Fostering Dialogue with Artful Endeavor

A scene from the Chinese edition of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, a stage adaptation of Jules Verne's masterpiece. [Photo by Huang Tingkuang/For China Daily]

Portraying the stories of the underwater world with puppetry, a stage adaptation of French author Jules Verne's sci-fi masterpiece Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea was held in Shenzhen on April 11-12, marking the opening of the 19th Festival Croisements.

Launched in 2006, the annual cultural festival organized by the French embassy in China and the French Institute of Beijing encourages and facilitates exchanges between artists and institutions from China and France.

From April to July, more than 300 events, including stage performances, art exhibitions and a French film panorama, will take place in 31 cities across China.

French Ambassador to China Bertrand Lortholary addresses the opening ceremony of the 19th edition of Festival Croisements in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, in April.[Photo/Courtesy of The French Institute of Beijing]

French Ambassador to China Bertrand Lortholary says that the 19th Festival Croisements will offer an ambitious program and explore multiple artistic disciplines to foster cultural dialogue between the two countries.

He adds that this year's festival resonates with the major environmental challenges facing the contemporary world. As France and Costa Rica co-host the third United Nations Ocean Conference in Nice, France, in June, the festival highlights the stage adaptation of the novel, inviting Chinese audiences to a poetic reflection on ocean preservation.

Verne's novel follows the adventures of Captain Nemo aboard the submarine Nautilus along with marine biologist Pierre Aronnax, who narrates the story, his servant Conseil, and harpooner Ned Land. Readers experience the mysterious, stunning yet thrilling undersea world through their eyes.

Directed by Christian Hecq, an actor and director from the French theater company Comedie-Francaise, and Valerie Lesort, a director, visual artist and actress, the adaptation features an immersive and visually captivating approach, adopting puppetry to present underwater life onstage. Hecq also portrayed Captain Nemo.

In 2016, the production won the Moliere Award for Visual Creation. The Moliere Awards are France's highest theater honor.

He says during the initial creation in 2015 they endeavored to restore the artistry of puppetry, which was often mistakenly perceived as a minor art form intended for children.

The lightness and flexibility of the materials used allow the puppets to reproduce the expressive, gestural language of aquatic creatures. Each fish, manipulated by the performers, has its own character. Hecq adds that manual animations enabled them to fully exhibit the richness of the live performance.

Staged during the festival is a new edition joined by a Chinese production team and cast, including director Zha Wenyuan, playwright Tian Xiaowei and performers such as actor Bao Jianfeng, which will tour Beijing and Shanghai, Nanjing and Nantong in Jiangsu province, as well as Chengdu in Sichuan province.

According to Hecq, the Chinese edition is distinguished by some of its puppets, which have been reimagined by visual artist Kain Liu Kaiyin.

This new edition is coproduced by the Central Academy of Drama in Beijing, the Hong Kong Arts Festival, and Tempest Projects, an international performing arts company based in London and Shanghai.

French actress Isabelle Huppert (middle) plays Lyubov in theater production The Cherry Orchard that toured China. [Photo/Christophe Raynaud de Lage/Festival D'Avignon]

An iconic guest

With a variety of performing arts shows taking center stage, Festival Croisements also includes theater production The Cherry Orchard this year, a classic play written by Russian author Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) at the beginning of the 20th century and directed by Portuguese director Tiago Rodrigues. It was the opening play for the prestigious Avignon Festival in 2021.

As its name suggests, the play revolves around a family orchard to be sold due to debts. Set against the backdrop of the coming modernity, landowner Lyubov, an extravagant and elusive woman portrayed by the iconic French actress Isabelle Huppert, and Lopakhin, a wealthy businessman born to a family of serfs on the property, as well as a group of other characters, are torn between nostalgia and a mix of hope and unease about future.

Huppert is certain that Chinese audiences will feel the depth of Chekhov's humor and genius through this play, which has just toured Shanghai, Nanjing and Beijing.

As Festival Croisements' guest artist this year, Huppert recalls that during her first stage experience in China — her reading of The Lover by Marguerite Duras in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, Guangdong province in 2017 — she observed how well French culture is received in China. The enthusiasm was renewed during her visit in December with The Glass Menagerie.

She also hopes that Berenice, on which she works with director Romeo Castellucci, will make its way to China after its European tour.

Chinese comedian and director Shen Teng, who serves as the ambassador for this year's Festival Croisements, says that cinema, art and culture transcend borders and languages, enabling audiences to connect and resonate with each other. The festival perfectly embodies this concept.

"We often forget that France is one of the birthplaces of comedy. From theater to cinema, French humor takes on various forms, yet it always touches the heart and offers a perspective on the world through laughter," Shen says.

He adds that he hopes cultural exchanges can allow audiences in both countries to discover more humorous, insightful works with a human touch while inspiring artists and fostering further collaborations between Chinese and French creators.

Bertrand Lortholary (left) and Chinese comedian and director Shen Teng at a news conference for the 19th edition of Festival Croisements in Beijing on April 8. Shen is the festival's ambassador this year. [Photo/Courtesy of The French Institute of Beijing]

Significant reflections

More than six years after its last visit to China, the National Orchestra of France will return to the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing in May as part of its Asian tour with a repertoire from French composers Maurice Ravel and Georges Bizet, together with Pictures at an Exhibition, a suite by Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky and orchestrated by Ravel, as well as works by Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff.

Conducted by Cristian Macelaru, the orchestra will be accompanied by Paris-born Chinese-Canadian pianist Bruce Xiaoyu Liu, who won the 18th International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition in 2021.

Renowned art institutions including the Musee d'Orsay and Centre Pompidou in Paris are joining Festival Croisements this year to showcase the quintessence of Impressionism, modernism and French contemporary art scenes in China.

More than 100 paintings and sculptures from over 50 artists, such as Gustave Courbet, Edouard Manet, Claude Monet and Vincent Van Gogh, will be displayed in the exhibition The Paths of Modernity: Masterpieces from the Musee d'Orsay, Paris at Shanghai's Museum of Art Pudong from June to October.

Stephane Guegan, scientific adviser to the president of the Musee d'Orsay, says: "This project was born from the shared vision of the Musee d'Orsay and our Chinese partners to exhibit some of the Orsay's masterpieces without reducing their status.

"Even iconic works transcend their fame; they are part of a larger history. This history aligns with Orsay's ambitions at its opening: to offer visitors the opportunity to understand paintings and sculptures in their context of creation, linked to the political and social revolutions of the period from 1848 to 1914. The exhibition follows this logic and emphasizes the significance of the aesthetic and economic evolutions in the art world."

Seven masterpieces from the French museum's collection were exhibited at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo. In 2020, Monet's iconic piece Impression, Sunrise was displayed in China for the first time.

Constance de Marliave, the museum's head of economic development, says that although the Orsay's presence in China is still modest, they have observed a growing interest in collaborative projects and the arrival of Chinese visitors. Since 2022, the number of Chinese visitors to the museum increased by over 5 percent.

She says this phenomenon reflects an expanding relationship that they're confident will continue to strengthen in the coming years, and they look forward to more partnerships and cultural projects to meet the growing demand.

From Tuesday to October 18,2026, the West Bund Museum in Shanghai and the Centre Pompidou will co-present The Reinvention of Landscape, which explores the various ways of representing the natural or urban environment in which human societies evolve.

Featuring paintings, installations, cinema and new media works from the French institution's collection, which have been created since 1905, the exhibition covers many artistic styles, such as Fauvism, Cubism, surrealism and abstract art, to trace the transformations of landscape as an artistic theme that now carries significant reflections on societal and environmental issues.

According to Christian Briend, the exhibition's curator and head curator of the Modern Art Collection at the Centre Pompidou, the exhibition includes some of the center's recent acquisitions never shown in Paris, as well as its collection of pieces by Chinese-French painter Zao Wou-Ki, Chinese artists Cui Jie and Qiu Xiaofei, as well as Chuang Che, who was born in Beijing in 1934, raised in Taiwan and lives in New York.