Ai Weiwei at the Rome Opera’s Scenography Workshops.Yasuko Kageyama/Hot Docs
If the keys to a strong performing arts documentary are backstage access and co-operative artists, then by 2020 director Maxim Derevianko had a fistful. He had worked shooting ads for the Rome Opera House for several years and had been looking to film some bigger project featuring the company.
“Is it by chance that I am here or is it destiny?” Derevianko wondered, because his great-grandfather had been appointed first violinist at the Rome Opera almost 100 years before. “I wanted to do a documentary about the people who make the shows happen.”
So he was looking for an appropriate production when the company announced that Chinese art star and activist Ai Weiwei was directing its new Turandot. The Puccini opera is set in an exotic China where the exiled Tartar prince Calaf woos Turandot, the cruel Chinese princess who has had all her previous suitors executed. Ai’s first opera and a metaphor for authoritarianism – there was a topic for a documentary.
“We knew it wouldn’t be simple,” Derevianko said in a recent interview, noting that right off the top of his documentary, Ai Weiwei’s Turandot, the newly minted opera director says he isn’t interested in opera and doesn’t listen to music. “I think it will be his first and his last opera production.”
But for Ai, this was also a full-circle opportunity. As an impoverished artist in New York in the 1980s, he had found work as an extra at the Metropolitan Opera on the set of Franco Zeffirelli’s Turandot simply because he looked Chinese. More than 30 years later, he ditched the orientalism that characterizes most productions of the opera in favour of messages about the contemporary world.
“The essence of the story isn’t solely about China – it’s about a broader fantasy of the East. That fantasy has, in a way, become our new reality through globalization,” Ai said in an e-mail interview. “Visit any modern Chinese city and the skyline itself is a product of wild imagination – brimming with light, spectacle, and surreal transformation. I wanted to use today’s world map and visual ruins – perhaps evoking ancient Roman or Greek structures – to frame the story.”
The set was a relief map on which the continents were depressions and the oceans were heights, suggesting the highs and lows of class. The costumes attributed animal personalities to the characters: Turandot was in a white, cagelike chrysalis while the questing Calaf carried a giant frog on his back, a reference to a Chinese saying about the lowly toad aspiring to the unreachable. The chorus carried umbrellas in reference to the 2014 Hong Kong protests, and videos in the background played contemporary scenes of migrants and riot police.
In interviews in the film, the conductor, the opera company’s superintendent and the tenor all stress how relevant and contemporary this Turandot will be, while Ai preferred to let his many concepts speak for themselves.
“He’s very cryptic. As an artist he doesn’t want to explain his art,” Derevianko said, adding that his biggest challenge during the shoot, which began in February, 2020, was building a good relationship with the busy director. On film, he relies on interviews with the show’s choreographer, Chiang Ching, an old family friend of Ai’s who got him the job on Zeffirelli’s production all those years ago and could speak to both his art and his history of persecution by the Chinese government.
But by the time the show’s rehearsals were running in March, COVID-19 had swamped Northern Italy, and rumours were swirling about impending closings. Derevianko’s contacts at the opera got him 20 minutes warning so he could shoot the big announcement: The Italian government was enacting new regulations that would close the theatre and stop both the performances and rehearsals.
“Everything collapsed,” Derevianko recalled. “For us, it changes completely the meaning of the film from seeing the creative process of the artists to ‘Why are we doing this? Why do we need art?’”
The closing was emotionally devastating for the performers – Derevianko was able to capture their shock on film – but in retrospect the director realized he had been handed a gift.
“I called my producer and said this could be something that will destroy the project … or something a documentarian could dream of,” he said. “You are making a film about, I don’t know, a soccer player. He breaks a leg. That’s drama. Of course you pray it doesn’t happen. You’re sorry for the soccer player. COVID-19 was the same thing for us.”
The production, postponed for two years, was finally staged in March, 2022, with a new conductor and new soprano. Costumes for the chorus that looked like medical gear now seemed prescient, and Ai expanded the video projections in the show, adding references to the Wuhan COVID-19 lockdown and stressing the political messages.
In the film, Derevianko builds to the crescendo of Calaf’s aria Nessun Dorma, one of the most beloved songs in the operatic repertoire. The refrain “Vincero!” – “I will win!” – marks the character’s triumph over cruelty and injustice, the opera company’s triumph over COVID-19 and lastly Ai’s triumph over Chinese censorship and persecution.
On screen, the irrepressible artist concludes: “Art competes with reality and art will have the last word.”
Ai Weiwei’s Turandot, part of the Hot Docs festival, screens April 25 at 6:30 p.m. at the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema and April 27 at 1:45 p.m. at the TIFF Lightbox (hotdocs.ca)
In 2020, the Chinese artist, filmmaker and activist Ai Weiwei began rehearsals of Turandot at the Rome Opera House. The production, which was halted by the pandemic for two years, is now the subject of a new documentary, Ai Weiwei’s Turandot. The artist responded to questions about his connection to the Italian classic by e-mail.
How did you come to be an extra in a production of Turandot in New York in 1987?
I had been in the United States for six years. I originally went there as a student, but very soon I stopped attending classes. With nothing else to do, I became undocumented. I could only sustain myself through odd jobs.
A friend of mine, Chiang Ching, a choreographer, was commissioned to work on a production of Turandot – an opera set in an imagined Chinese imperial court, which required Chinese-style dance. The director was the celebrated Franco Zeffirelli. He told Chiang Ching that he wanted to see Chinese faces on the stage.
Before this, I had never seen a Western opera. I joined the Turandot production purely to earn money. Zeffirelli was casting performers directly from the stage. He looked at my brother Ai Dan and me, nodded slightly and said we were fine. Just like that, I found myself transported to the bright stage lights of New York.
We had specific roles: We were the executioners in the opening scene, tasked with executing the princes who failed to solve Turandot’s riddles, sharpening large knives and turning an enormous wheel. The scene was electric – the public roared, “Kill him! Kill him!”
The thrill came not only from sharing the stage with the likes of Plácido Domingo and Éva Marton, but also from the modest rewards it brought us. We earned $3 per hour. We would take that money to the corner of 72nd Street and Broadway, where there was a place called Gray’s Papaya. They had a deal: Buy one hot dog, get one free – about a dollar in total. We each had a hot dog and some papaya juice.
You had never directed an opera before the 2020 production in Rome. In the documentary, you say you accepted the job because you like doing things you aren’t good at. Why?
When I encountered opera, it felt like my life had come full circle. I had gone from being an overlooked art student, wandering the streets, to being invited by the Rome Opera to direct Turandot. If it hadn’t been Turandot, I wouldn’t have accepted.
Though I had never directed an opera before, I was confident I could do it well. I’ve worked on large-scale installations and organized socially engaged theatre. There were many challenges, but they all fell within areas I’m familiar with: costume design, stagecraft, props and my interpretation of the story. It is set in China, but also speaks to refugees – a narrative about entering a new world order and about multiple possibilities. These were tangible, real challenges.
Before COVID-19 interrupted the rehearsals, what was the toughest part?
The biggest challenge was how to bridge reality with an opera written over a hundred years ago – how to connect my personal experience with China’s current reality and with global events. I would never direct an opera just for its own sake.
Why does Calaf have a frog on his back?
It comes from a classic Chinese idiom: “A toad wants to eat swan meat.” It describes someone attempting something impossible. There’s humour in that – a vagabond or a refugee daring to marry the most treasured princess in the land.
The actor playing Calaf asked me about the frog. It was hard to explain the idiom. But during his performance, he carried a beautifully crafted toad on his back. The actors were generous and didn’t complain.
I wanted every principal character to have their identity expressed through costumes and styling. In opera, there are no gestures, and facial expressions are hard to see. Everything rests on the voice, so costumes become crucial. That’s why I focused intently on designing distinctive costumes and props.
When you returned to the production, you chose to make the contemporary political parallels more emphatic by expanding the video projections. Why?
From the very beginning, I felt opera didn’t convey enough information. Its ties to the present felt weak, and its connection to my own life wasn’t clear enough.
Over the last decade, we filmed several important documentaries. Human Flow focuses on the global refugee crisis; its themes align with Turandot, though that connection is rarely made. Then came the protests in Hong Kong in Cockroach in which scenes of mass unrest echo Turandot, with agitated crowds on stage.
Coronation was about COVID-19, which halted our production. We had just begun using medical uniforms as costumes – stark white clothing that surprised everyone and seemed very extreme. It brought a shocking realism to the stage. Just then, the opera director came in to tell us to stop due to government regulations. It was like being struck by lightning.
The bold idea I had envisioned was suddenly mirrored by reality. That feeling, so direct and so theatrical, was something I had never experienced before.
Your interpretation of Turandot emphasized that it is a parable about authoritarianism, of which you have had a lot experience. What is your reaction to the current direction of the U.S. government?
Ah, now we’re back in reality.
Western politics can sometimes appear like a family party, with joy and laughter on the surface. But the capitalist system, with its hierarchy, repression and even brutality – particularly in international relations – has never been more obvious than it is today. It’s shocking, incomprehensible and even simplistic and cruel.
This side of America has always existed, but only now are people confronting it so directly – this domineering, emperor-like force beyond all reason. Many people simply aren’t used to it. But we must remember this is the result of a democratic election, a part of American culture. If people want change, they have the power to prevent someone from becoming a king.
You have said you would not direct an opera again. Is that correct?
Yes, I won’t direct another opera. A large-scale production like this is very much like falling in love. The emotional investment is total, but the emptiness that follows is immense. It’s an experience that’s hard to repeat.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
