Latest / Barbarians at the Gate / The Many Lives of Da Shan: Mark Rowswell on Chinese Poetry, Performing Live, and Staging Shawshank in Mandarin

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The Many Lives of Da Shan: Mark Rowswell on Chinese Poetry, Performing Live, and Staging Shawshank in Mandarin · Barbarians at the Gate

• David (00:00) Welcome to Barbarians at the Gate. I'm David Moser, hosting solo here in Beijing, while Jeremiah is no doubt on a beach in Thailand somewhere, getting a little well-deserved breathing space. He's a very busy guy. But I'm here in Beijing and sitting across from me is an old friend, Mark Rowswell, known to 1.4 billion Chinese people as Da Shan. And since you were listening to a podcast about China, I would say he literally needs no introduction. But if you want the backstory, you can first listen to our previous podcast with Mark, which is Barbarians at the Gate, February 2021. I'm not sure what date exactly, but it's in February. You can Google So thanks for coming on the show, Mark. Mark (00:40) It's good to be back. It's great to be back. Last time we did that podcast was remote, right? I was still in Toronto. That was in the middle of the pandemic. Yeah. A lot has happened since then. David (00:42) It's great to be back in Beijing. I know the pandemic seems like 20 years away, not just 10 years away or something. So I remember like before that day that or that time when we did the podcast, was, you and I were out on the in Beijing somewhere. I don't know doing what maybe drinking or having a meal or something. And, and you told me that you were heading into a new phase of your career, which I think you called the Dashan 2.0, 2.0, We talked about it a little bit and I wasn't too sure what you meant and I think maybe you weren't too sure either. But now it's so many years later, now we know what Da Shan 2.0 is, right? But maybe it's more complicated than that. Can you maybe just run us through that transition period? Mark (01:34) Well, I think that's a way I had of kind of explaining the evolution of what I do. Cause you know, I worked as a freelance performer for 30, it's coming up 38 years and you know, China has changed a lot. I've changed a lot. And as a freelance performer, your career evolves a lot. So, it was actually Da Shan 3.0 I was talking about because in those days, I guess it was sort of 2014. 2015, I really started to get into tuōkǒu xiù. There's a Chinese stand-up scene here. But before that, really had, you know, I became famous first as a comedian, so doing these skits and crosstalk. But by that time, I really had worked in China for 15, 20 years already, and I'd done a lot of work outside of comedy. So people... Often, you know, just that was the most simple label. Dashan's a, you know, Canadian guy who works as a comedian in China. David (02:35) Mostly just crosstalk probably. Mark (02:37) Mostly famous for crosstalk. Yeah, this, you know, and I think just on a side note there, because crosstalk is much more respected or revered sort of as an art form, whereas skits are just fun. Right. And so then I made my first appearance as a crosstalk performer and I became part of this crosstalk family, this hierarchy, and was taken in by, you know, one of the most prominent crosstalk performers. took me under his wing, the first foreigner to be taken into this family of crosstalk performers. So that was a big thing in the late 80s and through the 1990s. I gradually got away from that because I found, I kind of ran into a wall with the comedic performing. And besides, the more I sort of realized, you what is this whole Da Shan thing that's happening around me? Like this, the fame and everything, this thing. I came to the understanding that it was really much more of a cultural phenomenon than a comedic phenomenon. It wasn't that I had made great jokes or I was a really great comedian. It's sort of what I represented as a non-Chinese person working in this Chinese milieu and that lent itself towards comedy. But I also did a lot of work as a television host. I did educational programs. You know, I was involved in the Beijing Olympics and the Shanghai Expo in 2010. And so I never really intended to become a professional comedian. So that's why I spent a decade or more sort of, know, comedy was a great way to break in and make a name for myself. But I started to develop career more as sort of a, quote unquote, cultural ambassador, being some kind of a cultural go- between China and the West. I mean, not even included doing consulting work and things that were not necessarily performing wise. But again, 2014, 2015, you have the emergence of solo comedy in China. Not really the same as Western standup, but sort of a Chinese version of standup. Yeah. I have to say, know, tuōkǒu xiù and stand up are not really the same thing. They're, well, there's a. David (04:50) There's a confusion in the translation as well. Mark (04:53) Yeah, because tuōkǒu xiù comes from talk show. Right. And so, yeah, the Chinese misconception is that talk show is a one-man comedic performance, when it's really not. It's actually telling them talk show is an interview show, yes? Often hosted by comedians, but yeah. David (05:08) So you had become a celebrity. My impression, because I did follow you, you most of that time, you sort of, definitely left crosstalk Xiangsheng because of its limitations. And also it's not really, it's really not really you. It's your, you're, you're actually just going with a script. Yeah. And then also it seems like you, you, you developed a kind of allergy to TV for many reasons that you can maybe talk about, but also I had the feeling you did some shows that you could call tuōkǒu xiù right? But Somehow I don't think that felt comfortable to you either, right? Mark (05:43) So, but this whole thing about the Da Shan 3.0 was to tell people, you know, yes, I started as a comedian, but I really have not done comedy for 15 years. my bread and butter was being a television host or just a bilingual, uh, celebrity. Yeah. would be a celebrity for hire. Yeah. I was, I was Da Shan for a living. Um, and the reason I started, came up with this 3.0 label was to say to people, you know, now I'm coming back to comedy. but I'm doing it my own way now. I'm not doing traditional Chinese comedy and I'm not doing sort of the foreign student with a Chinese teacher kind of schtick because that really became repetitive. It was just constantly one-upping, you know, coming up with something that the audience didn't expect. And in the end, you know, when you're, when you're constantly outdoing yourself, I never expected he could do that. You know, every, every skit ended up being a test. Like the Chinese teacher would say, you know, I'm going to give you a test. Let's see if you, if you really understand this. And of course the end of every skit was always, Ta Zhen Hui! You know, he really, he knows his stuff. And this is the reason it became a burden is that I became like the super China expert. There was nothing I didn't know. And that was the comedic shtick. But after a while, like, how do you, how do you keep outdoing yourself? And so it did lead to a real psychological pressure where I'd go somewhere and everyone would just expect that I'd open my mouth and it would be pearls of Chinese wisdom. David (07:15) Well, I think that's true. Mark (07:18) So Dashan 3.0 again was to say, okay, I'm coming back to comedy. I've, you know, I've worked really hard for 15 years to become more than a comedian, like to be a, this cultural ambassador figure, but I'm going to come back to comedy now and do this tuōkǒu xiù. David (07:31) Okay, so you tried the tuōkǒu xiù. Mark (07:34) So the thing that tuōkǒu xiù it works and it doesn't. It didn't work for me being, you know, just going to an open mic or going to these clubs and trying to fit into that scene. Because after all, you know, comedy fundamentally is a young person's business. And I was already 15, even 20 years older than all the people I was working with. And you're an established me, I mean, you're an established television celebrity. And these are all just like young people out having fun for an evening, right? You know? David (08:06) Yeah, but isn't it also that your age at your age and their age, they're a concern. That's what I'm saying. They're talking about society, the dating, the relationship with their parents and all this kind of thing. And you're not in that. Mark (08:12) You're not really interested in the same thing. No, because me, like, it's the opposite, right? I'm interested in my relation with my son, my children. Exactly. Yeah. But again, you don't want to just, like, play into that, be the stereotypical dad, right? Like, you're all my children's generation and I'm the father figure and, like, let's play on those stereotypes. I didn't really do that either. David (08:41) You could have done something that was interesting and fun, but I think there's, didn't you feel a little bit constrained tuōkǒu xiù because it's still like subject, you know, the material. Mark (08:50) Well, no, so first of all, I felt liberated by tuōkǒu xiù because finally I could be imperfect. I didn't have to be Mr. Perfect/Da Shan anymore. And in fact, it was more fun to tell people, know, Xiangsheng, especially I think crosstalk being a two person dialogue. Of course there has to be some kind of a comedic clash between the two characters. And usually that was done in sort of this teacher student testing and, you know, exceeding the test kind of. David (09:19) ni neng shuo raokouling ma? Mark (09:22) and I just got tired of being Mr. Perfect. I think a lot of people got tired of Da Shan being Mr. Perfect. And you know, that's not, being perfect is not funny. That's true. It's fun. There's a fundamental contradiction in there. Like I can't be perfect and funny at the same time. It's much easier to be funny when you're imperfect. So with tuōkǒu xiù I was able to get up and kind of take the piss out of my character. And people loved that. Of course, you know, it was much more down to earth and it sort of, it really brought me into a new or younger fan base and everything. I just didn't really fit into the format of what the shows everyone else was doing. David (09:59) Because in Xiangsheng, you're always going to be a Lao Wai. But you actually, at that point, had a more complicated persona, right? It wasn't just the amazingly fluent Lao Wai. You already had a sense of... You could talk about Chinese culture. There were lots of ideas. Xiangsheng would never have given you that sort of outlet. Mark (10:21) Yeah, so tuōkǒu xiù in that sense, was much more liberating. It's just, I feel I didn't fit into the sort of the open mic kind of environment, but also the television shows that became popular with tuōkǒu xiù were also very formulaic. You know, they're sort of a game show style. Exactly. It's a competition. David (10:40) It's a competition. Mark (10:41) Yeah, you know, I mean, the more you watch them, the more you realize that it's, it became more and more formalistic because in fact, all of the skits were being written by the same six guys behind the scenes. Oh, really? David (10:54) Those young comedians weren't writing their own material? Mark (10:57) Well, a lot of these a lot of the shows where they bring in like new people or they bring in celebrities You know like a Tǔcáo Dàhuì this kind of roast style. Yeah David (11:07) Yeah, the insult thing came in there, which I was a little bit surprised. Mark (11:10) So people that are appearing as guests on those shows, usually, you know, they come up with their ideas and everything, but it's the writers that are sort of, there's a formula to it. Interesting. So I think the problem, the shortcoming for me with tuōkǒu xiù is that I really had to do a solo show. So that's why we sort of, put together this show called Da Shan kan Da Shan which was just an hour. Like I basically had to come up with an hour of material, which is tough. I mean, it's not that hard to do a five or 10 minute guest appearance. But as a guest, have to fit into the format. If you're doing a whole hour or even 90 minutes, it's your show. People are there to see you. And you know your audience and they know you. It's much easier to find that commonality. David (11:51) I don't think I really ever saw that show. Maybe I was too... But can you tell what was the format? How did it... Mark (11:58) It was kind of autobiographical. Again, it was telling people, okay, you know, Dashan from television, but let me tell you the real story. Like when I learned Chinese, you know, when I started out and, David (12:09) And you're actually a pedophile. Mark (12:12) Sort of the peak of that was 2017, 2018. I actually appeared in the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, which is the third largest comedy festival in the world after Montreal and Edinburgh. The largest in the Asia Pacific region. It's a big thing. But the thing is it's fundamentally an English comedy festival. And even though in Melbourne, there's a huge Chinese community in Melbourne, I thought, you know, it would fit in and everything, but still. you're taking kind of like a very unique Chinese language kind of thing and you're trying to stick it into an English language comedy festival. So that was a great experience, but it is, you know, it's kind of like, okay, that was neat. Let's do something else next time. David (12:51) Well, okay, something else, let's talk about that, because you went in a direction that most people would not have. You did really something else. Is that Da Shan 3.0? Mark (13:00) So no, so that's the 3.0. 2.0 is really the non-comedy, just being the cultural ambassador. 3.0 was telling people I'm coming back to comedy, but I'm not doing Xiangsheng anymore. I'm going to do this Dashan Kan Dashan I'm doing this solo show. David (13:12) So you started doing poetry readings. what was it? Does that overlap or is this quite a new venture? Mark (13:19) Cause the pandemic blew up Da Shan 3.0. It crashed and burned. There sort of was a peak in 2018 and then I thought, okay, you now I've been doing this for like three years. I developed my show, but you know, after you can do the same material for a year or two or three, but it really starts to stretch thin. Then you start to run out of, you know, people have seen it. Even if you're just doing live shows. So my idea was, let's take six months or a year off and recharge my batteries and start working on some new material and I'll start a new tour in 2020. Sounds like a great idea. And I honestly had just started that in late 2019. We're working on some new material, doing some new shows. I had a plan to sort, I was going to do a cross Canada tour in 2020 because I've never really toured my own country. I go back and I might do a show in Toronto or maybe stop through Vancouver, but I'd never done sort of a cross-Canada tour to the Chinese communities all across Canada. So that was kind of my plan for 2020. David (14:19) Okay, but it's probably appropriate right now just to mention it, people don't really know, is that you did have two audiences. One is the guonei, the people in China, but you also had a worldwide audience of basically any place that had a significant Chinese population, right? Mark (14:35) Which is funny too, because most of them actually, know, overseas Chinese communities are very diverse as well. My audience really are all the people that have emigrated from China since, say, 1990. Which again is a huge number of people. David (14:49) and they're gonna remember you because they're older. Mark (14:51) And so that was something I wanted to get into. I've done a lot of touring around China, but I'd love to use this opportunity to tour the world. I actually did, sort of a real eye-opener for me. I once did a show in Buenos Aires for some random reason. I was in Buenos Aires doing a TV show and I got to meet some of the Chinese community there and everything. And then like a month or so later, I was in Paris and I realized it was exactly the same audience. Right. David (15:19) Diaspora, right, exactly. Did you have a feeling with this diaspora audience that you were a little bit freer with your comedy because you're not in China and you could touch upon political issues that wouldn't be... Mark (15:33) Yeah, again, I don't think there's a huge appetite for foreign criticism of China, even among Chinese, overseas Chinese audiences. they, it's much, there's much more latitude, I think actually for Chinese performers to do that. But yeah, you could do things that were a little bit more, you know, cābiānqiú, David (15:52) brush the side shot. Mark (15:55) Right some or you know something that was a little bit risqué but well some David (16:00) Well, the problem, you know, in China is like anything, any joke that involves is kind of a suspect. But I mean, yeah, but that wasn't your point anyway. That wasn't Mark (16:09) But no, so I mean the end of Dashan 3.0 was that I really got into, you know, the freedom of not having to do television. I had enough audience that I could just do live performing and I could travel the world and that sounded like a great thing to do in my... David (16:23) Yeah, that reminds me of this. I could give this anecdote. You may not want me to, we can cut it if you want, but that you, you were, you told me at one point, you know, that you are angry at the, or are you sort of allergic to the CCTV and the shows because, you know, you were doing poetry at the time and they kept wanting you to, to, to move in a direction of of, why does only China be able to create such great works of poetry and stuff like that? And where you were trying to say that, you know, I'm trying to make the point that Chinese poetry is universal. Is humankind, right? And that turned you off, I remember. Mark (16:56) It's human. Yeah. And, that's always been a theme through my work is that I, I really try to find the commonality, the things that bring us together. Exactly. And yeah, the Chinese media, of course, they really want you to talk about how unique China is. know, I often use the example of the Beijing Olympics. This is kind of dating. This is already very old, but you know, the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics compared to four years later, the opening ceremony of the London Olympics. And the London Olympics was all about how we are the world and everybody comes to London and you're a Londoner and like we're all together. We're all the same community and everything. The Beijing Olympics opening show was all about look at how wonderful and unique we are. It's not about how universal we are. It's like, look at the beauty of our culture and isn't it amazing? I have to say, know, China really doesn't want to be understood. It wants to be admired and respected. David (17:53) I think the example I gave to you, said imagine a British TV show interviewing a foreigner or maybe something about Shakespeare and asking questions like, why is it that only British culture was able to produce a genius like William Shakespeare? And they would say, what? What are you talking about? Mark (18:08) about. Yeah. Anyway, the pandemic basically blew up Da Shan 3.0 because that was based on doing live performing and traveling the world. And, you know, those are the two things that got completely wiped out in the pandemic were international travel and live performing. So that's what, that's what I started, you know, we were stuck at home. We didn't know if it was going to be six months or a year or if David (18:25) Let's get into the poetry mark. Mark (18:33) you know, the world had changed forever. We didn't know. Right. and I just thought, you know, okay, let's take six months off. That's okay. but the only thing is I want to make sure that when this thing does come to an end, I didn't waste my time. Like I did something and I can come, you know, six months now, I go back to China. I was in Toronto at the time. six months from now, things are open. I can go back to China. And at least I know that I didn't waste this six months. Like I did something. And I've always been interested in Chinese poetry and finally had the time, right? So I spent a lot of that summer instead of touring Canada, which was the original plan. I spent that summer up at the cottage reading a lot of poetry and all the books I could find that sort of, you know, I had a very basic understanding, but I really wanted to get deeper into it. And I found a couple of poems that really spoke to me. And, you know, I had been doing short videos for my comedy stuff and everything. So I thought, well, why don't I try doing some short videos of poetry? Because this is, you know, a poem only is a minute long. You can do a short video. Let's do one of these things. And one of the first ones I picked was not a really common poem at all. It was a Chu Ci. was Chu, songs of Chu, which are, know, these are very ancient 2000 year old poems. And some of them not very well known at all. Everyone knows Qu Yuan, but you know, that's the most famous of the... David (19:59) that in particular. I was going to ask you about that. Did you choose what poems that you tended like or you were choosing poems that would be likely to be recognized? Mark (20:09) One that spoke to me and that one was on the typical theme of bēiqiū which is sort of the mourning of autumn and of course autumn is also the autumn of your lifespan so it's kind of a midlife crisis kind of thing you know. I just, I don't know where I had this idea, but I just thought, you know, this year sucks. Like 2020 really sucks. And every year we do look, so this is like the middle of December and we're looking towards the new year in 2021. And, know, this whole say goodbye to the old year and welcome the new year. And I thought, you know, this year just sucks. Like there's nothing good to say about 2020. So why don't I just do a really depressing poem. Just kind of an F you to 2020. I'm going to do this is my, this is my, like my finger to 2020 saying, you know, this year sucks and let's read a, a really sad poem to get rid of this horrible year. And that video went viral and it was a, like a really obscure poem that most Chinese people had never heard of before. mean, I, I think I put modern Chinese subtitles to it or captions. Right. but it just went viral and I thought, okay, let's try this again. Let's take, and the, you and I were keeping in touch. Well, David (21:23) Well, if we already get into that, why do you think that is? Because my, maybe you've said this to me before, but I think that people found it refreshing that your delivery and your style was not the sort of rigid, sort of traditional way of lǎngsòng poetry, right? You were sort of looking at the camera and acting it out. Your tone of voice and everything was not that of a poetry reciter. And I think people responded to that. Mark (21:48) And it, well, I think through one of the things about social media is that it's very intimate, right? People are looking at it on their phone. it's not a, it's not a big screen kind of media. It's a very small, intimate kind of media. And I was in a small room with a single light and just talking to the camera. The camera was, literally two and a half feet, three feet from my face. And I mean, I did it over and over till it felt right. But that's the main thing is that I was trying to bring the feeling of the poem out. So I was trying to act the poem out. David (22:18) Yeah, you were less concerned with the píng píng zè zè and more with the emotion. I've talked to some Chinese people about that and I think they mentioned that to me. Mark (22:29) I think that's what resonates with people because they know these poems. Most of the poems I do now are ones that are, you know, they're more from the canon of poems that are commonly known in China. But they're not done in the way they are in China, which is very formal. And you you straighten your back and you wear some traditional clothing and it's all the beauty of the Chinese language. David (22:52) It becomes an abstract kind of thing. stuffy, that's the word. exactly. How would you say stuffy in Chinese? Mark (22:56) It becomes stuffy too. Yeah. David (23:10) I'm an old drum. Mark (23:18) And you were doing a lot of improvisation. I don't know where we first got this idea, but you sent me some recordings and not necessarily tied to any specific poem, but I sort of looked through the stuff that I was doing and I thought, hey, this one fits. This is kind of the right feeling. And sometimes we did a little bit of editing. I remember the one Dingfeng Bo, it started around 40 seconds or so. And I said, can you give me another 10 seconds? David (23:44) That's right. Usually, you just said, give me 33 seconds of music. Mark (23:49) Well, one we did really really well I think was Sheng Sheng Man and that's one where it worked really well but I needed a little bit more time in the middle because there was a transition so can you just kind of draw that out? David (23:59) Yeah, well was great fun and you know also I think that it gave, it was a way of combining what you were trying to do with the recitation and the words and then in the semantics and actually add some kind of additional weight to it. Mark (24:16) But you know, fundamentally, the thing that's interesting that we sort of discovered on our own through this is that the musicality of Chinese poetry, because in fact, like the one I mentioned Shengsheng Man actually is the lyric poetry. It's, it's a ci, which literally are geci They're songs. They're lyrics to songs. And the music has been lost to time, but the musicality remains and you can discover, that's just one of the things I've David (24:33) song. Mark (24:42) I've found through this work is that you can rediscover that musicality and it doesn't have to be traditional Chinese instruments and pentatonic. That's right. It doesn't, yeah, because we don't know what they did in the Tang or Song dynasties. So we found that we've, we've, sort of rediscovered the musicality and that's, I mean, David (25:01) It might be Mark, that if you did do that with the Chinese musical instruments and the pentatonic scales and stuff like that, that it might have dragged it back to this sort of cliche that you were trying to avoid. Mark (25:15) I also think the way Chinese often do poems, even recite poems, even if they do do music, they'll have a pipa or a guzheng or traditional instrument like that. Basically just playing background music and there it's on two tracks. So there's music in the background and you're reciting, but the music is not really following the poetry. And what we did is, mean, that's the week that the, one of the ones we did, I thought was really great was Ding Feng Bo. And you know, it's just an eight bar pattern that just kind of reflects the rhythm of the poem. And again, that was, you know, the poetry and the music done separately and then just trying to find, you know, one from this column fits one from that column and put them together. Right, right. David (26:03) Yeah, those were pieces I just played. They eventually came as a sort of an album, a few albums of piano music that I made. But yeah, was a great lot. was a great, it was great fun to do that. Mark (26:15) yeah, that kind of, I mean, I didn't think of it as Da Shan 4.0 at the time. It's sort of more, lately people have asked me, you whatever happened to Da Shan 3.0? And I kind of thought, well, I kind of moved on from that. I guess we'll call it 4.0. David (26:29) You did things like, I think these are all, we should put all of these in the website, links to all of these things so people can know what we're talking about. But you would do things like to get a Li Bai poem, what's it, some Qiāng Jìn Jiǔ Qiāng Jìn Jiǔ. And you sort of said, by the way, just for the audience, if you don't know, Mark is also a musician. You play the bass. and you're an avid jazz fan and you're as much as a musical aficionado as you are, a Chinese and everything. But what I was great was you said, this is a drinking song. This is something like a, this is Yao Gu Yue. This is rock and roll and you did it as rock and roll and you sang it. Instead of reciting it, you sang it like a hard rock. Mark (27:10) translated as bring the ale More of a blues rock kind of thing. David (27:23) And I thought this is totally brilliant because that's the spirit of it. for a modern audience, sound more like a Cui Jian or something. It's like, they said, yeah, this is drinking. I'm going to drink my brains out. know, it was so great. Mark (27:29) Yeah, ooh. and again that's fine, that's trying to find the commonality or the universality. What culture does not have drinking songs? David (27:49) But they shouldn't be elite kinds of polite drinking songs. It's like the idea is to get drunk. Mark (27:54) Yeah. So, yeah, so that, and yeah, that really took on a life of its own. So when I, you know, when we came out of the pandemic, I think the first live show I did was in Toronto in September of 2022. And we took the Da Shan Kan Da Shan idea and I thought, you know, I don't want to do a 60, 90 minute show anymore. And I, you know, I kind of had lost confidence too. I hadn't been on stage for two years or so. I needed to, I needed to kind of break my, break my way back in. So I brought Jesse Appell our friend from, he was in LA at the time. I flew him into Toronto and we came up with this Da Shan and Friends format instead. Yeah. So Jesse came and we did the show in Toronto and you know, there's, Toronto has a sizeable Chinese community and there actually is, there are tuōkǒu xiù clubs in Toronto. So some of the local guys that were doing, doing Chinese comedy. David (28:33) Yeah, that's great. Mark (28:49) and we put together a show called Dashan and Friends. And for the first time I thought, okay, you know, this doesn't have to necessarily be a comedy show. It's kind of a variety show. It was mainly comedy, but I'm going to do Chánghèn Gē, the song of everlasting regret. And I get up on stage, I think I made a joke saying, you know, people all say like I don't know, the ultimate of comedy is tragedy or the ultimate. Something like, comedy taken to an extreme is tragedy or something. Yeah. So I said, okay, so we're going to end this comedy show with some tragedy now. Let's please, please enjoy the song of everlasting regret. And you know, I thought I'll try this in an experiment. I know people will like it for a minute or two. I'm just worried because this is a 10 minute poem. Can I really hold the audience for 10 minutes? Or are they going to all watch their, start reading their phones? I mean, David (29:18) or at base is and say, can you memorize 10 minutes? That would be my problem. Mark (29:44) Well, actually, the music really helps because the music triggers memory. Then it is like remembering lyrics. Like you hear the music and you remember, yeah, Chūnfēng táolǐ huākāi rì I remember now. So we did that and to my surprise and much pleasure, the audience, like they really did enjoy it and they were perfectly fine sitting and listening to a 10 minute poem. With music, we had, You know, Zhang Ke Min is also a friend. He was on piano and his sister Rosie was on cello. And I think we had a shakuhachi and a guy on drums with the bell, because there's a bell in the poem. David (30:23) this one. Yeah. Zhang Kemin isn't he... didn't he write the music for one of the... Mark (30:30) So he did, it was an improvised concept that we came up with and we had done it three or four times. So, you know, of the improvisation, it's kind of like the famous example is that "American Woman" by the Guess Who, right? It started just as a total jam, but they worked a song out of it. So the first time you do it, it's a total improvisation, but it kind of works. So let's take that and kind of remember what we did and try to, you know, let's bring in a cello and let's bring in some drums and let's make a thing out of it. So it did start as a pure improvisation, it like, Zhang Kemin was the only guy who could do it, but it did, there was sort of a format to it in the end. wasn't a pure improvisation, but it started as an improvisation. David (31:14) So Zhang Kemin is a professional composer, is that right? Mark (31:17) Well, he is the grandson of the great Li Dedlun who is one of the leading figures of Chinese classical music in modern China. So this is one of the great conductors of the fifties and sixties all the way through the 1980s. One of the guys, first guys that like really brought symphonic music to China. so he comes from a musical family and he's got a great jazz sense as well. that's... David (31:43) gonna say yeah yeah So now we're in the big time. Instead of these videos that you can twiddle a little bit into. Symphony, orchestra, you've got to get together, you've got to have a score, you have parts, conductor, have to rehearse. What's the collaborative process there? Mark (31:59) Well, this is the interesting thing. Doing these poetry videos actually led to a lot of new opportunities. So a friend of mine in Winnipeg called me up and said, you know, we're doing, we're going to do a Chinese new year event. Um, and we've got the Winnipeg Symphony, which is one of the better symphonies in Canada. And, um, we, you know, I've saw this thing online, uh, in China, this Tang poetry to a symphony, uh, it's a symphonic score. And do you think... you could do that. And I looked at it I thought, next week, no, but give me six months. could do that. That'd be so cool. Like I definitely would put in the time to do that. So we contacted the Xi'an Symphony, which was the rights holder of the score. We said, we'd love to do this in Canada. Can you give us the score? How much would it cost? And I spent six months to learn that was... I think that was Chang An Ge actually. I'm my memory is a little bit off there. It was the poem I'd already learned, but we were doing it with Zhang Kemin's improvised score. And all I had to do was sort of take the poem that I'd already learned and adapt it for the symphony score. Cause you know, you want to follow the music. You're not totally disconnected. So we did that. And then, you know, I had worked with the Toronto Symphony before, again, just doing a Chinese New Year event in Toronto. And one year I think I had narrated Peter and the Wolf, Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf I'd done in Chinese. You know, just a really eclectic career. I've done a little bit of everything, right? David (33:35) The word I think of is fusion. You're creating some East-West fusion, but of course they steal from us, we steal from them, and we come up with something better. Mark (33:42) So I pitched this idea to the Toronto Symphony. I said, you know, we've done narration before and now I'm doing this Chinese poetry, like, could we do this with the Toronto Symphony? So now for three years in a row, I've done this every year with the Toronto Symphony and not only like we started renting a score from a different symphony, a pre-existing score, for the last two years I've actually commissioned new work. So we're doing like brand new symphonic music. Shawn Moore, of our one of our joint friends, he did it last year. David (34:12) Shawn Moore is an important person in your musical career. Mark (34:15) We did the world premiere of Shawn Moore's Ode on the Red Cliffs. David (34:21) Oh, Shawn Moore, yes, an amazing composer, an amazing musician. with this Beijing is so incestuous because he's he's doing this with poetry and music. There's another group with Anthony Tao, who has this poetry and music group. he and I have worked together. He's just I'm just saying, you know, it's all English. Yeah. But but here we are, you know, Shawn and I are doing things. I'm playing keyboard. He's with violin and with Anthony and then Shawn and me and you. Yeah, it's like it's such incest. Mark (34:38) I think Antony is mainly the... this community here. David (34:52) Well, look, Mark, time is running out and we will definitely put these links to all these things, especially the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and all that. One thing I really want to get to is the Shawshank Redemption. Mark (35:06) Well that came from the poetry as well. really? Because I did- David (35:10) Wait, wait. audience doesn't know what we're talking about. So what is the issue we're talking about? Shawshank Redemption in Chinese. Mark (35:18) I got a call from Zhang Guoli, one of the famous actor directors in China. And he said, we want to do a Chinese version, a stage version in Chinese of the Shawshank Redemption. And of course, this is the classic movie. It's actually listed on Douban as the number one most famous, favorite movie of Chinese audiences. think Shawshank Redemption is one. Forrest Gump is two. and Farewell My Concubine is three. These are like great movies from the Chinese audiences just love. Shawshank Redemption is number one on that list. David (35:52) So Zhang Guoli chose this to adapt in a play in Chinese. Mark (35:57) There is an English play and it's not well known. It's not well known. think it's primarily a British production. It's, it's, it has toured in the U S but people don't really, it never sort of made a splash on Broadway or anything, but there actually is a Chinese play. And so the, so the Chinese group here, Longma She is the production company. They paid for the rights to the play, the Shawshank Redemption play. And then they adapted that into Chinese. And he said, I've been watching your videos and you know, this is the kind of voice that we need to this play and I thought, at first I thought he wants me to play Andy the banker like that doesn't make any sense at all and I realized he was talking about Morgan Freeman's role he wanted me to be the narrator and to play Morgan Freeman in which David (36:44) Absolutely perfect. You're the Chinese American or Canadian Morgan Freeman. Mark (36:50) You know, the funny thing is in the novel, in the original Stephen King novel, the character Red is Irish. That's why he's called Red. And in the movie, they hired Morgan Freeman, of course, great actor and one, you know, the voice of God. yeah, absolutely. They hired him to do the role, but there's a joke in the movie where they say, you know, why do people call you Red after all? And Morgan Freeman says, maybe because I'm Irish. It was kind of an inside joke because the character in the book was Irish. So, you know, by convention now, usually even in the play that character is usually played by an African-American actor. Right. But it doesn't have to be, of course. It's all drama. And so they hired me to be Red for the play. David (37:36) talk about the complications here. So you have to put on this play in Chinese, but they chose not to use Chinese, native Chinese speakers to do the adaptation of the play after the movie, right? So that was a decision, right? Mark (37:52) I wasn't the only foreigner they hired for this. The idea was we're going to have an all foreign cast and for the first time ever in China we're going to do it at play in Chinese but by all foreign cast. You know there have been lots of plays, foreigners performing plays in China but not all in Chinese. David (38:10) the psychological aspect, why was that the decision? Would audiences have been turned off to see Chinese actors playing these roles from their beloved film? And so they would need to be foreigners, but they can't be in English. Mark (38:24) I it's really, it's also to emphasize the idea that this is a foreign play and maybe it's politically sensitive, you know, to show that this is, we're not trying to make an allegory about Chinese society. This is a play, an American play about an American prison. David (38:38) But this is a great point. Isn't it kind of a sort of a portrayal of Chinese society? mean, talk about that a little bit because why do Chinese audiences so respond to it so strongly? Mark (38:50) Well, of course it is, it is a story about people trapped in a system and trying to break out of that system and it's hopeless, right? Except for Andy never gives up hope and in the end hope wins. And so I think that was the, that was sort of the approach they took in China more is that this is, you know, when you talk about it, we often talk about it being a story about freedom, but really more fundamentally, it's a story about hope. But then. On the other hand, what are we hoping for? Like we're hoping for freedom. David (39:20) Yeah, exactly. Or more precisely, escape from a place that does not have freedom. Mark (39:27) But it, yeah, but I mean, that's why it resonates with audiences around the world. Cause you know, everyone's trapped in somehow and has a dream that they wish they could achieve. They could sort of break out of the constraints, a pose on, in that way it's a universal theme. So I think it was just a little bit more palatable to have it presented as a, you know, a purely foreign presentation, foreign actors, foreign story, and everyone loves the story and it's very inspiring. David (39:32) Everyone's trapped. So you had to assemble a cast and I know that was a little bit difficult to find people who could speak Chinese well enough to... Mark (40:01) That's not where I first met Shawn Moore, but he in fact worked on it as well. He was hired to do the background music, yeah. Yeah, because you can't use the music from the movie or you either create original music or you pay the rights for someone else's music. And they decided to hire Shawn to write the music. And since he's writing the music for the play, you know, got to hang out with us anyway. Why don't you just take one of the roles? And so he was one of the, he played one of the convicts. Not one of the top two or three characters, but you know, an important character in the play. And yeah, we had, was it 11 actors from eight different countries. There were two Americans, I think, but you know, the cast was really from all over. Another old friend of mine, Ma Ding from Finland is somebody that I actually performed with in 1988. I didn't recognize him at first because he was this, I remember him as being kind of a hippie guy from 1988. And here he is now, he's like 65 years old. You've changed. Zhang Guo David (41:00) Lee actually, I think maybe wanted me to take a role in it, but there's no way I Mark (41:05) Well, we- yeah. We wanted you to play the old guy who kills himself. David (41:09) Thank you. I may be that guy if things continue the way they're going. Mark (41:15) Brooks, right? Brooks, that's his name. The guy, and again, that's to show, you know, in the end, when Morgan Freeman, when Red does break out of prison, he's able also to break out of the pattern that Brooks followed, which where he left prison and was like totally a fish out of water and ended up killing himself. He should have just stayed in prison. And that was an important part of the story. But again, that, you know, you would be great for that. David (41:43) Yeah, a suicidal old guy. Yeah. So, so and but it was but there was the reception was was great Mark (41:50) Yeah, we did, uh, you know, we, so we started that in late 23, we performed through 24 and then we came back and did another run in the summer of 25. And I think, you know, in terms of like formal paying audiences, we did it 33 times. You know, we did, we did various rehearsals and dress rehearsals and stuff, but actual formal performances where people bought tickets to come and see the show, we did 33, which is very good for a play. You know, some plays are more than that, but you know, an awful lot of plays never get, you know, an awful lot of places play sort of launch and do five or 10 shows and that's it. I think to do 33 was pretty good. There's always the chance we'll do more. It's kind of dormant now. And I kind of feel like it's run its natural course. Like we, we did it well and it was successful. We got good reviews. It sold well, but, I've kind of moved on from that now. But again, that also came from the poetry because Zhang Guoli saw one of the poems I did and said, you know, man, that sounds like red. David (42:51) Great, great. Well, yes, you're moving on to other things and I hope to have you in the podcast in the future for to get Dasan 5.5. Mark (43:00) 5.0. think the next step really is to take these like 10 minute guest appearances or short videos and really turning it into that's what we're working on now is how do we turn this into a show that we can tour around like turn this into a like a 90 minute show that's based on the poetry but you know maybe also it's poetry and music and and we bring in some comedy as well and get sort of the new Dashan and Friends version of the show a touring show that's because that's Again, we've kind of come full circle to pre-pandemic time where I really want to be doing live performing and traveling and hardly do any television anymore. this is, the poetry is something that seems to really have legs and that I'm pursuing now. David (43:45) Yes, indeed. You told me about this newly opened restaurant sort of performance. Mark (43:51) site. Yeah it's the new it's kind of the new bookworm in Sanlitun. know the bookworm was a great hangout but it closed. David (43:55) in the book order. Yeah, Cui Jian is the proprietor of the C string. Mark (44:01) It's called C-strings, Hai Shang Xian. And yeah, every Thursday they do live music and it's kind of a cultural hangout and a performance venue. And we performed there a couple of weeks ago again with Shawn and we did 40 minutes of the poetry of Su Shi, also known as Su Dong Po. David (44:22) Wow, we haven't had time to get to do that. I was telling someone the other day, you're a Sudong Po expert now and you've even done a documentary about it. We'll put that in the link. Well, Mark, there's a lot we could talk about and it's just great to you on the show. Mark (44:30) Yeah. But it's just great to catch up. And people can follow this stuff on social media and yeah. David (44:39) That's right, you're on social media. I think both Chinese and people of other countries should put you on their watch list. Okay, do you hear drums? I hear drums. Yeah, think I hear drums. think that's the cue. We have to quit now, Mark. again, come back again, okay? I will. All right, bye-bye. Bye. Mark (44:51) Dom dom dom dom. Barbarians at the-