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Forbidden Dreams
Composer Guo Wenjing says the most challenging part he created for the original ballet The Peony Pavilion are the two pas de deux between the leading female role Du Liniang and her lover Liu Mengmei. One is the first scene in Act I in which the lovers embrace in the dream. The other is the last
scene of the ballet in which the ghost of Du makes love with the living Liu.
Wang Qimin (left) and Li Jun play the leading roles in the ballet version of The Peony Pavilion.
"It's so hard to write the music because I neither make love in dreams nor with ghosts," Guo says half joking half serious.
"But it's interesting and I believe that art first of all must be interesting," he adds.
From May 2 to 7, the National Ballet of China (NBC) will premiere the "interesting" ballet version adapted from the Chinese classic The Peony Pavilion at Tianqiao Theater.
It has taken NBC seven years to complete its take on this classic written by Tang Xianzu of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), according to Zhao Ruheng, the president of NBC.
"We all enjoy working on the ballet because our creation is based on a very good story. It is such an extreme tale that it gives us many possibilities. A woman falls in love with a man whom she's only met once in a dream and dies longing for him. Then she tries to come back to life to continue the
love," says director Li Liuyi who is a veteran theater director with Beijing People's Art Theater.
"Tang Xianzu left us a dream. Over the past 400 years, so many people have tried to interpret it. Now we are trying to dance into the dream," says the director who himself has been fascinated by the story for years and has read a large number of works about it.
"We are trying to make this dreamy ballet extremely beautiful and true," Li adds.
In his eyes, The Peony Pavilion is so much more than a love story. It's also a scathing indictment of the limitations of the super-rationalist, but rather clueless, world of Neo-Confucian politics.
"The playwright Tang also borrowed freely from Buddhist and Taoist philosophical concepts. After all, Du's love is so strong that it has the power to last three lifetimes - and karmic rebirth was a notion drawn from the Buddhist tradition," Li says.
Zhao says that they decided to adapt the Peony Pavilion because it is such a great Chinese classic and is often compared to Shakespeare.
"Both authors relied on supernatural forces to further their plots. The Flower Goddess, for instance, who brought the dream lovers together in The Peony Pavilion, is almost interchangeable with Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream or Ariel in The Tempest," Zhao explains.
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