Aranya Festival unveils bold lineup of plays

The 2025 Aranya Theater Festival, themed on Sensibility and Sense, has unveiled the lineup for its Showcase unit, spotlighting nine cutting-edge productions selected from a pool of 387 proposals.

This year's Showcase edition also sees the launch of a bold new initiative — Idea — designed to explore the evolving boundaries of performance through interdisciplinary experimentation and speculative thinking.

Described by organizers as "keys rather than answers", the nine selected works challenge conventional theater structures and delve into themes spanning society, technology, emotion and human existence.

Among the standout entries are The Soap of Shaman by Li Ning, The Incident of White Rhinoceros by Li Ziyi, and Rashomon

by Zhang Tian. Each production offers a distinct theatrical vocabulary, contributing to a broader vision of what theater can be in a rapidly changing world.

The newly launched Idea section is not merely an extension of the festival program but a platform for radical rethinking. From AI-driven narratives and crypto-art to quantum theory and ecological memory, Idea invites thinkers, artists and technologists to reimagine theater as a living, borderless space.