The Cheap Things project experiments with visibility: a Chinese theatre artist living in the Czech Republic livestreams fragments of her ordinary life on a Chinese social media platform. Everyday routines, rehearsals, frustrations and small joys slowly become digital content shared with an unseen audience far away. While viewers in China watch out of curiosity about life in Europe, the material generated through this process returns to the theatre stage. Between these two gazes — online viewers in China and spectators in Europe — the performance explores how distant worlds imagine each other through images, media narratives, and historical fantasies.
Ran Jiao
A Chinese performance maker based in Prague, working between theatre and dance as a director, dancer, performer and maker. Trained in classical drama, she later shifted toward expanded performance practices when existing theatrical languages could not fully hold her lived experience as a migrant body. She began developing her work from this gap.
Her practice sits at the intersection of body, costume, and performative formats. She approaches performance as a site of translation — from language to embodiment, from material to agency, and from lived experience to shared form — where personal and political realities become materially entangled. Thematically, her work moves across the personal, social, ecological, and political. A graduate of DAMU in Prague, she has collaborated with festivals and institutions including Bazaar Festival, Tanec Praha, Prague Quadrennial, Berliner Festspiele, National Theatre New Stage, National Gallery of Prague, Tantehorse and S.ES.TA, etc, and has worked with directors and choreographers such as Wayne Jordan and Alice Chauchat.