Street scenes

A new performance transforms the theater into an ancient town. Xu Lin reports.

It's a bustling ancient street full of people clad in traditional white robes. A boy vendor who's carrying a big tray of steamed buns suddenly falls over. A woman using scissors to make a traditional Chinese paper-cut asks if you've recently seen her relative. These scenes from the late Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) come from director Wang Chaoge's latest work, Another Glance at Pingyao. The production, which took a year and a half to complete, will debut in February in Shanxi's Pingyao city. Tickets cost 298 yuan ($47.80). "It's rare to see such a performance, which is more like a living museum or time-travel experience," Wang says. "Sometimes, we're witnesses and sometimes involved. So, we get the whole story through the fragments our ancestors have left behind." Impression Liu Sanjie, which Wang co-directed with Zhang Yimou and Fan Yue in 2003, remains one of China's most popular and profitable performances. The Impression series now has seven installments, all of which are set on famous mountains, or the banks of renowned rivers or lakes.

Pingyao, a UNESCO World Heritage site, attracts tens of thousands of tourists every year who come to see its well-preserved old quarters, which boast a history spanning more than 2,700 years.