Not just your token foreigner

Mark Rowswell, aka “Dashan”, may be the most famous Canadian on the planet. It’s just as likely, however, that prior to coming to China, your average expat never heard of Rowswell, or his Dashan character.

For those of you still fresh off the plane, “Dashan” is the moniker bestowed on the character Rowswell played when first thrust onstage in front of a live television audience of 550 million during Spring Festival 1988. “Dashan” jolted the Chinese viewing public with his mastery of the language. Rowswell has since fashioned a career out of his command of the Chinese language. Along the way, he’s picked up his fair share of critics in the expat community, some of whom condemn his Dashan character for being China’s “token foreigner”.

Rowswell cogently defends himself against such charges, saying in an e-mail interview with City Weekend, “The way audiences relate to Dashan is . . . much more of a specific relationship rather than simply one with ‘the foreigner’ . . . The character I have developed by doing a wide variety of different things over the years has become a relatively unique entity . . . It’s not enough to simply be a Chinese-speaking foreigner, show up at an event and do what you’re told. That’s something I haven’t done in a very long time, in fact since almost the very beginning.”

Though his meteoric rise to fame was built mainly on his aptitude for crosstalk, a traditional Chinese counterpart to Western standup comedy, Dashan/Rowswell has since taken on dramatic roles, both on stage and screen. Despite his roots in comedy, however, he is only now beginning his first full-length stage comedy, playing harried Parisian Pierre Brochant in “Super Idiot,” a Chinese adaptation of “The Dinner Game”, by Francis Verber, the writer of “The Bird Cage”.

Rowswell candidly acknowledges the oddness of the linguistic mashup: “We’re a bunch of actors speaking Chinese, playing French characters in a story that takes place in Paris. Yet the performers are all from different parts of China, and one even comes from Canada. It’s a challenge for the audience to transcend this and accept our characters simply for what kind of people they are.”
So far, Chinese audiences seem up to the challenge. Super Idiot’s second engagement in Beijing is nearly sold out.

THE DETAILS

Super Idiot (超级笨蛋)

When: Sep 26-31, 7:30pm

Where: Ethnic Cultural Palace Theater: ¥80-¥680

Contact: 137-0107-8536