Lifestyle

"The facilities were very old, and the children had to suffer mosquito bites while watching the play," said Zhao, the chairperson of the since-renovated theater. "The occupancy for each show was lower than 10 percent."

The hardship was not exclusive to the China Puppet Theater. According to statistics from the Ministry of Culture, the total number of performances by stateowned art troupes has been declining since the 1980s, from 740,000 in 1985 to 400,000 in 1994. During this time-frame, 30-40 percent of the operating funds came from government support. Very few of the theater houses were self-sufficient, let alone profitable.

The government knew there had to be a change in this sector. For China Puppet Theater, that change came on September 15, 2006, when it announced plans to transform into an enterprise, as more than 2,000 Chinese art troupes at the time were required to do so eventually. It was also when Zhao, a businesswoman, assumed responsibility as the chairperson of the 50-yearold theater.

Tradition and innovation

Zhao believed her first and primary task was to produce an excellent play to rebrand the theater and win new audiences. "Good plays are the essence and core competence of a theater." To compose an attractive act, she hired famous directors, choreographers and composers to create a new play, Monkey King, with a total investment of 5 million yuan ($819,000). The play was soon a hit in Beijing, with performing commitments reaching 210 a year and generating 11 million yuan ($1.8 million) at the box office.

Since the success of Monkey King, the theater produced two or three new plays every year, both original stories and adaptations. All of them integrated a variety of art forms including dance, acrobatics and martial arts. The theater has developed many new forms of plays based on traditional puppet plays and managed to achieve innovation every time. In Young Confucius, for instance, some line-controlled puppets were replaced with large stage characters. When the two life-sized horse puppets "walked" from the entrance to the stage, enthusiastic cheering rose instantly from the audience.

But those innovations were also criticized by many. People blamed the theater for abandoning longstanding puppet play traditions. "There is a huge misunderstanding," Zhao said in defense. "Inheriting traditional art and innovating cultural industry are not contradictory."

In fact, the theater has invested 1 million yuan ($163,000) on reproducing a classic puppet play. It also arranged a performance schedule of 500 commitments a year for strictly classic plays. "It's difficult to simply rely on traditional plays. If we want to profit, we need innovation. But the classic and innovative are just like our right hand and left hand," Zhao said.

Art and business

Before coming to the China Puppet Theater, Zhao was renowned as a manager of international buildings. As the first certified property manager in China, Zhao had worked as general manager for several famous enterprises. Her experiences convinced her that a theater cannot survive fierce competition by merely having good plays.

"In Beijing, there are a lot of good plays and theaters already, but the problem is that people do not walk into the theaters to watch the good plays," Zhao said. "So we have to build a platform between plays and people's consumption, which is marketing."

Zhao passed this idea to her team, among which only four out of 154 are administrative staff. Others all focus on performing and marketing. "No theater in the world can feed itself on performing only," Zhao said, reminding her employees that art should serve the market. Even high-level executives have personal million-yuan sales targets to meet every year.

A total of 10 million yuan ($1.6 million) was invested on theater renovation to make it look like a fancy theme park to better attract children. The theater meanwhile signed contracts with 19 well-known brands including a fast food restaurant and English training institute, which will open stores in the new theater, filling two-fifths of the space, as parts of a plan to build an industrial chain.

In addition, the theater also keeps looking for partners to further explore the market. In 2012, the China Puppet Theater cooperated with the Beijing Zoo, converting an abandoned elephant house into an Animal Castle Theater with investment of 5 million yuan. In the following eight months, it attracted 330,000 visitors and box office revenue amounting to 8.31 million yuan ($1.36 million).

"Although we pursue benefits and strive to build an industrial chain, we never forget that the core value of a theater is its arts," Zhao said, insisting on strict standards for stories, music and directors, "because you have to be much more serious about your job when your customers are children."

Look into the future

In the past seven years, the China Puppet Theater's annual performing commitments increased by 10 times, and its audiences by 16 times. The total revenue has amounted to 215 million yuan ($35 million).

But Zhao told ChinAfrica that she still has an unfulfilled "Chinese dream." "I hope Chinese puppet plays can go to the international stage and entertain children around the world," she said. To achieve that, she believes that more transformation and reform are necessary for the old art troupes.

The theater is planning to establish five to eight Animal Castle Theaters in Dalian, Guangzhou, Shanghai and Chongqing, and to invest 400 million yuan ($65 million) in facility expansion in order to realize its ambition to become a leader of the children's cultural industry in China.