Hotel, what does it mean? Is it a overnight stay or a ritual, an opportunity for murder or an escape from reality? Four directors and directors from across the Taiwan Strait and three places developed a big drama using four narratives around the proposition of "hotel". The play was originally called "Pornographic Hotel" and is now called "Four Loves Hotel". It closed in Taipei on September 3 and has now moved to Beijing. It will serve as the opening play of the 2016 Cross-Strait Small Theater Art Festival and will open again tonight and tomorrow night at the Chaoyang 9 Theater.

You may have seen several directors co-directing a certain movie, and this is definitely the first time that four drama directors created four independent stories for a topic, and then connected them into one play. In 2015, the Taiwan Creative Society invited four choreographers from Taipei, Hong Kong, and Shanghai to each create a 40-minute creation around the "hotel". Each person can use up to three actors. They start from their own ideas, and the scripts are independent of each other. Each has its own music design and costume design. The stage design and lighting are designed and handled by Taiwanese designers hired by the Creative Society.

Producer Li Huina said that the idea of collective creation came from her favorite movie "Emotions, Angers, Sorrows and Joys". This old film from the 1970s was co-produced by four directors, Li Hanxiang, Li Xing, Hu Jinquan and Bai Jingrui. Describing the four emotions of joy, anger, sadness and joy respectively, she decided to pioneer this in a theater environment and found four "experienced but not senior, maturing" directors to co-create a play, and the result was the nearly three-hour "Four Loves Hotel".

In the past two years, the four directors have held director co-creation meetings in Taipei twice and conducted three video conference calls. They exchange script changes at any time via email on weekdays and upload videos to the cloud to maintain communication on progress. Half a month before the premiere, the four people, designers and actors flew to Taiwan from Shanghai and Hong Kong, racing against time to carry out intensive final touches and polishing.

Different people and things live in the "Four Loves Hotel". Taiwanese director Yang Jingxiang tried to tell a honeymoon story, behind which is a close but lonely love relationship. The two experienced each other during the constant migration, and also experienced various changes and problems in the world; Hong Kong director Chen Henghui used three worldly affairs to tell a story about mother and freedom, including the beauty of butterflies and the blood of filicide; Shanghai director Wang Zichuan's story includes deserts, tents and ""from alien stars and the future"""Chicken-shaped Man"; Taipei director Li Mingchen used "Room Service" as the theme. While telling his own story, it flows among the other three stories. It is both a use and a service. "It does not belong to any room, but can enter and exit every room when needed."

Although the proposition and writing and directing work are completed by the four creators individually, how these four stories finally resonate and start a dialogue is the biggest challenge facing "Four Loves Hotel". Wang Zichuan said: "The four people and the four fragments are not pieced together, but blended into a play, and they have a conscious relationship. "Specifically, as Yang Jingxiang introduced: when they were developing their own stories, they consciously left some space for each other. Finally, before they were staged in Taipei, they grasped the vague connections and echoes between the four stories, rearranged them, and interspersed them with each other.

If we have to find a connecting point among these four stories, Yang Jingxiang believes that it should be "some kind of emotional anxiety": "Zichuan uses the fictional Altes people to talk about the earth and survival issues, and uses black humor to present a huge anxiety about the earth, land and destruction; Henghui uses the cruelty of his mother to tell a subject's anxiety about freedom and emotional identity anxiety - if we compare children to land, does the mother have to manage this land? How long will it take? How much freedom does it cost? My part is about a couple traveling around the world, as if they are in a sweet little world, which is extremely sweet, but the big world outside the small world is very unsafe, with terrorism and many other problems; Mingchen uses the part about the B&B workers to a certain extent to show the current anxiety in Taiwan. "Four people unfolded the narrative in four different forms in four different times and spaces. Yang Jingxiang said with a smile: "You will suddenly find that the younger generation of Chinese are very anxious. Faced with such a big environment, we have been asking, what should we do? ”

Another practical challenge they face is that the play does not have a "chief director" and the four choreographers have equal status. So how does the stage design serve the different needs of each director, and "who should we listen to?" Wang Zichuan wanted to set up a tent as a hotel in the wilderness, but the hotel of the other three directors was a realistic hotel image, which made it very difficult for the stage designer. In order to keep the stage design unified and reduce unnecessary projects, Yang Jingxiang asked the stage designer to make a bold decision: "Just think of yourself as the fifth director. "Four directors share a stage, mutual compromise and cooperation are also indispensable. For example, Chen Henghui arranged for all the actors to dance a group dance in the script, and Yang Jingxiang changed his group dance in the second half to a duet. For example, they borrowed actors from each other, integrated with each other, and put many excitement and surprises into the transition part.

Not to mention styles and ideas, even the languages used in daily life are completely different among the four directors. In this drama, the mainland director Wang Zichuan's part of the actors speaks Mandarin, while the Hong Kong director Chen Henghui's part includes Mandarin, English and a lot of Cantonese. Will this create a sense of fragmentation or a challenge in watching the drama? Chen Henghui’s answer is “no”. In his favorite Taiwanese movie "City of Sadness", there are Taiwanese, Mandarin, Japanese, and "there is even a character who speaks Cantonese," which left a deep impression on him. In Yang Jingxiang's view, diversity is the reality. The diversity of Chinese cities can no longer be ignored or avoided. In every city, there are people who speak different dialects. The four of them deliberately used four forms and at least four languages ​​to break the convention of maintaining a single or unified play in a noisy atmosphere. Producer Li Huina said, "Language, voice, and accent have a sense of rhythm, which constitutes one of the characteristics of the theme of 'Two Sides, Three Places'". She hopes that the audience can watch the show with an "open mind" and stay in this rich and complex Four-Emotions Hotel.

Creation Society Theater Company "Four Loves Hotel"

Time: September 9, 2016 (Friday) 19:30

September 10, 2016 (Saturday) 14:30

Venue: Beijing Chaoyang 9 Theater Action Theater

Ticket price: VIP area 380, area A 200, area B 150, area C 100 (yuan)

Duration: 180 minutes

"2016 Cross-Strait Small Theater Art Festival"

First stop: Beijing

Time: September 9th - October 1st

The lineup of the 2016 Cross-Strait Small Theater Arts Festival is still strong. During the nearly three-month drama journey, a total of nine wonderful plays were staged. Audiences at the Beijing station will see "Four Loves Hotel", a eccentric and romantic work jointly produced by the Taiwanese creative agency and three places across the Taiwan Strait, "UNDO", a work by Rhapsody Theater that faces "indiscriminate killings", and the latest magical and realistic black comedy "Beautiful Little Paris" by Fire Stealing Theater.", Shakespeare's Sisters Theater Company has been invited again to deconstruct Zodiac, a murderer, and has specially planned activities such as "Cross-Strait Drama Producers' Workshop", dialogues between scholars and experts from cross-Strait small theaters, "Homage to the Text - Original Script Reading Project".