In Wuzhen, all the world's a stage

Take a detour from the bustling streets of Wuzhen in Jiaxing, Zhejiang province, and you are likely to find yourself in one of many quiet alleyways that dot its canals and stone-paved paths.

One of them, Hongchang Long, is particularly popular with visitors, who can often be seen strolling or taking photos, drawn by the alley's unusual dimensions — it is 81.5 meters in length, but, at most, only 1.5 meters in breadth.

Paved with gray flagstones and flanked by the brick walls of ancient courtyards that rise 6 meters in height, when they look up, visitors only see a narrow strip of the sky, occasionally concealed by overhanging branches from the gardens on the other side of the walls.

One snowy day last year, when director Stan Lai, who is also co-founder and director of the Wuzhen Theater Festival, emerged from the Shen Estate Teahouse Theater, which lies just to the right of the alleyway and saw it in its wintry splendor, he had an idea.

This was to find a young director willing to take on the challenge of putting on a play in the alley. "But how could anyone stage a play in such a long, narrow space? It seemed like an impossible task," he says.

Then, this year, Huang Lei, co-founder and producing director of the festival, challenged Lai to create a site-specific production.

The two had collaborated on a conceptual play, Sleepwalk, in 2014. It was staged in an old house in Wuzhen and wasn't ticketed or promoted. When people walked in, they stumbled upon the actors, who would offer to guide them through the house and tell them a story.

Lai accepted the challenge and asked Huang to find a similar kind of house for the new production, but then quickly changed his mind. "Three minutes later, I texted back saying there was no need. I'd found the space, which was Hongchang Long alley. I'd also found the 'young director' — myself."

That "impossible task" and Lai's 41st production premiered at this year's 10th Wuzhen Theater Festival. Called The Long, Narrow Passageway, it begins by dividing the audience into two groups.

They then follow two "tour guides", who impart the alley's history. The groups enter from opposite ends of the alley, eventually meeting in the middle. There, the guides argue with each other about the correct direction of the tour, and discover in the process that they are actually the younger and older versions of the same person, and that they are meeting across time.

Following this encounter, the audience is taken into the Shen Estate Teahouse Theater, where the two versions of the same individual engage in conversations and debates about subjects including happiness, aging and the possibilities of life.

Lai says that he was allowed the freedom to convey his feelings without inhibition, and to drift in and out of dramatic structure for the production.

"Here at the festival, it doesn't really matter what genre or format the work you're seeing takes. What truly matters is how you feel when you see it," Lai says.

For its 10th edition, this year's festival is host to a range of international productions, some of which have also used Wuzhen's theater venues as settings.

Polish theater company Teatr Biuro Podrozy staged Eurydyka at the Water Theater. The iconic outdoor theater has a stage on the surface of a lake, with a broken bridge and traditional Chinese architecture as a backdrop.

The play is based on the ancient Greek myth of Eurydice and Orpheus. Soon after their marriage, Eurydice dies of a snakebite, and Orpheus journeys to the Underworld to bring her back.

Hades, god of the Underworld, permits Orpheus to take Eurydice away, on the condition that he does not turn to look at her on the way back to the world of the living. Toward the end of the return journey, Orpheus can't resist and turns around, seeing Eurydice, who then disappears like smoke on the wind.

Adapted and staged in 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic, director Pawel Szkotak says that the story has contemporary implications.

"I thought that when we use this myth about a love that is stronger than death, maybe we can find hope, both for us and the spectators," he says, adding that love is an eternal human theme.

When performing abroad, the troupe often chooses outdoor productions, as they tend not to feature elaborate dialogue, and so are easier for audiences from different countries or cultures to understand.

Before Szkotak arrived in Wuzhen, he was sent photos of the Water Theater and decided to make use of the venue's beautiful and symbolic setting.

He modified the beginning of the play, so that when Eurydice first appears, she arrives on a wooden rowboat, an interpretation of the scene where Eurydice crosses the River Styx to the Underworld.

"We have done many open-air performances, and we have to be open to the possibilities we find. So, we often change our performance a little to make use of the environment or the weather," Szkotak says.

"I can say that when we perform outdoors, we are always playing on a double set — one is the theater, and the other is the environment."

To make the most of the Ancient Courtyard Theater, director Ata Wong Chun-tat and his troupe Theatre de la Feuille, which was founded in Paris in 2010, staged Fall and Flow, a production that pays tribute to martial arts fiction and kung fu films.

Born and raised in Hong Kong, Wong grew up watching action films by directors like John Woo and Johnnie To.

"I love those movies and their tension, like the slow-motion sequences. Ever since I started in theater, I've thought this is a good way to express ourselves physically," he says.

Passionate about theater since secondary school, he began to study mime and was introduced to physical theater at the age of 14.

After graduating in modern dance from The Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, he studied physical acting at L'Ecole Internationale de Theatre Jacques Lecoq in Paris.

For the production, the performers underwent eight months of training, with around two or three days per week spent on acrobatics and kung fu, and one or two days on Yueju Opera originated in Guangdong province.

"It's like mixing up everything about movement and feeding it all to our performers. Most of them didn't have much experience of this kind of training before. We all know that it takes time for our bodies to really digest all that information, so we practiced every day," Wong says.

Adrian Leung, the main actor, says that he began learning martial arts when he was 8, and therefore didn't feel the training was too challenging. His real challenge lay in conveying the narrative through physical movements.

"The difficulty is how to use martial arts and Chinese opera for storytelling, so the audience understand the plot, not just so we show off our skills," Leung says.

"I believe that actors should continue to receive training, even after they graduate, to continue learning and making progress.

"Art is about constant innovation, and a feature of Theatre de la Feuille is that, when I'm rehearsing for a production, I'm also training and growing."