Viral ballet that brings legendary painting from China’s Song dynasty to life with eye-popping choreography is coming to Macau
- A ballet troupe’s 2021 work Dance Drama, Poetic Dance: The Journey of a Legendary Landscape Painting has spawned a fan following in China
- The ballet follows a researcher who travels through time and space to meet the painter of the Song dynasty scroll in question and artisans who helped create it
A dance performance featuring eye-popping choreography that went viral in China last year is coming to Macau.
The China Oriental Performing Arts Group’s show “Dance Drama, Poetic Dance: The Journey of a Legendary Landscape Painting” features dancers performing gravity- defying side and back bend moves inspired by a classical Chinese painting by Wang Ximeng.
The move – which requires dancers to do a 90-degree back bend – was dubbed qingluyao (“blue green waist”), a reference to the colours of the dancers’ dresses, and was hashtagged and shared extensively online after the troupe performed it during Chinese Central Television’s Spring Festival Gala in February 2022, a show watched by nearly 1.3 billion viewers.
It is a technique that can only be achieved “through endless sweat from practising”, the troupe says.
The show was created in 2021 by Zhou Liya and Han Zhen, two of the troupe’s female choreographers. Both in their 30s, they are known as the “twin stars of Chinese dance”.
