A clown hands out balloons to eager children at the festival opened in Beijing on July 8, 2016. [Photo/Chinanews.com]

The sixth China Children's Theatre Festival is underway in Beijing, kicked off with the July 8 performance of a play based on the Chinese fairy tale, Malan Flower. Deputy Minister of Culture Dong Wei was present.

The festival, which features dozens of shows, runs through to August 25, so it will make the young ones' summer holiday so much fun! Its theme is "Light Children's Heart and Shape the Future--Colorful Chinese Dream", and there is an international flavor to the event. Forty-six repertoires will be performed 215 times by 25 children's theater groups from eight countries, such as the US, Japan, Spain and Australia. Remarkably, one of the repertoires, a drama on Chinese Idiom stories co-produced by the China National Theatre for Children (CNTC) and Missoula Children's Theatre in Montana, US, was listed as a key project at the seventh high-level consultation meeting on China-US cultural exchanges this year. Apart from performances, there are seminars and carnivals to inform and entertain those attending the festival.

According to Yin Xiaodong, chairman of the organizing committee and head of CNTC, there will be many firsts at this year's festival, such as online voting for favorite drama and the addition of the China-Japan-South Korea children's theater category. He added that, "We proceed to share experience and cooperate with the outside world in an attempt to make the China Children's Theatre Festival global-oriented, Chinese-featured, updated, commercialized and popular."

Organized by CNTC, this year's festival is based in Beijing and extends to Jinan, Chengdu and Ningbo.