"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.