Veteran theater director makes Wuzhen debut

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.