The second edition of the Luminous Festival, highlighting inclusive arts, includes The Story of Giving Birth from China. [Photo by Patrick Imbert & Li Hao/For China Daily]

Qi Lixia, founder of the center, says the play is the product of a casual discussion in the community in which she talked about childbirth. It turned out that many of the women had been through traumatic experiences that involved great physical and psychological pain.

The experiences were so personal and so painful that the women could not even bring themselves to talk with their husbands about them, depriving them of one channel for catharsis. So Qi suggested to Zhao that they produce a play on the topic.

Over the course of more than a year they interviewed 29 mothers in the community, ranging from 20-year-olds to 60-year-olds, most of whom had followed their husbands to Beijing.

"We then sorted the recordings into a transcript of nearly 300,000 words. As I read them I felt a sense of awe. Their narration of their own childbirth experiences together formed a chronicle of our society over the past few decades."

To tell the stories within a confined space and with a limited budget, the play centers on the experiences of the woman mentioned at the start of this article, who was born in the 1970s and gave birth in the 1990s and in the 2000s, and whose tale is regarded as fairly representative of all the women.