Music, Dance and Performance in Jia Zhang-Ke’s The World and Our World

“All the world’s a stage
, And all the men and women merely players” – William Shakespeare, As You Like It.

The players of Jia Zhang-Ke’s fictional/factual depiction of Beijing, China’s theme park The World are as frightening as they are intriguing. The gap between the genuine and superficial natures of humanity are constantly portrayed throughout the film. 
What is fascinating for me whilst watching the development of the film is that the moments in which the performers are back stage or not performing to an audience are the moments myself as a wider audience member (viewing through a screen, rather than in public) questions the nature of these characters within the film.
The chemistry of the characters on stage whilst performing to their audience at the world park is one which seems so “natural”, yet as an audience we are still aware that it is a performance of music and dance. 
In the 1952 musical masterpiece “Singin‘ in the Rain”
the stage and media portrayal of Don Lockwood and Lena Lamont a glamorous and romantic one (the cinematic/stage couple) is hugely different from their real life relationship, but as this clip shows Lena does not seem to realize the difference, believing what the fan magazines say that herself and Don are engaged.

The World fits with Durkheim’s (1893) idea of the city as site of exchange and encounter as it seems that The World in itself is a microcosm of “the city” or in this case “the world”, and a very condensed one at that. Yet the cultural exchange in itself feels artificial and premeditated rather than the concept of something natural coming together which Durkheim was suggesting was happening at the turn of the 20th century.
In Zhang-Ke’s 21st century “site of exchange and encounter”, the exchange of culture, (the elaborate stage performances; costumes, music, dancing) seems part of the grand creative illusion of theme park, and the idea of encounter is realized between the audience and the performers, rather than the performers encountering each other. 
Yet even though the music and dance is a show and a performance, therefore not what we as an audience associate as our realities, the idea that it can also transcend this primary outlook on it to a higher level is intriguing. So perhaps even though characters within The World blur the lines between what is genuine and what is superficial, what is actuality and what is false maybe that misses the point of the idea of performance for the individual, rather than the wider picture.

The World

In Dancer in the Dark (2000) the lead character Selma (played by Bjork a trans-national performer in her own right) speaks about musicals her favourite past time to her Russian friend Cvalda; “I always leave musicals at the song before the last one, as then they will never end and will go on forever”. Selma’s life within the film is a tragedy where she is eventually executed wrongly, but the way in which she copes with life is through music, dance and performance. Even on the verge of death, her imagination turns hell into happiness through song and dance as shown in the video below.

Shakespeare said “All the world’s a stage”, but the stage in which The World’s performers meet their audience, where Don Lockwood speaks out to his adoring fans whilst trying to mute Lena and where Selma in Dancer in the Dark loses herself in music and dance within minutes of her death, these are the stages which allow artists and performers to lose themselves living on the border of reality and fiction.

Jamie Mattick

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