Chasing Artistic Rigor and a Mass Audience at Once, the Wuzhen Theatre Festival May Be Theater's Predicament in Miniature

A theater festival is not only a cultural occasion; it is also a mass event — and stacking the two on top of each other tends to cause trouble.

On Xizha Street in Wuzhen, colored theater banners hang from the eaves on both sides, each printed with the portrait of a famous theater figure in bright, saturated color. The design has more than a hint of Meng Jinghui about it.

From October 18 to 28, the whole of Wuzhen turned colorful, with open-air carnival acts in every street and alley. More than a thousand spectators hurried from one theater to the next, and even late at night or in the small hours you could find enthusiasts gathered and talking at the bars along the river. But behind these thriving scenes, this year's slate of invited productions at the Wuzhen Theatre Festival was still a little top-heavy.

The first half held most of the works people were watching for: Meng Jinghui's opening production of Teahouse, Hamburg's Thalia Theater with Dancer in the Dark, Chin Shih-chieh's Experimental Actors Studio, Tadashi Suzuki's Springtime in the North — famous directors, famous companies. The second half carried less weight. Some viewers' enthusiasm drained away in their reviews, and reporters, short on time and stamina, would now and then hand tickets back at the last minute.

Still, set against the narrow criteria by which last year's invited productions were picked, this year's turn toward variety gave the festival a new charge of energy — the organizers had, after all, set this year's theme as Magnanimity.

The festival's official account said that this was its largest edition in six years by number of productions, the widest in geographic range and the richest in the subjects it took on, and that these stylistically varied works would all stay close to the theme of Magnanimity. Over the full run, the idea of what counts as "theater" was stretched a long way — but as the borders of art blurred and ran into one another, ordinary audiences faced a stiffer test.

1. "It felt like the elite trying to talk to the masses, and meeting its Waterloo."

On October 18, the curtain rose at the Wuzhen Grand Theatre and a huge wheel, running floor to ceiling, appeared in front of everyone. It was 19 meters long, 16 meters deep and 11 meters tall — the largest single set in the career of Zhang Wu, the designer who has worked with Meng Jinghui for years. It carved up the playing space, splitting the stage into several parts, and the actors even ran across its curved face. Its silver-white metallic glare stood for the industrial age, and gave off a chill of its own.

In an interview with Qianjiang Evening News, Meng Jinghui explained why he had staged Teahouse: partly to carry on the finest parts of the original, and partly because there was something in its spirit he could let his imagination roam through.

"If you insist on calling it subversive, then maybe what it subverts is the imagination. Everyone knows the plot, so why do it that way again? It's about how we young people look at history, how we young creators walk together into a new space — a space of aesthetics, of personal imagination, of collective work, of collective knowledge piling up."

As the opening production, Teahouse impressed with its stage effects and the ambition of its adaptation, but not every viewer could take it. Weibo filled with harsh reviews. One read: "In under half an hour it quoted a few lines from Lao She's play, and all the rest was a madman's performance-art show." The same viewer added: "Please don't wreck a classic, and don't ride on Lao She to make crazy money off your own name."

Sun Xiaoxing's The Cherry Orchard set off a similar argument. Sun's long-standing subject is the relationship between the internet, reality and the stage; this time he took apart Chekhov's classic using anime and video-game culture, and drew the deepest incomprehension of anything at the festival.

When people came for Lao She, for Chekhov, for "the classics," many felt more than confusion — they felt indignation. They wanted the classics to stay the way classics are.

Before the show, one audience member said he would happily pay above face value for a ticket to The Cherry Orchard; half an hour in, he could not stand it and walked out. "It was terrible," he said. On Weibo the bad reviews came in waves: "Aren't those projections just game ads?" "Is throwing in dating-sim visuals and emoticon bullet comments what 'Magnanimity' means?" "I'm not prejudiced against anime-style dance. I just think using this kind of otaku dance for the ball scene in Chekhov's script shouldn't exist, no matter how you adapt it."

Only a few said they liked it: "This is theatrical expression and experiment that folds internet culture into a classic text — very fresh, very virtual, very dreamlike. I think people who are good with memes, who spend time on Bilibili and who are open to new things will like it. It's a surprise at the festival, and it points toward the future."

In an interview, Sun Xiaoxing sorted the bad reviews into three kinds: first, that the "sanctity" of a classic must not be defiled; second, the stigma attached to anime and game culture in China today; third, that he had asked his actors to perform in a seemingly "childish" style, which audiences read as amateurish.

He said plainly that anyone who came to Wuzhen to watch theater in the spirit of tourism, holiday and leisure, hoping for slick multimedia and sensory pleasure, would not find it in The Cherry Orchard.

Li Jianjun's Popular Mechanics used non-professional performers, focusing on the sense of ritual and the empathy that ordinary people build inside a brief span of performance time and space. With ordinary people rather than "actors" on stage, the director set out to explore how their very different temperaments and life experiences shift the boundaries between character, lines, reality and self.

Plenty of people could not make sense of untrained performers standing on a stage. One viewer wrote on Weibo: "Theater has to be set apart from the real world. Theater lifts reality up; it does not exist in the real time and space of this moment. The boundary between performance and reality, and between actor and audience, should be discussed inside the context of the theater."

Man Ding, artistic director of Beijing's Zhongjian Theatre, who follows the international avant-garde closely and is known for taste that runs ahead of the field, put it this way: "The argument over Popular Mechanics feels like the elite trying to talk to the masses, and meeting its Waterloo."

2. Who Is the Core Audience?

Xiaochan, at the Wuzhen Theatre Festival for the first time, watched Popular Mechanics in pouring rain. She liked the choice of untrained performers.

"Your identity and your awareness make up who you are, and they make up your taste in theater too. Grassroots and elite aren't opposites — The Count of Wulong Mountain and The Cherry Orchard, Stephen Chow and Macbeth, and so on. All art has to be interpreted by an individual. The director's choice of people was interesting too: art lovers from an older generation and a younger one, model operas and dubbed foreign films, musicals and physical dance-theater, and people with disabilities taking part as well."

After she posted her impressions on Weibo, the amateur performer who had done The Count of Wulong Mountain in Northeastern dialect in Popular Mechanics liked her post. "He must have searched the keywords himself. Pretty funny," she said.

Xiaochan is a diligent art lover: exhibitions, theater, film, squeezed into every gap outside work. Asked what she hopes to get from plays and shows, she said, "A sense of how other people see the world."

Seeing varied work, unlike her usual theatergoing, matters to Xiaochan. But coming to Wuzhen as an art lover in the broad sense, she noticed something off in the arguments: "Audiences at exhibitions, at contemporary art shows, can accept not 'getting it.' Even very senior people in the field I deal with through work will sometimes admit they can't understand a particular piece. Theater audiences don't think that way. A lot of them can't accept not understanding something. There really is a gap in mindset."

Zhu Ying has come to the Wuzhen Theatre Festival six years running; at the start her only reason was to chase a star. At the first festival in 2013, Stan Lai's production of A Dream Like a Dream, starring Hu Ge, played at the Wuzhen Grand Theatre. Li Yuchun was in the same cast. Hu Ge's fans (the "Peppers") and Li Yuchun's fans (the "Corns") made up part of the crowd that first year.

Zhu Ying came for Hu Ge. She told QDaily that back then you did not buy through the mainstream ticketing sites, and you had no idea whether you had landed a ticket until customer service called to tell you; getting one felt like winning a lottery. A Dream Like a Dream was the first play Zhu Ying ever saw, and she became a devoted theatergoer — over the past two years she has averaged 70 to 80 productions a year.

From 2016 on, Zhu Ying started attending the festival for its full run. Asked about the cost she winced, but she added it up carefully all the same: "I see 15 shows a festival, about 300 yuan each on average. Lodging outside Xizha is cheap — a hostel bed is a little over 20 yuan, and the price hasn't gone up in years. Food, meals and snacks together, comes to about 100 yuan a day, and late-night food and drinks with friends is another 100 or so." All told, a year of the Wuzhen Theatre Festival costs her close to 7,000 yuan.

Watching plays in Wuzhen is no longer Zhu Ying's only reason for coming. Seeing friends, talking, drinking have become the greater comfort, and that atmosphere exists only here. This year she watched with a few close friends, and they had a T-shirt printed on their own initiative, half self-mockery and half devotion: a line of Chinese characters reading "Wuzhen Isn't Worth It," and under it, in English, "WE ARE STILL HERE."

This year, watching Chin Shih-chieh's Experimental Actors Studio, Zhu Ying cried the whole way through, and afterward she and her friends hugged and cried together. An hour later Chin Shih-chieh walked out of the theater with staff beside him, and Zhu Ying and her friends happened to be walking alongside and ended up in the frame. She posted to her WeChat Moments: "Right now I think Wuzhen is absolutely worth it." She said she will come again next year.

There is another kind of audience member: the one who buys the "Grand Slam."

The Grand Slam is an official Wuzhen package holding one top-price ticket to each of this year's 28 invited productions (The Cherry Orchard could not be fitted in because of scheduling conflicts). It costs a little over 10,000 yuan. A week before tickets officially went on sale, Qiangwei (a pseudonym) took the last of the 10 Grand Slam places. She said each Grand Slam holder this year spent somewhere between 15,000 and 26,000 yuan on the trip in total.

Qiangwei's first Wuzhen Theatre Festival was last year, when she saw 16 productions. Having spent years on the agency side of advertising, she brought that planning habit to Wuzhen: a month before last year's opening she made a special trip to scout the town, measuring the distances between theaters so she would have time to get from one to the next; also last year, unhappy with where she was staying, she switched lodgings at the last minute. On April 17 this year she started her current job, and the timing was deliberate — after six months she would be entitled to 10 days of paid annual leave, and this year's festival opened on October 18.

Weighing their time and energy, some Grand Slam buyers sell off part of their tickets, but Qiangwei watched all 28 without tiring and wrote a short review of nearly every one. She treats these 11 days as an escape from ordinary life. Back in Shanghai, she shared a post from the festival's official account and wrote: "One charge, a year of battery life."

One more detail: after she bought the Grand Slam, Wuzhen staff booked her a single room. All lodging inside the Xizha scenic area, where the festival takes place, goes through the official channel. It is at moments like this that Wuzhen's other identity shows itself: a tourist attraction.

3. Who Is the Festival For?

After six years of work, this festival, started by Huang Lei, Meng Jinghui, Stan Lai and Chen Xianghong, has become the largest and most prestigious in China, and every year it counts as an event for the whole theater world. Since theater is by nature "an absolutely niche pursuit," the Wuzhen Theatre Festival may be its one chance each year to draw much attention from outside.

The festival's origins go back 11 years. Huang Lei, then performing in Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land, took a liking to the Water Theatre; Chen Xianghong, chairman of Wuzhen Co., Ltd., agreed at once, and Stan Lai and Meng Jinghui joined in. The four became co-founders, and it took four years of formal preparation before the first festival opened.

Theater has plainly become the cultural element that separates Wuzhen from every other old water town, but the core theater audience is still a small one. To widen the customer base, Wuzhen has tried many things, and tying itself to popular idols is one of them.

On October 12, six days before the opening, the festival's official Weibo account posted an "apology statement." A staff member had made inappropriate remarks on Weibo, and the organizers apologized to Chen Linong and his management team.

It began when Wuzhen invited contestants from Idol Producer and Produce 101 to film a promotional video. In the edit, Chen Linong's line "I'm Chen Linong" was cut, leaving only the words "Wuzhen Theatre Festival," and when the official account posted the video and tagged each star in it, he came last.

The fans exploded, filling the comments with their anger. That is what led a staff member, at the end of his rope and feeling personally insulted, to make inappropriate remarks, which in turn brought the official apology. How much young fans of young idols care about them may be beyond anything the theater world imagined.

The video has since been deleted; the apology was reposted more than 2,000 times, making it the festival account's most-reposted Weibo post of the year. Open Chen Linong's Weibo and you find a page of short brand videos, each reposted more than a million times. As of October 30, the festival's official Weibo account had 520,000 followers; Chen Linong had 9.68 million.

Which brings us back to the paradox of who the festival is for. Is it for a core audience with more tolerance and more openness, or can the bar come down, opening it to anyone who happens to get the chance to see it?

That depends on the frame of mind of the people making the work.

We reported earlier on what happens at Old Fairy. It is made of two pieces, Pregnant and Like a Fish in Water, and "what exactly am I watching" was the question running through most of the audience for two hours. This June, both pieces premiered at Shanghai's Ming Contemporary Art Museum, where contemporary art fans thought them "too theatrical"; by the time they reached Wuzhen, mainstream theater audiences found them too much like performance art.

Waiting in line for Old Fairy in Wuzhen, one couple said they had come only because it fit their schedule and they happened to see someone reselling tickets. As for homework on the piece, what they knew was this: "You can drink chicken soup, someone hands out dried fish, and there's a huge fish tank in the middle of the room."

Both halves of Old Fairy did put a heavy demand on the audience's taste. Like a Fish in Water broke the traditional relationship between performer and spectator — people walked in, danced, were asked to answer questions — and, unexpectedly, some of them loudly demanded refunds.

The directors, Lin Cuixi and Lyu Yuzhou, have met plenty of viewers who said they did not understand. "But as long as they're curious and open, willing to ask, willing to try to get in, that's fine with us."

Sun Xiaoxing, director of The Cherry Orchard, was blunter: "I think the Wuzhen Theatre Festival is now standing at a crossroads: whether to strengthen its rigor, or to lean into the entertainment that comes with tying itself to tourism — the old question of art versus commerce. When a play is staged in Wuzhen, does it happen as art and scholarship, as a cultural phenomenon, or does it appear as a mass-market product? When what the audience expects and what the maker intends part ways, a break and a gulf open up."

4. Some Regrets

Wuzhen was rushed again this year.

The festival had 29 invited productions, up from 24 last year — 33 works in all, if you count 1st LOVE and 1st KISS separately. With the number of theaters unchanged, more productions meant everyone's time got squeezed.

Performance times stayed the same, so sets came down and went up more often, and technical run-throughs got tighter, leaving some companies no time for a full rehearsal on the set; they got a quick feel for the space and then faced an audience. Technical support this year came from a team out of Taiwan, working on the ground with local staff from the Wuzhen tourism company; some companies also brought technicians of their own.

Out of gratitude, at the Bangwan Theatre the young companies in the Young Theatre Artists Competition would, as they bowed at the curtain call, stretch an arm toward the front right of the stage to carry the audience's eyes there: "Thank you to the teachers on the Taiwan technical team for their support."

The 18 competition pieces, 30 minutes each, needed more guidance; the invited companies could mostly get through their performances on the strength of regular training and craft. Even so, the crush of the schedule caused problems, and they cannot be blamed on the technical team.

On the opening night of the Moscow Art Theatre's 19.14, artistic director Meng Jinghui had to go on stage and make awkward conversation with the audience for more than ten minutes; he later told them straight out that the company was still fixing its subtitles. A hiccup like that is understandable at a festival, even a kind of experience in itself, but it still exposed gaps in the preparation.

That same night was the opening of Chin Shih-chieh's Experimental Actors Studio. Had 19.14 ended on schedule, there would have been only a rushed 20 minutes to get across town; because of the delay, a good number of people had to leave the Wuzhen Grand Theatre early and hurry to the Net Theatre, a kilometer away.

Audiences were not the only ones left puzzled. Lin Cuixi and Lyu Yuzhou, the directors of Old Fairy, sounded regretful in an interview: "Even now we don't know why we were invited, and we never had any real exchange with them — the steering committee, the jury — or got any feedback on our work."

One thing did go well.

The closing ceremony always has two main pieces of business: naming the winners of the competition's three awards, and announcing next year's theme and dates.

On average this year's 18 competition works were better than last year's — the floor rose a good deal, but the ceiling did not reach last year's, and even the finalists each had flaws too large to ignore.

After giving the Wuzhen Award for Special Mention to Jackdaws Playing in Water and The Mournful Bird's Cry, and the Wuzhen Award for Best Individual Performance to Xu Yewen (writer, director and performer of Sleeping Beauty: A Great Awakening), Stan Lai and Huang Lei announced that the competition's top prize, the Wuzhen Award for Best Production, would go unawarded.

The announcement drew quick applause from the hall. The jury put its view this way: "'Magnanimity' is this year's theme, but we cannot let magnanimity take the place of a standard. It is when our standards and your level of work can hold each other that the festival is truly alive."

Right after the theatre festival comes the World Internet Conference, November 7 to 9. As soon as the last show ends, every company has to strike its set overnight, and the conference's materials move in at once. After nearly two straight months on the festival, many staff get a single day off before starting the next job.

That is the next order Wuzhen has to fill.

The cover image shows the opening of the Wuzhen Theatre Festival; the long banner image shows the carnival in the old town. Unless otherwise noted, all images come from the Wuzhen Theatre Festival's official channels.