All the water is a stage

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.