About Us

Tian Gebing

Director

Tian Gebing, born in Xi’an in 1963, theater director, has been one of the outstanding personalities in China’s independent theater scene since the 1990s. Already during his studies at the Central Theater Academy, he began to search for alternative, experimental forms of performance and came into contact with the independent theater scene in Beijing.

He is involved in numerous independent experimental projects in the nineties before founding the “Paper Tiger Theater Studio” in 1997, a platform in which performance artists, dancers, literary figures, musicians, visual artists, as well as people from all kinds of other social backgrounds work together. The central starting point of the theater work is the immediate reality

of Chinese society and the search for new forms of expression for

a contemporary theater in China.

Since 2010, he has increasingly turned to transcultural theater practice.

In this context, for example, the production “Totally Happy” (2014) is created in co-production with the Münchner Kammerspiele. This is followed, among others, by “Dekalog” (2016, Stary Teatr Krakow), “500 Meters: Kafka, Great Wall, Images from the Unreal World and Daily Heroism”

(2017, Thalia Theater Hamburg / Festival Theater der Welt)

and “Heart Chamber Fragments” (2021, Münchner Kammerspiele).

Since 2019 he also lives and works in Berlin. Here he recently

directed “Her Face”, a performance project in eight private apartments.