The Little Asia festival is becoming a logistical headache because neither Asia nor its theatre groups are little.
With five cities - and seven small theatre groups - participating in this second Asian Little Theatre Exchange Network this autumn, it is proving more ambitious and expensive than its organisers had envisaged.
Arts centres in Beijing, Tokyo and Nagoya are each presenting one theatre production; Taipei and Hong Kong are doing two. They will all then tour one or more of the other centres.
The main change from last year, said Louis Yu, performing arts co-ordinator at the Hong Kong Arts Centre, is 'scale'.
'Last year it was just Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan. Now Beijing has joined.' One of the big challenges comes from a difference in definition. The term 'Little Theatre' in Asia can be traced back to the student movement in Japan in the 1960s, where political dramas were performed in fringe venues like tents in parks.
Later, in the 1970s and 80s, it was used generally to mean alternative theatre.
The term was adopted by Taiwan in the late 80s with the relaxation of censorship and increase in cultural activities, and in Beijing at the same time, where a little theatre piece called Bus Station based on Beckett's Waiting for Godot was part of the protests against authority in the run-up to the student massacres of 1989. Later, the political connotation was removed 'and that theatre movement is more related to the whole social climb in the 1980s'.