Ancient painting made to dance

• Source: Global Times
• [11:09 July 07 2010]
• Comments

Liu Yinghong as the artist Zhang Zeduan and Su Shu as the 'Daughter of the Bianhe River' in Qingming Riverside. Photos: Courtesy of Hong Kong Dance Company

By Guo Song

More than 800 years ago, a Chinese artist recorded the scenes of ancient China in a historic scroll painting, and now a group of creative dancers will relive the story of the masterpiece for Shanghai audiences.

The Hong Kong Dance Company will bring Qingming Riverside to Shanghai this Friday and Saturday, the closing act of the Shanghai Grand Theater's Dance Festival.

This epic dance performance is based on Along the River During the Qingming Festival, a masterpiece of Chinese painting created by Zhang Zeduan, a famous artist who lived during the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127).

The five-meter scroll painting depicts vividly more than 800 figures from all walks of life in hustling and bustling scenes along the Bianhe River in Bianjing (today's Kaifeng, the capital city of Henan Province in central China), formerly the capital city of the Northern Song Dynasty.

The dancers capture the unique features of the manners and expressions of the 800-plus people presented in the original painting and recreate daily life in China hundreds of years in the past.

"The essence of the show is to make the painting come alive with our music and dance," said Leung Kwok-shing, the art director and choreographer of Qingming Riverside.

When viewing a scroll painting, viewers usually unfold it bit by bit from right to left.

To create a certain feeling similar to viewing the scroll painting, the perfor-mance is separated into 16 scenes, each presenting a different section from the original painting.

"The artist Zhang Zeduan himself came to mind," said Gerard Tsang, the executive director of the Hong Kong Dance Company, speaking of the one character in the dance who turns the whole scene into a coherent vision.

The original painting depicts more than 800 people, but one character, a man with a bag on his back and a gift box in his right hand standing at the front gate of an official's home, attracted Tsang's attention.

"If the artist included himself in the painting, I'm sure this guy would be Zhang Zeduan," said Tsang, research consultant and script writer of the work.

In Zhang's painting, the scenes are developed along the Bianhe River. The "Daughter of the Bianhe River" is thus represented as the female lead in the performance.

The story of the relationship between the "Daughter of the Bianhe River" and the artist is similar to that in The Dancing Girl of Izu by the famous Japanese writer Yasunari Kawabata.

"A slight sadness hangs over them because they know clearly that they are doomed to go separate ways in the end," said Tsang.

The costumes for Qingming Riverside also reflect the cultural characteristics of the Northern Song Dynasty.

In the second scene, "Canal Willows," picturing the scenes along the Bianhe River in spring, the lead female dancer wears cunzixie, 3-centimeter high-heel shoes designed to show off a woman's small feet which were popular among women in the Northern Song Dynasty.

In Scene 11, "Night Entertainment," the dancers wear zhizideng, a kind of red lantern, on their heads.

Zhizideng was the sign of a red-light district in the Northern Song Dynasty. Restaurants with red lanterns usually offered escort services.

Other than the distinct cultural characteristics of the period, the show also features non-material cultural heritage and borrows ideas from several Chinese masterpieces in painting and literature, such as Outlaws of the Marsh, one of the four classic Chinese novels.