys can still do whatever they want and women are powerless, regardless of their social status.” commented the director.

By stepping away from the conventions of Chinese theatre and harnessing the expressive potential of new technologies, Thunderstorm 2.0 challenges the dominance of hierarchies that extend beyond gender concerns. This is subversive political theatre expressed in breathtaking visual semaphore.

Both engrossing and increasingly implicating viewers as the story-telling perspective shifts, we are challenged to ponder how little has changed in the dynamics of power, whether in the realm of interpersonal relationships or among nation states attempting to exert ever more dystopian control over the lives of their citizens.

Thunderstorm2.0 asks what we will do about what we now know.

Elizabeth Bradley is an Arts Professor in the Department of Drama at the Tisch School of the Arts. She teaches courses about global arts leadership and facilitates international cultural exchange. Last spring she was appointed as a theatre critic to the new original theatre journalism digital site Broadway.News.

Suggested Readings

Mary Mazzilli, Gao Xingjian’s Post-Exile Plays: Transnationalism and Postdramatic Theatre (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).

Xiaomei Chen, The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

Rossella Ferrari, Pop Goes the Avant-Garde: Experimental Theater in Contemporary China (Enactments) (Calcutta: Seagull, 2013).

Jörg Huber and Zhao Chuan, eds., The Body at Stake: Experiments in Chinese Contemporary Art and Theatre (Berlin: Transcript-Verlag, 2013).