Cathy Mo865068803@qq.com

IT seemed that Veronica Piraccini, a pro-fessor of painting at the Academy of Fine Arts of Rome, is not only a talented artist but also a creative magician.

She opened a mere piece of white cloth, which looked plain to the eye, in a dark lecture hall in Dafen Gallery on Saturday. However the audience was stunned the moment she turned an infrared lamp on beneath it: A painting with colorful lines, dots and geometric shapes materialized.

Piraccini said she invented this “invis-ible” painting technique in the 1980s and by employing her unique style, she has depicted a variety of fi gures and expressions of their inner feelings. She also extracted a purple hue, a stable and ever-lasting material intended for paint-ing, from the meat of a snail.

Piraccini was among the fi ve Italian and Russian artists invited by Shenzhen artists to visit Dafen, a village in Longgang Dis-trict known for producing oil paintings for home improvement traded both domes-tically and abroad. On Sunday, she was

invited to give a demonstration painting a portrait in front of a group of painters in Dafen. To start with, she showed the audience how she arrange her oil pig-ments, and how she holds the palette and brushes of different length and size in her left hand. In less than an hour and a half, she completed a half-length portrait of a man in expressionistic style.

Other Italian artists also invited to give demonstrations inclulded Gerardo Lo Russo, former president of the Academy of Fine Art of Rome, and professor and art critic Ferdinando Fedele.

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Thursday November 30, 2017

Italian artists give demos in Dafen

Veronica Piraccini in her demonstration class at the Dafen Village on Sunday. Photo by Cathy Mo

Debra Lidebra_lidan@163.com

A LANDMARK eight-hour play by Stan Lai, a preeminent playwright-director of the Chinese-language theater, is return-ing to a local stage in March.

The show, “A Dream Like a Dream,” thought of as a masterpiece, has 30 actors playing nearly 100 roles in 400 costumes against rotating sets on a four-sided stage. The best seats in a sunken “lotus pond” are in the middle of the stage for the audience to sit on swivel-ing chairs for a 360-degree immersive experience.

It might fi rst strike anyone as impos-sible to ask audiences to sit through eight hours (the show is split into two sections performed in the afternoon and evening respectively, with a 20-minute intermis-sion in each section), as we have but a limited attention span in this Internet era. However, most of the tickets have already been sold after sales started last Thursday afternoon.

“All of us are travelers in the rivers of life,” said Wang Keran, producer of the play. “And very often we feel troubled and frustrated. A good play touches and consoles people’s soul and brings them courage and inspiration to carry on.”

First performed in Taiwan in 2000, the play started a tour on the Chinese main-

Epic Stan Lai drama returns to town

land in 2013 with a leg in Shenzhen.“In a story, someone had a dream; in

that dream, someone told a story.” These are the opening lines of this watershed production and a key to the layers of story that unfold in this complex yet highly accessible work.

Audiences will be taken through a slow yet captivating journey of several life stories that draws them in, building anticipation to learn more about each character. A dying patient is telling his story to a young doctor, and like Russian

nested dolls, other stories unveil, with more stories within each story. Patterns of love and losse emerge through time and place, from contemporary Taiwan through the exotic Shanghai of the 1920s and the Bohemian Montmartre in Paris of the same period, and a chateau in Nor-mandy, France, with a mysterious lake.

In his dreams, the patient sees a lonely waitress in Paris and an old woman living secretly in Shanghai, who in her younger days met a French diplomat who mar-ried her and took her to France where

she lived in the chateau and learned to paint. The characters’ lives were intricately linked together since.

Besides the costumes and sets designed by Oscar-winning Timmy Yip, the show’s appeal also lies in the stellar performances by experienced actors.

The sophisticated storylines effort-lessly move from present to past throughout the play, yet remain easy to follow for the audience thanks to the director’s decision to have sev-eral actors play the same character on stage.

Xu Qing (“Mr. Six”) is mesmeriz-ing as Koo Hsiang-lan (one of the key characters) who is sure of her powers of seduction, growing in confi dence as a liberated woman, and facing per-sonal tragedy stoically, while Hu Ge (“Nirvana in Fire”) convincingly plays the young architect abandoned by his wife and plagued by a mysterious ill-ness who is searching for meaning in life. Both characters make choices that the playwright cleverly leads the audi-ence to romanticizing even further, hoping for connections between the two characters.

Golden Horse best actress Ma Sichun (“Soul Mate”) also makes her theatrical debut in this production, taking up a role previously performed by songstress Li Yuchun. “Her role is not the most challenging, but Ma already proves her prowess on the stage and is approved by the direc-tor,” Wang said.

The cast also includes veterans King Shih-chieh, Tan Zhuo, Hsu Yen-ling and Lai Fanyun, the director’s daugh-ter.

Lai once said that this is the one play where he let his “experimental spirit” run free and unrestricted from commercial considerations.

With more than 100 working on the production, which employs 12 trucks for transporting the costumes and props, Wang said he never wor-ried about losing money producing the show.

“I myself was moved to tears when fi rst reading the script; my actors and actresses were moved, and I’m sure the audiences will embrace it,” he said.

Wang’s company, Beijing Yan-ghuashidai Cultural Development Co., Ltd., also produced Stan Lai’s many other plays including “Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land” and “The Village.”

Time: 2 p.m., 7:30 p.m., March 16-18, 2018Venue: Shenzhen Poly Theater, intersection of Wenxin Road 5 and Houhaibin Road, Nanshan District (南山区后海滨路与文心五路交界处深圳保利剧院)Metro: Line 2 or 11, Houhai Station (后海站), Exit ETickets: 80-1,680 yuan

“A Dream Like a Dream” is staged against rotating sets on a four-sided stage in Beijing.

A scene from “A Dream Like a Dream.” File photos