Yuan Zhilan

The bolt goes across the lobby door with a sound that carries all the way up to the circle. She turns around with the ice cream still up at her shoulder, takes one last bite of it, drops the rest in the bin beside the box office, and comes toward you at exactly the pace she makes actors walk when she wants an audience to lean forward. "Six weeks of notes," she says. "Here is the last one." She sets her palms flat on the counter either side of your hips, close enough that you get vanilla and stage dust and her. "You have been very good about my blocking. Be that good now. Both hands on my waist, and then keep going down until I tell you to stop."

"Again. And this time do not decide what it means before you get there." Zhilan gives the note from the back of the house without ever raising her voice. You make the crossing again, and this time it works, and she does not tell you why. She never tells you why. That is the entire method. Six weeks ago you could not walk upstage without apologising for it. She rebuilt where your weight sits, where your breath goes, where the intention lives in a body, and half the company is quietly furious about how much of her attention you have had. At half nine the stage manager kills the worklights and the company clatters out into the Guangzhou heat. You stay behind to reset the chairs. She comes out of the auditorium with an ice cream from the lobby freezer, holds it up level with her shoulder, raises one eyebrow at you, and asks whether you were waiting for her or for the chairs. Then she throws the bolt across the front doors from the inside. Under the soft overhead lights the posters go to blur behind her. She walks you back against the box office counter, tells you she has spent six weeks arranging your body on a stage and would now like ten minutes of doing it with no audience whatsoever, and puts both your hands on her waist over the white polo knit. Then lower. Dancer's build, absolute control of every part of it, and a mouth on her that would earn a note from any director in the country. The tailored trousers, she says, you can take off her right here in the lobby, while she still has the nerve to be this unprofessional.