Experimental Mime and Shadow Play: Nathan Zhe Talks ‘Snow in Midsummer: The Silence’
In the week leading up to the winter solstice, I sat down with a handful of local theatre-makers to reflect on the year, learn about people’s upcoming projects, and find out what was keeping them warm through the short, dark days of December. This interview with Nathan Zhe is the first in a series which will appear on the Kingston Theatre Alliance’s Performance Blog in the early months of 2025.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
To call Nathan Zhe the co-producer and director of Yu Theatre Society’s Snow in Midsummer: The Silence feels like an oversimplification of his role. After all, he’s also the show’s technical director, sound designer, and live sound programmer, as well as one of two student playwrights who adapted the 12th-century Chinese script to create a non-verbal performance using shadows and movement.
When we spoke in December, I was curious to know where Zhe’s relationship with theatre began. How did he become a creative and technical jack-of-all-trades? Now a third-year student in the Media and Performance Production (MAPP) program at Queen’s, Zhe was initially focused on filmmaking and coursework, but became more involved in theatre when he started working with Yu Theatre in fall 2023. “I jumped into a lot of projects last year. I worked on A Doll’s House as an actor, a set and prop designer, also as a devising team member. I also worked on Jingsha: The Journey as an assistant technical director.”
Yu Theatre was founded by a group of Queen’s drama students in 2018. “Before that, Kingston didn’t really have a space for Chinese plays. That’s why Nick [Fanzheng Wang] established this club dedicated to producing contemporary Chinese plays in Chinese, and it slowly evolved from there.”
Since the club’s inaugural production—Yiao Limei’s Rhinoceros in Love in 2019, which was directed by Wang and performed in Mandarin with English surtitles—Yu Theatre has been a unique space for Chinese international students at Queen’s to create innovative theatre in their mother tongue.
The group draws from a wide range of inspirations, adapting works by Chinese playwrights from the 20th and 21st centuries and classical works like zaju from the Yuan dynasty. They also take inspiration from plays in other languages, such as Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, which Yu Theatre reimagined and set in modern-day China.
While creating space for Chinese-language theatre has been a focus of Yu Theatre’s mission, their upcoming production, Snow in Midsummer: The Silence, will be told without words, using mime and shadow performance to bring to life a 12th-century play by Guan Hanqing.
Snow in Midsummer has been an exciting project for Zhe, who, with collaborator Lizhe Xu, had to undergo an intensive process to adapt the text. “There’s a lot of content in the original script, especially in the language, and some of the details in the dialogue that cannot be easily translated to movement. It would be too visually complicated, if you focused on too many visual details—the audience would be confused. So that’s been a challenge.
“The main focus is to give an overview of the story—to convey what happened in a way that is easy to comprehend and interpret. Since Snow in Midsummer is a famous Chinese play, it was also in the syllabus of DRAM 200 at Queen’s University. A lot of people will already know what’s going on, and [the plot] can be easily explained in three or four sentences. So we adapted it according to the simplest way to make the story accessible to everybody.”
Alongside his work with Yu Theatre, Zhe has spent the past year getting involved with other local performing arts projects, including Queen’s Theatre Troupe’s The Anger in Ernest and Ernestine and Hedda Gabler and Blue Canoe Theatrical Productions’ The Lightning Thief. “I’d say it was a super important growing period for me, having this intensive year working on different projects. It made me super busy, and it made me grow and learn a lot of practical skills as well. So that was super valuable.
“I learned a lot, because I worked in many different roles—backstage, on a technical level, and also moving toward the more creative aspect, as an actor. So I got tons of experience, and met a lot of cool people and new friends along the way, which made me super passionate about theatre production.”
Zhe looks forward to another busy semester as he works on projects with Yu Theatre, the DAN School’s Winter Major, and an as-yet unannounced Queen’s Musical Theatre production later this spring. In the meantime, he hopes that Snow in Midsummer, which opens at the Baby Grand tomorrow, will pique the curiosity of audiences in Kingston. “We’re doing experimental mime and shadow performance, which is something quite exciting for the whole Kingston community. So if you want to explore that and see how we’re going to make that work, definitely go see Snow in Midsummer.”
Nathan Zhe is an emerging arts administrator currently in his third year of Media and Performance Production. His interest ranges from the producing aspect of film to theatre production.
Yu Theatre Society presents ‘Snow in Midsummer: The Silence’ at the Baby Grand from January 14 to 18, 2025. Tickets and more information can be found here.
