From an application to a first shared reading
In her published interview, An Xirui describes seeing a casting notice shared by a friend, submitting her résumé, receiving the script, and sending back an analysis and an audition recording. Her first meeting with the team ended with a reading alongside Wu Hao. A role advertised in a notice had become two performers working on the same dialogue.[S2] Wu's account adds the practical question of time. When Cao Jiansong first invited him, he explained that he worked during the day and needed time to reach rehearsals in the evening. On the second invitation he agreed to join, recalling that he arrived three days later. Finding performers also meant finding hours in which they could work together.[S3]
What is our relationship in this scene?
Rehearsal did not immediately make the characters clear. An recalls struggling to grasp changes in her character's state and finding her performance caught in the emotions on the surface of the dialogue. Wu describes impressions of his character as fragments he could not assemble.[S2][S3] Cao starts from how the script was written: dialogue developed line by line, rather than following a predetermined plot and set of characters. He initially wanted the two figures and their relationship to remain abstract. Rehearsal made him recognise the performers' need for something specific to work with. His revised approach was to establish a relationship within each scene while allowing it to differ from one scene to the next.[S1] This suggests a question for a viewer: how do the two people treat each other here, and does that relationship still hold in the next scene? It is a reading question drawn from the interview. The sources provide no scene-by-scene relationship chart from which to supply fixed answers.
An additional story, and a revised assumption about age
An also recalls the director writing another story when the performers struggled to feel their characters. That additional script helped them approach the characters' inner activity. She describes it as support received in rehearsal; the additional text is not available here, so its scenes and dialogue cannot be reconstructed.[S2] Wu recalls initially imagining a middle-aged character distant from his own experience. He credits Liang Yin with helping him recognise that helplessness and numbness were not confined to that age. He could begin from something closer, without first building a remote image and then trying to reach it.[S3] These are different forms of work. One supplies a situation; the other changes a performer's starting assumption. Alongside scene-specific relationships, they show several ways of approaching an abstract text. The performers describe improvements in understanding and collaboration, but these are pre-performance accounts. How spectators received the changes requires evidence of the performance itself.
Imagining an audience in the round
Cao had considered seating the audience around the acting area, then abandoned that proposal because of venue constraints. He also recalls finding some blocking through the performers in rehearsal and changing other ideas when they proved unsuitable on site. Rehearsals were still continuing when he gave the interview.[S1] Stage and visual designer Gao Pengfei describes another aspect of the work. A limited budget required simple means, while his concern was to connect space with speech, bodies, performers and spectators, instead of leaving form isolated from the action.[S4] The accounts describe different constraints and choices. Reading them together does not reconstruct a documented design meeting between the two makers. The abandoned seating proposal also distinguishes an idea from the eventual performance. This article has no final seating plan, and a circular object would not establish that spectators sat in the round.
Keeping the work attached to its contributors
The performance information in all four articles credits Cao Jiansong as writer and director, Gao Pengfei with stage and visual design, Xu Jinjiang with publicity and ticketing, and An Xirui and Wu Hao as performers. Liang Yin appears in Wu's account as someone who offered performance advice; this contribution does not establish an additional formal production role.[S1][S2][S3][S4] These credits connect writing, performance, space and publicity while directing readers back to each contributor's account. Existing studies discuss playable relationships, spatial changes and the relation between scene-specific choices and changing characters.[R1][R2][R3]
From interviews to rehearsal records
Two existing public BODY rehearsal access copies offer another route into the material: one registered as 6 September runs 9 minutes 40 seconds, and one registered as 8 September runs 18 minutes 6 seconds.[V1][V2] These are full-copy viewing links for exploring performance and space. The title dates follow the source register. Shots, speakers and actions have not been matched individually to the adjustments recalled in the interviews. The questions in this article can guide viewing without serving as predetermined answers.
Sources and dates
All four interviews were published on 8 September 2022 as part of one series. They are not four independent investigations, nor does the publication date establish a shared interview date. Relative dates within the accounts do not fully agree. The closing information announces a performance for 9 September; an announcement alone does not establish its outcome. This article is edited from published interviews only, without private conversations, inferred identities in rehearsal footage or invented video timestamps.