DSL Magazine: Issue 11

69 A graduate of the Central Academy of Drama, Sun Xiaoxing (b. 1986) currently works in his hometown Tianjin as a lecturer for the Tianjin Conservatory’s Department of Theatre and Film. While he is also active as a curator and critic, Sun’s practice centers on his work as a director and playwright. Conversant with innovations in experimental and interdisciplinary theater, Sun’s plays have incorporated structural and aesthetic references to the digital everyday since at least 2015, when he presented his web-based work ——— —Here Is the Dividing Line———— at the 6th Beijing Nanluoguxiang Performing Arts Festival. Pushing the boundaries of dramatic performance into the spaces of virtual worlds and digital platforms, Sun’s work offers a unique approach to the Chinese internet - one that questions the role of the performing arts in digital times rather than predictably reading communication technologies through dramatic metaphors. Cyber Theatre Project (2015-2016) Sun Xiaoxing’s internet-related dramatic works are parts of a larger Cyber Theatre Project working as a versioning framework for these explorations of mediated everyday life - in his own words, “‘Cyber Theatre Project’ is trying to become ‘beta’ in the squeezing process of being swallowed by and overflowing from the interface (screen).” The first work belonging to this project is Speed Show: Drift Internet Cafe (2016), a performative midnight gathering of self-proclaimed zhainan [otakus], internet addicts and “cyber minorities” at an actual internet cafe in Beijing, during which 45 participants showed up and used the venue’s computers while screen recording software documented everything for six hours, replaying their activities after they left in the morning. Love’s Labour’s Love, the second work of the Cyber Theatre Project, shifts the stage from internet cafes to the Taobao marketplace, with two women decorating their bedrooms with goods purchased online. The third work, Here Is the Message You Asked For… Don’t Tell Anyone Else ;-), presents an alternative history of an e-mail virus pretending to be a stripper spreading across the world and destroying internet infrastructure: mixing themes like compatibility and incompatibility, encoding and decoding, databases and voyeurism, Sun’s experiments in “cyber theatre” expand the possibilities of performance with nuance and originality. 孫曉星 Sun Xiaoxing