Hello, and welcome to The Crush Bar, a weekly newsletter about theatre written by me, Fergus Morgan.

Over the next eight weeks or so, this newsletter is going to be pretty heavily focused on VAULT Festival, which returns to the caverns underneath London Waterloo for the first time since 2020 next week. Hooray.

There are, mostly, going to be two issues per week. On Mondays, I’m going to publish issues featuring my pick of five shows to see that week at VAULT. And on Fridays, I’m going to be sending out your regular, in-depth interview with artists, lots of whom will have shows on at VAULT. This is one of the latter - an interview with collective Ensemble Not Found.

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That’s all for now. More from me at the bottom, but first: Ensemble Not Found!

There is an abandoned city in China, deep in the Gobi Desert, that cannot be found on any map. Known only as Factory 404, it was built in the 1950s for a single purpose: to build a nuclear bomb.

“China gathered the best scientists, the best technicians, the best doctors, the best cooks, and put them in this utopian town so they could work together without any outside influences,” explains theatremaker He Zhang. “To everyone outside, it was called Gansu Mining District. To everyone inside, it was called Factory 404, and its entire purpose was to research and build nuclear weapons.”

Zhang is one fifth of London-based, East Asian experimental collective Ensemble Not Found. He came across Factory 404 while conducting research about the apocalypse, and was intrigued – just as he was also intrigued by the fatalistic online philosophy of doomer-ism, and by nuclear semiotics, the concept of communicating the danger of radioactive waste to future, non-human civilisations.

He was interested, too, in China’s historic relationship with the USSR, in how Soviet ideals of utopianism shaped Chinese life, and in the growing social phenomenon of Soviet nostalgia. “I grew up in Beijing, and my family taught me Soviet stuff,” Zhang reflects. “My grandpa would take me for a fancy meal at this restaurant called Old Moscow as a treat. It had Soviet architecture, and played Soviet music and served Soviet food. We watched Soviet films and listened to Soviet folk songs. There is an inherent nostalgia for those things in China, which is so fascinating.”

Together, these four themes – Factory 404, doomerism, nuclear semiotics, and Soviet nostalgia – form the core of Ensemble Not Found’s new production Project Atom Boi, which runs at VAULT Festival next week. It revolves around Yuanzi, a 20-year-old doomer living in London, who grew up in Factory 404.

What Project Atom Boi will involve beyond that, though, is difficult to say. Developed in workshops throughout 2022 and shared as a work-in-progress at Centre 151 and Theatre Deli – as part of the venue’s annual SHIFT+SPACE programme in September and December, the show is still taking shape.

“The first showing had a very linear storyline,” explains Vivi Wei, Ensemble Not Found’s stage manager. “The second showing incorporated more interactive game elements. We played a drawing and guessing game with the audience, which decided which parts of the show would be performed. The version that we perform at VAULT Festival will be slightly different again. It is exciting.”

“Our name is Ensemble Not Found, and that is what we are. A collective like ours has not existed in the UK before…”

Alongside theatremaker Zhang and stage manager Wei, Ensemble Not Found involves director Kiki Ye, actor Xiaonan Wang, and movement director Ting-Ning Wen. Zhang, Wei, Ye and Wang hail from different parts of China, Wen from Taiwain. They met via a combination of courses at East 15 Acting School, friends’ birthday parties, and workshops for other shows. Then, led by Zhang and Ye, the five of them formally formed a collective for the first round of research into Project Atom Boi in March.

“We have several things in common,” says Wei. “One is our mutual background as East Asian artists living and working in London. We all want to share our own culture and language with the theatre industry. And we all want to do things that have not been done before. Our name is Ensemble Not Found, and that is what we are. A collective like ours has not existed in the UK before.”

“The five of us are very different, with different interests and different skills, but we work well together,” adds Zhang. “We are comfortable with each other. We trust each other. That means we can play around with ideas, and go into stuff without an expectation of immediate success. We don’t have an artistic director or a producer. It is just the five of us, making decisions together.”

Project Atom Boi is Ensemble Not Found’s first full show, but the collective already has several other projects in the pipeline. A second show, Led By The Wind, a piece exploring the human impulse to fly and incorporating elements of documentary theatre, will be performed as work-in-progress at Camberwell’s Blue Elephant Theatre in late February. A third, Woo Woolf, is inspired by Virginia Woolf, and will be workshopped through Theatre Deli’s SHIFT+SPACE programme again in late March. The group have produced a podcast in Mandarin, too, and the “Ideas” page of its website bursts with other plans: Project Nighthawker, a piece centring around food and migration; Project Visa, a history of borders and passports.

“The first aim is for us all to stay in the UK,” says Zhang, when asked about the ensemble’s ambitions. “We are all migrant artists, so we will all face visa problems at some point. Beyond that, we just want to keep making work, and keep exploring ideas that interest us, for as long as we can.”

What do you want to do?

Wen: Expand Ensemble Not Found as a platform to explore performance making with artists from multi-disciplinary backgrounds.
Wang: Grow any idea that might bring more energy and hope into the world.
Wei: Try new things, survive doing the things we like, and explore deeper into the field that is not “found” yet.
Zhang: It is not found yet, so we are trying! As long as I’m not stuck in one creative place, I think I’ll be happy.
Ye: To care about the world and transform what we see and think into theatre. Ensemble Not Found grows and shifts with every one of us and the journey each of us ventures on.

What support do you need to get there?

Funding, international collaboration, industry connections, secure space to work, more connections, our community, and luck.

How can people find out more about you?

People can come and see Project Atom Boi at VAULT Festival next week. They can come and see Led By The Wind in February and Woo Woolf in March, too. Ting-Ning has a series of physical workshops lined up at Theatre Deli over the coming months, too.
And people can find us on Twitter, on Instagram, and via our website.

That’s it for now. I’ll be back in your inboxes on Monday with a pick of five shows to see during the first week of VAULT Festival - in addition to Ensemble Not Found’s Project Atom Boi, that is. There will be no issue next Friday, as I’m away on holiday, but I’ll be back the following week.

One final reminder about the various ways you can support this newsletter: you can share it with anyone you think might be interested, you can become a paid subscriber using the button at the top, or you can get in touch with me about using it for promotional purposes.

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That’s all. Thanks for reading. If you want to get in touch for any reason, just reply to this email or contact me via Twitter - I’m @FergusMorgan. See you in a week!

Fergus

The Crush Bar

Ensemble Not Found is innovatively exploring…