Shadow puppets take the spotlight

Performances of a fading art form add a special flavor to the Wuzhen Theater Festival, Chen Nan reports. 

People snap photos and clap as a mime performs on a street corner. A group of young theater students present impromptu performances on another.

These scenes in Zhejiang province's 1,300-year-old water town, Wuzhen, played out amid the Wuzhen Theater Festival, which has drawn visitors and artists from around the world to live shows at indoor and outdoor venues every October for the past five years.

This year's festival ran from Oct 18 to 28.

This year, 22 shows and 11 workshops presented by the Wannan Shadow Play and Opera Art Troupe, a group of five shadow-puppet artists from Anhui province's Xuancheng city (Wannan refers to the southern part of Anhui), were the highlights of the festival.