Wuzhen in October: China’s Water Town Becomes a Stage
Since 2013 the canal town of Wuzhen has held a ten-day theatre festival each autumn, with international companies in its theatres and hundreds of performers in its lanes and on its boats.
Wuzhen is one of the old water towns of the Yangtze delta, in Zhejiang province, between Shanghai and Hangzhou. Its canals, stone bridges and timber houses were restored in the early 2000s and it became a popular place for day trips. Since 2013 it has had a second identity. For ten days each October it is the setting of the most important theatre festival in China.
The founders
The festival was created by four people. Chen Xianghong is the developer who led the restoration of the town. Huang Lei is an actor who had filmed a television drama there and proposed the idea. Stan Lai, from Taiwan, is the best known playwright and director in the Chinese-speaking world, and Meng Jinghui is the leading director of experimental theatre in Beijing. Their model was Avignon and Edinburgh, where a festival takes over a whole town.
What happens
The programme has four parts. The invited plays bring companies from abroad and from across China. In 2017, for example, there were 24 productions from twelve countries, giving about a hundred performances. A competition for young theatre artists presents short new works, and has launched a number of careers. A series of talks puts directors and actors in front of the public.
The fourth part is the carnival. Throughout the festival, more than a thousand free performances take place out of doors, on bridges, quays, squares and boats. They include mime, puppets, dance, music, acrobats and folk opera, and they are what most visitors remember.
The theatres
The main venue is the Wuzhen Grand Theatre, built for the festival and designed by the Taiwanese architect Kris Yao. It has two auditoriums back to back, one of 1,200 seats and one of 600, and is shaped like a twin lotus on the water, with a facade of angled brick and a screen of latticed wood. Other performances are given in an old open-air theatre on the water, in converted warehouses and in a former silk factory.
Planning a visit
The festival takes place in the West Scenic Zone, the larger of the town’s two restored districts, which is closed to cars and entered by ticket. Seats for the main productions are released in September and the famous names sell out in minutes. The carnival needs no booking. Many visitors come without tickets and are content.
Staying inside the zone makes all the difference, since the day visitors leave at dusk and the lanes are lit by lanterns. The inns within it are booked far ahead for the festival. Just outside the old town, Alila Wuzhen is a modern interpretation of a water town in white walls and still pools.
Wuzhen is about an hour and a half by road from Shanghai and an hour from Hangzhou. The nearest high-speed station is Tongxiang. October is also the best month in the delta for weather. The town has a contemporary art exhibition in some years, held in the same silk factory and in a rice barn, which has shown Ai Weiwei, Marina Abramovic and Anish Kapoor.