Wi-fi Afterlife

Our friends Annette & Renzo and their son Max arrived this morning for a 10 day stay. Nice having people to stay: different conversations, gets us out & about, keeps us in touch with life back in Blighty... Took it easy first day - just an afternoon stroll through Chaoyang Park - which was eerily empty for a Saturday. Took us a while to realise that it's because most people are working or at school this weekend in advance of next week's Qing Ming (Tomb Sweeping) festival.  

Tomb Sweeping Day, sees families remember their ancestors by laying out food at their graves and burning paper replicas of daily necessities such as clothes, money, cars,houses... and increasingly iPhones & iPads, complete with accessories like headphones. Good to stay in touch with the dearly departed, but alas it won't work for my mum - she never could master the mobile phone.

Today is a strange connection to my dad too. I am 51 years and 16 days old, precisely the age he died. So, if I make it to tomorrow, I'll have outlived him. A sobering, wistful thought...

But back to the land of the living: it's also my sister's birthday.Happy birthday Mary.

Explosive?

More Dickens, this time from the British theatre company TNT (The New Theatre, not Trinitrotoluene). Founded in 1980, they are largely unknown in Britain but very popular overseas. A bit like the British Council then. In fact, according to China Central TV, they are  “the most popular theatre company in the world.” There is a grain of truth in that. Despite their tiny casts of unknowns and even tinier pack-them-in-a-suitcase sets, they are probably the hardest working, most travelled theatre company around. I first came across them when we living in Japan where, since 1992, they have given more foreign language performances in more venues than any other non-Japanese company; at the 2004 Fajr Festival in Tehran (the Muslim World's largest Arts Festival) they won first prize for their Hamlet; and in China their tours regular take in 20 cities, some of which I've never heard of. So tonight was Dickens's David Copperfield, done part straight, part musical. It wasn't the greatest production I've ever seen but it was good, honest theatre to an appreciative audience, performed with invention on a shoestring budget. Hats off to them.  

Seitsemän laulua tundralta

Fit for nothing tonight, so watched another Siberian tundra film, as you do. I mean, how obscure is this: a 1999 B&W film by a female Finnish director about the Nenet people who live between the Kora and Kamyr peninsulas in Arctic Russia... and yet, there was a DVD of it in our local supermarket, in French. Aside from herding reindeer, the Nenets are big on singing and storytelling (they didn't have a writing system until the 1930s) and the film focuses on this part of their culture in an awkward acting-cum-documentary style. They lead a tough life and I must say didn't look as chirpy as the Happy People in Herzog's Taiga film (see last Thursday's post). It must have been a fairly easy choice to shoot in B&W - there's no colour at all in the bleak-but-beautiful lansdscape. Apparently the film was Finland's submission to the 2000 Oscars, in the Best Foreign Film category, but didn't even get nominated.

Tianjin

Finally visited Tianjin. It's only 100kms away - half an hour on the bullet train - but it's taken until now to find the right opportunity. The occasion was a press conference for the soon-to-be-opened Tianjin Grand Theatre. We're contributing Re-rite, the Philharmonia Orchestra's immersive, interactive, educational music installation (difficult to describe...) which will be open to the public for a month, but more on that when it happens. Meanwhile, Tianjin first impressions... another enormous city (14m), little pockets of old Western architecture (the Brits & French set up shop here in 1860) amidst the rampant spread of skyscrapers and highways. Need to come back for a proper look around.

Quote of the week

"Can I go on the computer and listen to The Nolans?" (Naomi Elliott, age 7)

The Depths to which we have Sunk

So, James 'Titanic' Cameron made it to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest point in any of the world's oceans: 11,000m - deeper than Mt Everest is high. I've always been fascinated by this place, partly simply its utter remoteness, but also for the weird & wonderful creatures that exist down there. Over 4,000 people have climbed Mt Everest but there have only been two manned descents to the Mariana Trench. Would I want to go down myself? Yup.

Unfinished Symphony

Spring has sprung. Domesticated day of gym, pancakes, cycling & dance classes with the girls (not simultaneously - a new craze!) and then took Naomi to a concert. My colleague Sam belongs to the Beijing International Chamber Orchestra, an amateur but quality group of western and Chinese musicians, founded by a formidable Russian woman with peroxide hair, 6-inch heels and a baton that could do some damage. They perform four pairs of concerts a year, usually at the German School's theatre, which was packed.

The concert began with Mozart's Concerto for Harp and Flute (an unusual but pleasing combination), with Sam playing the latter, superby I should add. Apparently it's the only piece of music Mozart ever wrote with a harp in it. An hour and a half of classical music is a test for any child and Naomi fidgeted and squirmed but silently so. She was relieved that Schubert never finshed his "Symphony No.8", so only had two movements.