This year the international section of TRAMEDAUTORE is dedicated entirely to China.
The importance of this country on the international scene and for the world economy is undisputed; the impact of Chinese emigration and entrepreneurship in Italy and the Western world is substantial.

Relationships between Italy and China are evermore solid and important. And yet, despite this, we still know little about the Asiatic Giant. In the world of theatre our knowledge is limited to traditional genres, save for a scattering of incursions onto the contemporary scene by protagonists such as Meng Jinghui. The review proposes acclaimed masters, recognised at home and abroad, such as Guo Shixing (resident playwright at the Central Experimental Theatre of Beijing) and Nick Rongjun Yu (director of the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre), but also successful young playwrights like Shao Zehui (Beijing), Candance Chong (Hong Kong) and Li Bonan (Beijing). There will be dissidents, such as the Nobel Prize winner Gao Xinjiang, who lives in Paris, and writers completely integrated into the Chinese social-political context such as Pan Jun, one of the ex so-called "educated youths" from the University of Anhui sent into the countryside during the Cultural Revolution.

In choosing the writers and works, we have tried to respect writing styles which range from the epic to the intimate, from realism to the abstract, from the dramatic to the conceptual. The only fil rouge which can be perceived in the constellation of works is that they are all expressions of urban life in the great metropolises: Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong. In the single stories, some painful and tormented, others funny and ironic, the Chinese writers show us modern life and the recent past of their country.

This edition of TRAMEDAUTORE demonstrates the profound syntony with the programming of the Piccolo Teatro, in China for the first time in 2002 with the tour of Harlequin, and then in 2006 with Così fan tutte, whileHarlequin toured for a month in five cities including Tianjin, where it inaugurated the Chinese Theatre. The same tour saw the birth of the by now ten year-old collaboration with the Shanghai Theatre Academy: moments in a long, rich and vivacious relationship, with a country which today occupies a position in the world that at the time was difficult to imagine.