CHENGDU, Nov. 17 (Xinhua) -- About a year ago, on a November night in Tunisia, the beat of Yi drumming broke the silence on the stage of the 25th Carthage Theater Days festival as Aluo Zuogumu, a woman from the mountains of southwest China, sang in a language unfamiliar to the crowd.

Though not a single word of Mandarin, Arabic or English had been sung, the ancient theater erupted in applause when the final note fell away. "They did understand," Aluo recalled.

The moment, which stretched across continents and cultures, began in a quiet valley in the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture of Sichuan Province, where a unique theater festival has been reshaping lives.

This November, half a world away from Tunisia, French director Serge Nicolai stood in that very valley. There, his auditorium was a sloping meadow: the jagged outline of Lushan Mountain was his backdrop, and his acoustics were dependent on the wind.

A veteran of the famed Theatre du Soleil, Nicolai had found himself enthralled by this raw, elemental form of theater. For him, it had felt like stepping back into the origins of performance, where breath, presence and nature forged a connection no digital medium could mimic.

Li Ting, the visionary behind the Daliangshan Theater Festival, was the person who brought Aluo to her Tunisian stage and Nicolai to his mountain slope. The festival concluded its seventh edition on Sunday, allowing Li to slow down from her busy routine of scheduling and problem-solving.

The valley, Li said, had shaped her long before she shaped its theater festival. She grew up in Xichang, the prefectural capital, eating cold bean jellies she bought on the street and doing her homework at a desk facing out onto the glimmering Qionghai Lake and a sky full of stars. And, whenever she traveled deep into the mountains with her performance troupe, she would hear the folk songs of the Yi people.

The stars Li had watched in her youth found their way into her scripts decades later.

"Liangshan is home to the largest Yi community in China. It has well-preserved traditions that are closely interwoven with modern life," Li said, noting that since the prefecture emerged from poverty, it has seen a growing hunger for cultural and spiritual fulfillment.

In 2018, local culture and tourism authorities invited Li, who had already built a successful career as a playwright, to collaborate on the launch of the Daliangshan Theater Festival a year later. The inaugural event brought together over 20 renowned Chinese and international artists in 2019, and to date, the festival has hosted 400 productions from 38 countries, staging a total of 1,375 performances spanning over 20 theatrical forms.

For people like Aluo, the platform is an opportunity to reshape their future. Born into poverty in what was once categorized as a national-level impoverished county, Aluo's early years revolved around chores and the practical aim of landing a factory job. But one of her teachers had observed her natural musicality and encouraged her to join a local performing arts troupe.

For years, she danced and sang on the region's lively performance circuit, though she had felt like she was playing "a small role." But with the launch of the theater festival, Aluo's work was no longer about performing set-piece folk dances for tourists, but about creating something of her own.

For her, the festival is a beacon that shines across borders, drawing global performing artists to Liangshan, where they can soak up the winter sunshine and collaborate with local youth to imagine and create.

The festival quickly became a focal point for creativity. Working with a council of renowned Chinese artists, Li created stages everywhere from established city theaters to lakeshores and ancient villages.

For local young people, this was transformative -- like the world had arrived overnight. "What's on today?" became a familiar question throughout November in Xichang. Children queued for French puppet shows, their excitement leaping easily across language barriers.

It was on this platform that Aluo's transformation took root. She was cast in "Star Returning," a musical performance written in collaboration with New Zealand director Lemi Ponifasio that drew inspiration from Yi epics and poetry. His guidance changed everything for Aluo: "Think about what kind of Yi people you want the world to see."

The question progressed Aluo from a performer of preset routines to a co-creator, an artist shaping her own story. Later, in "Greek Comedy," a new play directed by Gavin Quinn from the Irish Pan Pan Theatre, she learned to "go appropriately crazy" on stage. "The forms differ," she said, "but the essence is the same: being true to who you are."

For Nicolai, the festival thrives on a spirit of genuine, cross-cultural, and collaborative creation. In his masterclasses delivered as part of the lineup, he intentionally erased the boundaries between students from elite drama academies and amateur performers from nearby villages. Together they moved, improvised, and found a shared language rooted not in words but in human expression.

In the Liangshan of today, Nicolai saw a place where young Yi people are actively shaping their cultural identity and using their own language to tell new, contemporary stories. During the festival, he watched children sit in rapt silence as they watched the French puppet show "Little Red Riding Hood".

"This festival stages everything from the most avant-garde to the most authentically local," Li said. She sees Liangshan as a cultural bridge to the world, offering a more nuanced view of a place where satellite launch towers rise beside traditional Yi homes. It is a landscape defined by stark contrasts and deep cultural continuity.

Liangshan is sharing its culture with the world, and at the same time, the festival is bringing global artistic practices to the doorsteps of local residents. "It's a two-way effort," said Liu Kang, chairman of the Liangshan Culture & Tourism Investment Group L.L.C. "A journey made toward each other."

As night settled over the valley theater, the stories of Aluo, Li and Nicolai met in a pool of fading light.

Aluo, once a girl aspiring to become a factory worker, stood with a quiet confidence, her feet planted in soil that needed her as much as she needed it. Li continued her ambitious work, stitching together mountain stories, youthful ambitions and global voices.

And Nicolai, gazing up at the same star-strewn sky that had once stirred Li's imagination, found his answer not in a neat conclusion but in the living, breathing dialogue that unfolded around him.