Performing Nuo Rituals

Seven old opera slips from the Republican era were unearthed at a construction site in Dali. A horn blast pierced mountains and seas, and six young people were dragged onto a bizarre stage by an invisible debt owed to the opera.

The rules of the stage were laws of life and death. Each ancient theatrical rule they comprehended caused a new opera pattern to grow across their flesh.

This was the power to break out of a desperate situation, and a curse that consumed the self. When one hundred and eight patterns covered their bodies, the living became extras at the corner of the stage, applauding without end.

They traveled across the mountains and rivers of China, braving one deathly illusion after another, born from intangible cultural heritage: Nuo rituals, Yingge dances, puppetry, The Peony Pavilion, shadow puppetry, and molten iron fireworks. Every time they made it offstage alive, they had to pay with their memories, their bodies, or their future. The borrowed-face art could grant the might of gods and spirits, but the price was the gradual erasure of the question, "Who am I?"

In ancient times, Wu Xian fell from the heavens. The heavenly ladder was severed, and he turned his body into a solitary stage, keeping vigil for three thousand years. People climbed the altar and knelt, praying for divine blessings and the return of old dreams, yet no one was willing to listen to the end of his unfinished Nuo opera.

Shen Du refused to inherit the divine altar. He would not summon a god into the world. In an ordinary human voice, he would sing an encore for the lonely spirit of antiquity.

Though the ancient stage was sealed, its theatrical energy did not fade. Where obsession gathered, stages appeared everywhere: livestreams, wedding halls, funeral homes.

The seventh stage was not in a ruined shrine, but in the bones and blood of the six of them.

Nuo means hardship for humankind.

Masks were never meant to hide your face. They force you to face the suffering in your heart that you cannot overcome.