Viral ballet that brings legendary painting from Chinas Song dynasty to life with eye-popping cho

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”.

It has been performed more than 300 times across China. In 2022 alone, the troupe visited 30 cities and presented 178 performances in 33 theatres, including 18 consecutive shows at the Beijing Poly theatre. This set a record for the highest number of consecutive performances of a Chinese dance drama in Beijing.

When the dancers perform it in Macau it will be their first tour outside the Chinese mainland.

According to the dance troupe, some fans have followed the tour around and watched it more than 30 times. Not only is the choreography a big draw, but so too are the show’s artistic references to China’s Song dynasty.

The “legendary landscape painting” that the title refers to is a single landscape painting by Wang, a Song dynasty prodigy who died at the age of 23.

Wang was a teenager when he painted Qianli Jiangshan Tu (“A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains”), which is considered by scholars to represent the pinnacle of Chinese blue-green landscape painting and is in the collection of the Palace Museum in Beijing.

The 11-metre-long scroll painting depicts mountains and rivers in simple, iridescent greens and blues and was first put on public show at the Forbidden City in Beijing in 2017. It made quite an impression on Zhou and Han, so much so that when the China Oriental Performing Arts Group was thinking of creating a new work, their thoughts immediately turned to the painting.

With the help of experts, the pair began researching the history of the painting. Eight months later, they had their show, which they refer to as a “dance poetry drama”.

One of the elements of the painting that deeply inspired the pair was Wang’s use of colours, and they are reflected in the dancers’ dresses and the set design. The iridescent greens and blues of the original painting emit a jewel-like light when artificial lights are dimmed, according to Wang Zhongxu, a research librarian at the Palace Museum.

The show’s storyline reflects the fact that the creation of art and its conservation is not the singular effort of a genius artist but involves others.

The audience follows the perspective of a researcher at the Palace Museum who travels across time and space. The researcher meets not only Wang himself, but other characters – such as the scroll maker, seal cutter, silk weaver, stone grinder, brush maker, and ink maker – who would all have played pivotal roles in the scroll’s creation and ensured its colours would not fade even after a thousand years.

“Dance Drama, Poetic Dance: The Journey of a Legendary Landscape Painting” will be staged at The Venetian Macao from August 24 to 28.

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