A Cultural Carnival
(City Weekend)
Updated: 2005-04-20 11:27

The artists and innovators who have created the Dashanzi Art District in eastern Beijing are celebrating with the 2005 Dashanzi Art Festival, beginning April 30. This carnival of culture isn't just about a celebration of the arts-it's also to celebrate the art district's newly extended lifespan.

Promoter Shannti Dinnoo says the festival will feature Chinese and African musicians, French digital video directors, a German-Swedish contemporary dance troupe, and even a circus acrobat-dancer from France. The festival will also showcase new-millennium artists "who will stroll around the art district telling stories in different languages," says Shannti.  "The twin themes of the festival are language and legend." This year's festival has everything from a UK theater group that uses signs and body gestures to communicate, to a multimedia show called "Techno Orientalism," that includes Japanese animation artists and the Chinese-American laptop composers FM3. On May 4th, French and Belgian dancers will take Dashanzi's center stage to reenact myths of creation from all over the world in a performance titled "Skene."  Els Silvrants, a festival organizer, says the designers who colonized the Dashanzi district are delighted they can now count the French Embassy, the Netherlands' government and tech-entertainment titan Sony as festival sponsors.

But behind the scenes, the artists who have transformed this one-time military-industrial complex into a Big Bang of cultural creativity have been worried about the changes taking place in Dashanzi. Some background: Dashanzi was set up by Chinese and East German defense technicians as a model of communist bloc comradeship in the 1950's.   Over the last few years, Chinese and Western art dealers and digital designers have reengineered the district into a cool globalized space for art studios, clubs, exhibition spaces, eateries and bookshops.  But Dashanzi's owners now want to redevelop the zone as the result of an ironic twist of fate:  Since new-age artists have flocked to the low-rent complex, the property value of the area has skyrocketed.  The developers would like to capitalize on the boom by expelling the artist community.  

Happily, there's good news. Huang Rui, an artist who helped bring about Dashanzi's rebirth and publicized its threatened destruction in a fantastic book titled "Beijing 798", says the district has won a three-year reprieve. "The city government has ordered that the Dashanzi Art District be protected at least until the [Beijing] 2008 Summer Olympics," Huang says. "Dashanzi is a symbol of artistic freedom and of China's new civil society," With an international spotlight shining on the district this May, Dashanzi could survive long after 2008.

Dashanzi Art Festival
April 30-May 22
4 Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing
Tel:   6438-2797
Email: diaf@vip.sina.com or check: www.diaf.org.