Dashan Dishes on the Challenges of Standup Ahead of March 30 Bookworm Gig

Even though he's performed for TV audiences of 1 billion, Mark Rowswell's first bit of big exposure outside of China's borders left him flustered to the point of flubbing the whole thing. The famed crosstalk star and CCTV Spring Festival gala mainstay sometimes recounts this funny debacle during his recent and upcoming Chinese language standup shows like his forthcoming April 13 Melbourne International Comedy Festival gig, along with occasional English language appearances like the one he'll make at The Bookworm tonight (March 30, as part of a Foreign Correspondents Club of China event). The bit about his very public bombing goes like this: During the 2008 Beijing Olympics he was asked by The Today Show host Matt Lauer about what it was like to be Dashan (or "Big Mountain"), China's biggest foreign celebrity.

"I thought 'This is my big chance, I'm going to become famous in America now!'" Rowswell tells the Beijinger over the phone ahead of his Bookworm appearance. But the first question that Lauer asked Rowswell threw him off. "He said: 'I hear you're really famous in China. Could you tell us just how famous you are?' How are ya supposed to answer a question like that?'" Rowswell says with a chuckle, before recalling how he stammered through a muddled answer.

When he tells this story onstage, Rowswell follows up the Lauer letdown with a redemptive conclusion: he continued working day-to-day at the Olympic Games, and during the closing ceremonies he spotted Yao Ming. On his way to snap a selfie with the legendary basketball player, Rowswell realized Yao was surrounded by fans clamoring for an autograph. "I thought 'Oh, give him a break. Let him enjoy the moment, because this really is a great moment for him and his country.' So I turned my back and thought 'Maybe another time.'" But sure enough, a few moments later, Rowswell felt a tap on his shoulder. When he turned around there was Yao towering over him, grinning widely with a camera in hand and asking in a deep booming voice: "Dashan! Can I get a picture with you?"

"So the next time I see Matt Lauer, I'll tell him: 'When I run into Yao Ming, he asks me for a photo. That's how famous I am,'" Rowswell says. Such behind-the-scenes anecdotes have been doing well at his recent string of standup shows, which have all but replaced the glitzy gala gigs and more conventional crosstalk performances that first allowed him to show off his Mandarin proficiency and, in turn, made him a megastar on the Mainland in the 90s.

"I enjoy taking the piss out the 'Dashan' image a bit with these standup shows. Everyone knows me from television and my image from CCTV, but what this is is a live show where I tell people the real story," he says of the gigs that usually take place at university campus theaters for audiences of 500-800 20-somethings. The 51-year-old Rowswell says that he grew up listening to classic Steve Marin and Eddie Murphy comedy LP's as a boy in his native Ottawa, Canada, before graduating high school and studying Mandarin at the University of Toronto in the mid-80s and moving on to Peking University on a scholarship as the decade came to a close. The Mandarin prodigy became a sensation in China for his deft mastery of 相聲 xiàngsheng crosstalk and comedic skits in Mandarin, before going on to host the ESL series Dashan and Friends and Dashan's Adventures, along with making more appearances than any other foreigner on CCTV's widely watched New Year's Gala.

He'll touch on those successes at his appearance tonight, which will be an informal Q&A for the Foreign Correspondents Club of China. But Rowswell will dedicate most of tonight's engagement to speaking about his current focus on live standup in Mandarin, and how it's an exciting new challenge that has kept him from growing complacent.

"What many of us foreigners often have to do on Chinese TV is demonstrate skills in the Chinese traditional arts," Rowswell says. "So that's nice, I've paid my dues there. But I don't want to do anymore tests, thank you – now I'm doing something that's a bit more my own, and something that's closer tied to real life in China. The best way to describe it is "the Dashan story. It's a face to face evening with Dashan where you get to hear the back story that wasn't on TV."

"The TV image is polished, everything we've done has been rehearsed," he continues. "And everything you're doing there, as an actor, is relatively passive. You have a role to play, it's a director's medium, and you're trying to play your role as best you can. But the stage is really a performer's medium. It's a direct dialogue between me the performer and the audience."

Rowswell performs this Dashan Live set in Mandarin, and will tour comedy festivals in Melbourne, Sydney, and Auckland in the coming weeks. His Melbourne International Comedy Festival gig will be April 13 and will be the only Chinese language performance at the fest, drawing on an audience of Chinese expatriates that want to see Dashan perform in a new style in their adopted homeland. He has also performed Dashan Live before Chinese audiences in Canada, America, and Europe, and hopes to continue touring the world in this fashion.

"It's a neat goal to aim for: can I take this thing that I've been working on in China, which is made for a cosmopolitan Chinese audience, and pull it off at a 500-seat theater as a major festival act?" Rowswell says of the set that he has spent the past few years honing at venues like Kung Fu Comedy, a Western-style comedy club in Shanghai, along with college campus gigs in Beijing and other Chinese metropolises. In China the shows have been huge successes – he sells out the theaters and, while he doesn't get heckled, do crowd work or encounter other troupes that Western comics typically face (because Chinese crowds typically aren't as rowdy as Western standup attendees), Rowswell relishes the real time connection with an audience that is eager to get to know him better, and that in-the-moment intimacy has proven hugely motivating.

While he's excited by the prospect of bringing that experience abroad, and confident that Chinese expats are hungry for such shows, it hasn't been easy to pioneer such performances. Something as seemingly simple as selling the tickets has been cumbersome, for instance, because the Melbourne festival usually uses Ticketmaster while Chinese patrons almost exclusively stick to WeChat  to purchase tickets for shows. "On a practical level it's tough, and there's a chance this might not work," Rowswell says of his upcomming Melbourne gig, and while his anxiety is somewhat audible his gleeful anticipation rings all the louder.

After sorting out such logistics and touring the set successfully in several cities abroad, Rowswell's next goal is to perform Dashan Live in front of a Chinatown audience perhaps in Toronto or another locale he is very familiar with, while also having a camera crew in tow, and then have the recorded special available for his fans online, Louis C.K.-style. He'd be starting from scratch again while working through the details of such video distribution, seeing as the Chinese market remains untapped in that regard-- yet another hurdle that seems irresistible to Rowswell.

However, the truly motivating factor behind Rowswell's burgeoning Chinese standup career is identical to his reasons for not wanting to become an English language comic – he wants to perform in Mandarin and connect with a Chinese audience on a deeper level.

"People always say 'He's famous in China' but that's just a label, they don't know the Dashan story," he says. "And what really turns my crank is breaking out of your own cultural bubble, doing something in a totally different environment. I've never really been interested in being a China expert, explaining China to a Western audience. Most of us foreigners learn about China from people like Peter Hessler, who go to China and write these great books, but when was the last time we read a book about China that was written by a Chinese person?"

He adds that such first hand insights are equally scarce for Chinese audiences. "They rarely get information about the West from someone who isn't Chinese," he says, a void that leaves him with an enticing opportunity: "That's what I try to do as a Westerner, come here and speak the Chinese language to a Chinese audience. And hopefully they'll get some impression or understanding of the West from me directly."

Dashan will speak at The Bookworm tonight, March 30, from 7-8pm. Tickets include a drink and cost RMB 75 for the general public or RMB 65 for Bookworm members. FCCC members get in for free. Book a seat via Yoopay here. The FCCC Happy Hour will be held after the event in the Bookworm bar from 8pm onwards. 

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Email: kylemullin@truerun.com
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Photos: China Daily, Huffington Post, Dashan.com, The Atlantic