Amateur theatre and acting workshops in Beijing help foreigners hone their performance skills, and more importantly, become involved in local life, as Erik Nilsson finds out

The curtain is rising on a new type of cultural exchange between foreigners and locals in Beijing.

An increasing number of foreign-founded amateur theatre performances and acting workshops popping up throughout the city could create a dramatic shift in the capital city or at least on its amateur performance stage.

  
Left: Audience members at the Beijing Actors Workshop's Improv Night play a game to improve their acting skills. Participants read emotions and goals written on others' backs and try to achieve the goal while acting as if they are experiencing the listed emotional states.

Right: Members of the Beijing Actors Workshop perform a scene from Moulin Rouge.
  

"For the expat community, I think that making some sort of art, theatre or satire about ourselves and the city allows us to be a real part of this place, not just the transients we so often are, dipping our toes into China, but never really getting in," said American Jonathan Haagen, 25, of Durham, North Carolina.

Haagen recently played the role of a lusty laowai in the recently performed comedy, "I Heart Beijing." Written by 26-year-old American Elyse Ribbons, of Detroit, the satire deals with the typecasts of characters often found in the capital: the sassy American woman, the American-born Chinese (ABC) who constantly complains about being caught between two worlds, the domineering Chinese man, the Western womanizer who picks up harems of Chinese girls at English corners and the young Chinese woman trapped between modernity and tradition.

However, as the plot unfolds, these stereotypes are built up only to be torn down like a pre-Olympics Beijing skyline.

American Frances Chen, 36, of Chicago, who played the ever-complaining ABC, believes that the performance's mixed cast made the show more powerful.