... and once a year in the town of Wuzhen all the tourists can be audience members

Picture an entire town turned into one grand immersive theater: huge marionettes walking through a narrow, flagstone-paved lane, mother and daughter sitting leisurely in a "paper" boat that floats along a river, young couples whispering under a night sky lit up by florescent kites.

No matter where you go in the town of Wuzhen, Zhejiang province, during its annual theater festival you are likely to run into performances－and some in the unlikeliest of places, such as at the corner of an otherwise quiet square, under the roofs of a moss-carpeted dock, and even on rowing boats.

Even tourists unaware of the festival will find themselves immersed in plays, dance and music, everybody being invited to roam the 1,300-year-old town's alleys, riverbanks and theater venues. Again this year, from Oct 25 to Nov 3, the festival transformed the town into a stage for performance and expression.

They can, for example, step into the "home" of the Italian director Eugenio Barba as he throws a "dinner party". Before the performances of The Tree he stood outside welcoming members of the audience and showed them where to store their personal belongings.

"This is a very creative way of thinking theater, that the spectators are my guests to share a dinner, and food are sounds, images, words, poetry," said Barba, founder of the Odin Teatret of Denmark.

But forget about private box seats with a glass of champagne in hand. Those who wanted to watch The Tree were required to hand in their phones before performances. When the show began they sat facing one another, celebrities and dilettantes alike, not knowing what the evening would bring.

What gradually unfolds were various stories with a tree at their center. The performance submerged its audience in an overwhelming auditory and visual head trip, or, as one viewer commented on the review site Douban, "the best nightmare I have ever had".

Barba is well aware of how offbeat his works are and that they can be unsettling. With the orchestration of words, sounds, light and space, he likes to take the audience by surprise.

He lives in two worlds, he said, the inner personal world and the world he shares with others. When he reads in the newspaper that something shocking has happened in the world, it stirs and interacts with his inner world, inspiring him to devise a performance to explore such issues.

"All Odin Teatret performances place the destiny of the individual in front of the bigger history... We hope the performance can awaken the imagination and sensibility of the spectators."

On Oct 27, the last day of its three performances, people lined outside the theater from afternoon till after dusk hoping to be able to buy last-minute tickets. Even though The Tree could be regarded as one of the headliners at this year's festival, there was room for an audience of little more than 100 at each performance.

Julia Varley, an actress who is artistic coordinator of the Odin Teatret, said 100 is in fact quite a lot, given that only 50 viewers were able to see each performance when the theater company first performed at the Wuzhen festival several years ago.

The same kind of audience size restrictions apply when the shows are staged in Europe, Varley said.

"The organizers always ask us to have more spectators, but we still limit the number."

On the same note, the audience is able to experience the performance as much as the director wants them to.

Varley said: "For us it is important that every spectator has the same possibility of seeing the performance. And we know also that the distance between the audience and the actors gives a special perception of the performance… It is the quality of the relationships that is important."

One of the company's most notable characteristics is that its shows are performed in different languages. After having been founded in Norway, the company eventually moved to Denmark, giving the ensemble a more diverse look and feel over time, with actors coming from a dozen countries with no common language.

The language barrier came as an obstacle for the company, leading it away from classical theatrical texts but pushing it toward innovation and originality, Barba said.

"The history of theater shows that actors of a company go from village to village, town to town. In all cultures, professional theaters are always like this. And being foreign, that is part and parcel of professional theater.

"So to be foreign is also a moment of attraction for the spectators because what is foreign presents diversity. And diversity is always an attraction."

Diversity is by no means something the Odin Teatret has a monopoly on in Wuzhen. In fact diversity is the festival's very essence, with troupes from 13 countries and regions performing this year. During the 10 days, each visitor, performer and theater venue were interconnected, creating kaleidoscopic effects that made the small town all the more dazzling.

All this was encapsulated in the play with a title that is as tantalizing as it is long, Dots and Lines, and the Cube Formed. The Many Different Worlds Inside. And Light, directed by Takahiro Fujita from Japan.

As with Barba's play, this is also inspired by real-life events that Fujita read about in the newspaper, dealing with how individuals and individual events could have rippling repercussions.

Telling the stories of several teenagers in 2011, Dots and Lines, and the Cube Formed was triggered by several news events that took place ten years before, including the gruesome murder of a girl in a small town in Japan, and the September 11 attacks in the United States.

It also tells of the thousands of young people who abandoned their home towns in eastern Japan after the huge earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima nuclear disaster of 2011.

The play was created in 2013, when Fujita and his theater company Mum & Gypsy were invited to perform in Italy. It was the first time that he had created a show that people who didn't speak Japanese could relate to, he said.

He chose to write about leaving one's hometown, a universal theme that resonated with the audience. After the performances, viewers came to him, discussing their similar personal experiences.

Fujita said that recently he had been thinking about how to appeal to a broader public, creating shows that will attract people who do not normally go to the theater.

The Wuzhen experience was new for him and the company. Visitors do not just go to the Wuzhen festival for the theater performances, but also because they can enjoy the sights and the food and drink at the same time.

"I and the other troupe members feel the Wuzhen Theater Festival delivers a concentrated appreciation of world theater," Fujita said. "It really is unique."

Like Fujita, the Polish director Michal Znaniecki is keen to attract more people to the theater through open-air performances, in his case opera.

Last year when Znaniecki first saw Wuzhen's Water Theater he was seized by a strong yearning to stage one of his own works at the venue.

By day the Water Theater is a picturesque park with an amphitheater. Its central stage lies in front of a lake with a broken stone arch bridge, ancient architecture blurring into the trees in the background.

By night, perhaps because of a trick of the light, the theater becomes a portal for audiences to walk into different eras and realms.

In recent years directors from home and abroad have exercised their imaginations there. This year Znaniecki staged The Fairy Queen, a baroque rendition of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

He adapted the performance to make the most of every element of the venue. The opera singers sang on the broken bridge, fought on water as the boat pitched and rolled, and the audience gasped in awe when paintings were projected onto the water screens, as if suspended in mid-air.

"When you work on an open-air production, you need to make a lot of attractions because the audience can be easily distracted (for example) by wind, by rain," Znaniecki said. "So it's good to create huge visual effects all the time."

Open-air theater is an important part of his work. Znaniecki has staged his productions against diverse natural backdrops, including deserts and forests.

For him, open-air theater allows the maximum of theatrical effects, calls for actors of the highest energy, and demands a different level of participation from the audience, making opera appeal to the general public rather than a sophisticated few.