Wuzhen Theater Festival: The other side of an ancient town

World
Europe

When tickets became available two months ago, the 5th Wuzhen Theater Festival sold out 15 of its 24 plays in about an hour.

The annual international festival, which kicked off on October 18 and continues until October 29, has gradually become one of the most significant symbols of Wuzhen, a traditional water town in east China’s Zhejiang Province. The town has a history that traces back 7,000 years.

Handout photo from Wuzhen Theater Festival.

During the 10-day festival, a total of 100 performances from 24 productions and 12 invited countries including Russia, Germany and the UK, will be shown at the seven indoor theaters. Productions are organized into five sections: “Classics Revisited,” “Female Perspectives,” “Multimedia Productions,” “Physical Theater,” and “New Voices.”

Handout photo from Wuzhen Theater Festival.

The Wuzhen Theater Festival, jointly founded by the chairman of Culture Wuzhen Chen Xianghong, award-winning playwright and theater director Stan Lai, well-known Chinese actor Huang Lei and highly-reputed experimental drama pioneer Meng Jinghui, is welcoming its fifth year since the first Wuzhen Theater Festival was launched in 2013.

In last four years, the festival has been expanding, with a total of 65 plays, 218 performances, 16 theater activities and more than 5,100 carnivals, attracting nearly 100,000 theatergoers and almost a million tourists

The Wuzhen Theater Festival. /Photo via sohu.com

Chen Xianghong summarized the past five years as "the renaissance of a town," which has broadened the Chinese vision of plays and presented a window to Chinese theaters on the world stage, making this astonishingly charming water town known to a foreign audience.

Because the Wuzhen Theater Festival has attracted a large number of young people and young artists, the town has transformed from a "tourist town" to an "art scene."

"It is now hard to imagine Wuzhen without a theater festival," Chen said.

The town has become busier in the last four years, with a larger number of theater productions and outdoor carnival events.

The view in Wuzhen. /Photo via sohu.com

The Wuzhen Theater Festival is often compared to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Britain and the Avignon Theater Festival in France, even though its co-founders said they did not refer to any foreign festivals when planning the festival.

There is no doubt Wuzhen has made its way onto the international cultural landscape with its annual theater festival.