"This year's Beijing Fringe Festival is more diverse and more international," said Meng Jinghui, mastermind behind the event, now in its eighth year.
The festival, which runs until Sept 26 in six theatres and art spaces in Beijing, will include 22 dramas from seven countries, said Meng.
"We have invited troupes from Brazil, Japan and France. In eight years the number of plays during the festival has grown from a dozen to over a hundred. While more foreign plays are joining us, they are also characterized more with the directors' personalities and understandings".
Brazilian play Three Tragic Females, for example, probes relationships between men and women, women and society; Japanese play Three Strange Sisters, tells the story of three gifted girls who step into a world which is bound with all kinds of rules.
As a cooperation partner with Festival d'Avignon, the oldest extant annual arts festival in France, this year's Beijing Fringe Festival is also imprinted with a "French taste".
La venue des esprits
, or Back of the Soul, is a play telling the story of Edouard Buguet, a photographer in 1970s Paris. It recounts an incident of fraud that aroused heated discussion at the time. The play adopts a narrative way of story-telling and combines shadow play, aiming to explore the possibilities of camera use in stage plays. By reflecting on the superstitious mentality of people at the time, the play guides audiences to uncover the secrets behind supernatural phenomena.
Also included are three script reading projects of Les mouches(or directly translated as The Flies in English), Morts sans sépulture(or Die Without a Burial Place in English) and Huis clos(or The Confinement in English), all of which salute French writer Jean-Paul Sartre.
"Dialogue, communication, magic thinking, charming eternity, impulsive imagination and flexible resilience - here, we live together, interact with our peers, write about our emotions, expose our feelings," said Meng during an interview with theartdest.com. Meng said that his idea of hosting such a festival is to develop new Chinese talent while opening up theatrical boundaries.
The festival has become an occasion which showcases youthful productions and one of the biggest theater events in China.
