In Wuzhen, all the world's a stage

To make the most of the Ancient Courtyard Theater, director Ata Wong Chun-tat and his troupe Theatre de la Feuille, which was founded in Paris in 2010, staged Fall and Flow, a production that pays tribute to martial arts fiction and kung fu films.

Born and raised in Hong Kong, Wong grew up watching action films by directors like John Woo and Johnnie To.

"I love those movies and their tension, like the slow-motion sequences. Ever since I started in theater, I've thought this is a good way to express ourselves physically," he says.

Passionate about theater since secondary school, he began to study mime and was introduced to physical theater at the age of 14.

After graduating in modern dance from The Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, he studied physical acting at L'Ecole Internationale de Theatre Jacques Lecoq in Paris.

For the production, the performers underwent eight months of training, with around two or three days per week spent on acrobatics and kung fu, and one or two days on Yueju Opera originated in Guangdong province.

"It's like mixing up everything about movement and feeding it all to our performers. Most of them didn't have much experience of this kind of training before. We all know that it takes time for our bodies to really digest all that information, so we practiced every day," Wong says.

Adrian Leung, the main actor, says that he began learning martial arts when he was 8, and therefore didn't feel the training was too challenging. His real challenge lay in conveying the narrative through physical movements.

"The difficulty is how to use martial arts and Chinese opera for storytelling, so the audience understand the plot, not just so we show off our skills," Leung says.

"I believe that actors should continue to receive training, even after they graduate, to continue learning and making progress.

"Art is about constant innovation, and a feature of Theatre de la Feuille is that, when I'm rehearsing for a production, I'm also training and growing."