"Everyone came looking for something, and everyone found something," says playwright Geneviève Flaven, founder of the Shanghai-based 99 Project. A French-born entrepreneur who runs a design consulting company by day, Flaven moonlights as a playwright and producer in addition to playing saxophone in a local band on weekends.

Flaven's most recent play, 99 Women, hit the Shanghai stage in 2015 and was a hit with expatriate and Chinese women alike. With a cast of 99 amateur actresses - each from different countries, ages and backgrounds - the monologue-heavy performance, which drew inspiration from her poem Life and Death of 99 Ordinary Women, sought to reveal both the diversity and the singularity of their answers when asked what it means to be a woman.

Half a year later, Flaven and her troupe are hoping to keep the inspirational flames of 99 Women burning with a new project that builds on the themes and ideas of their original play. According to Flaven, the new project has four phases: conducting interviews and collecting story ideas to create material, a collaborative writing process, editing the stories and then writing a new play.

Following our glowing review last autumn of 99 Women [See: "Play exploring and celebrating the female identity takes the Shanghai stage" October 8, 2015], the Global Times (GT) were eager to catch up with Flaven (GF) to discuss her intentions and expectations of this new project.

GT: As an entrepreneur, how did you become so interested in literature and plays?

GF: I developed a great passion for books and a special relationship with words since my early age. I think it is partly because, as a child I had a fertile imagination and the vice of curiosity. There is a quote that says, "a reader lives thousand lives," and I believed it. I always wanted to explore new territories and expand my consciousness of life and the world around me. Literature and theater is for me a way to be related to my inner self, to better understand the world and to connect with others in a more conscious and sensitive manner.

GT: Why did you choose the number "99" for your project name?

GF: The number 99 came naturally. My previous theatre piece was about 99 different women. My intention in that play was to answer the question: how to be a woman? But there are an infinite number of responses to this question. I purposely used 99, which is not a round figure, to indicate that the question will always remain open.

GT: What motivated you to do this new 99 Project?

GF: Along the journey of staging 99 Women from March to October 2015, we realized the importance for every participant to express themselves onstage as individuals and, at the same time, to share this experience with a large group of people. The combination of personal expression and collaboration was truly the force of the concept. With the new 99 Project we are widening this idea and enriching it with new activities.

GT: Compared with 99 Women, what's new about this project?

GF: In 99 Women, I was the single author of those 99 stories, which all came from my imagination. In our new project, the stories will be based on 200 interviews of real-life men and women in Shanghai, conducted by 40 interviewers and transformed into theater lines by a pool of 40 writers. The main differences are the arrival of male participants and the collaborative storytelling process.

GT: What remains unchanged?

GF: We will keep the principles that made 99 Women such a success: a platform for creative expression, open to everyone who is motivated to experiment with new things, an organization driven by volunteers working in collaboration and with a charity purpose (all the benefits of the future shows will be donated to a social project in China).

GT: What ideas and inspirations do you want to convey to your audience?

GF: The first is personal identity. There's a need for people to reconnect with themselves, especially the younger generation because they are constantly exposing themselves to the digital world, but they need a space to reconnect with themselves and discover their true self. We tend to summarize our lives through our Web profiles and forget that we are complex, diverse creatures. The second is doing things with other people; a sincere and direct collaboration. The Web makes us feel like we can do things with a lot of people around the planet, but when it comes time to stop and take action, to make a difference, you need to enter into direct, face-to-face relationships.

GT: How many interviewees do you need for the new project, and what kind of information do you expect from them?

GF: We need between 160 and 240 interviewees from men and women living in Shanghai. But there is no need for anyone who lived a so-called "extraordinary" life. Ordinary life stories are full of poetry when you listen carefully. We want to capture the diversity of people living in Shanghai: Chinese locals, foreign people of all nationalities, men and women, youngsters and the elderly, artists and business people. Everyone is welcome because every life is lived and thus interesting. We want to collect stories that reveal the uniqueness of a person through different touches: personal anecdotes or small details (a gesture, a color, an attitude). We want to produce a sensitive portrait of someone, not an exhaustive biography.

GT: How can potential interviewees contact you and participate in this awesome project?

GF: People can register on line at http://www.the99project.net/join-us/, or write an e-mail to contact@the99project.net.

Geneviève Flaven, founder of the project

 

The team behind the new 99 Project introduce their plans to an audience Tuesday.

Photos: Courtesy of Liz Hingley and Wang Han/GT

 
Newspaper headline: 99