The newly launched Sphinx Meta Theatre Festival in Beijing serves as a visual feast of theatrical performances supported by cutting-edge technology. The event kicked off on April 15 and will run through the May Day holiday, featuring 65 plays that can be enjoyed both online and offline.

The curtain-opener is a Chinese drama inspired by and named after Goethe’s "Faust." Performed at the capital’s Fengchao Theater, it combines traditional stagecraft with virtual reality.

In a way, the audience becomes part of the play, which posed a series of challenges for the production team.

Ma Yue, the play’s VR visual designer, said mixing real and virtual spaces presented numerous obstacles.

"I think this transition is actually a very important thing to think about. In other words, how do we seamlessly bring the audience from the virtual space back into the real space, while at the same time fully expressing the director's intentions” he asked.

From the performance to the set design, the possibilities offered by technology make for a more varied and exciting drama.

Meng Jinghui, who directs “Faust” and serves as the festival’s artistic director, said Sphinx Meta is a natural progression as the metaverse is steadily creeping into our everyday lives.

"In this era, aesthetics, art, technology and the humanities should be well integrated, including the idealism inherent in each of us. Put simply, the metaverse is a way of living and an accumulation of culture," Meng said.

According to the organizers, the Sphinx is used here as a symbol of mystery and imagination, referring to the unknown future of theatrical performances. Industry insiders say this is especially exciting as there is a growing trend for tech companies to get more involved in how art is made.

“The fusion of the arts with technology will create new forms of presentation that are constantly evolving. And I think it's the same with theater. It's a central vehicle for combining different technologies to produce new forms of content,” said Chen Yan, the CEO of NG Comic.

“So I wouldn't necessarily say that the theater is changing its essence, but rather it is building on the different technologies that we are developing at the moment to produce different forms of performance.”

The festival provides a platform for young directors to explore the future relationship between art and metaverse technologies, and to blur the boundaries between the creators and the audience.

It is being held in a number of cities in China, as well as in global cities like Paris and New York.

The goal of the Sphinx Meta Theatre Festival is to provide a challenging and inspiring space for the public, a place to explore the possibilities of theatrical performances – and an opportunity for fresh ideas about the future of drama.