It is 5 am and Tadashi Suzuki is awake. The Japanese theater director enjoys walking in Wuzhen, the ancient town of canals located in Tongxiang, Zhejiang province.

"There are less people early morning, when the sunlight streams through the clouds onto the narrow streets, stone bridges and rivers, and everything is so quiet and full of energy," he says.

Suzuki, 79, is in Wuzhen to stage his new play, entitled Springtime in the North.

Since 2014, Suzuki's theatrical productions, including Cyrano de Bergerac and Dionysus, have been staged in China.

This is the first time, however, that the director has brought a play to the Wuzhen Theater Festival. Now in its sixth year, the festival is presenting 109 performances by artists drawn from 17 countries from Oct 18 to Sunday.

Since the establishment of the festival in 2013, Suzuki has been invited to give master classes and workshops in the 1,300-year-old town.

"Every time I am here to join in the Wuzhen Theater Festival, I am happy to meet artists from different countries. I enjoy watching their performances. There is no difference at any age in the world of theater. I, too, am here to learn," the director says.

Suzuki premiered the play, Springtime in the North, in Japan in 2017. The script was written by Nobuo Kazawa around 40 years ago.

Through the performances of actors from the Suzuki Company of Toga, the 70-minute play tells the story of a young man who feels mentally and physically exhausted and locks himself up in his home－cutting off communication with his family.

This young man, who was formerly employed at an insurance company, has three men and a woman fighting to control his mind and, little by little, the four of them corrode the young man's heart, and ultimately kill him and his parents. Though the young man tries to resist, all his efforts are in vain and, in the end, he loses his life.

With a simple stage set, Suzuki portrays a young man, who has lost a sense of himself and his place in society.

"Identity crisis is a problem for many young people, who live a busy life now. They spend much more time with their phones rather than with their families," says the director.

Suzuki opened the play with the famous Japanese ballad, also titled Springtime in the North, which was first performed by Japanese singer Masao Sen in 1977. The song became popular among Chinese music lovers after the late Taiwan pop singer, Teresa Teng, sang a Chinese version in 1979. During the performance in Wuzhen, Suzuki ended the play with the Chinese version of the song performed by singer, Jiang Dawei.

Suzuki, who was born in Shizuoka, Japan, has been a pioneering theater practitioner since he was a student at Waseda University.

While he compares Wuzhen to a dreamland of theater, Suzuki also has his own "Wuzhen" in Japan.

In 1976, Suzuki relocated his theater troupe, the Waseda Shogekijo, from Tokyo to Toga, a remote mountainous village in Japan. He renamed his theater the Suzuki Company of Toga and founded one of Japan's first international theater festivals, Toga Festival, in 1982.

Since then the site has grown into a complex of rehearsal rooms, open performance spaces, indoor and outdoor theaters, and has become a popular destination for theater lovers from around the world.

During his long career, Suzuki has developed his own method of acting and training, which focuses on the human body's expression of energy as the basis of theater.

"The body is an indicator of a person's upbringing and cultural environment, and one of the best ways to communicate a culture in theater is to fully explore the capability of the human body," Suzuki says.

Since 2016, Suzuki has been sharing his acting technique with young Chinese actors at the Great Wall Theater at Beijing WTown, a resort with a similar style as Wuzhen, near the foothills of the Simatai section of the Great Wall. His acting techniques have been taught in schools and theaters throughout the world, including at The Juilliard School in New York, the Moscow Art Theater and the Royal Shakespeare Company in the United Kingdom.