The poetic modern dance “Dongpo: Life in Poems”，performed by China Oriental Performing Arts Group, which combines modern dance in a pioneering manner with elements of the traditional Chinese arts of poetry, painting, calligraphy, seal carving, music and opera, and martial arts, represents an in-depth distillation – through an audio-visual integration of music, dance, poetry, and painting – of the quintessence of Chinese classical philosophy and aesthetics, going back nearly a thousand years in a similar way to the traditional Chinese technique of sketching ideas, for a dialog with “a confidant of a different age.” several poems considered to be representative of the poet’s attitude towards life are employed to search for what underlies the Chinese culture spiritually. The 14 seals evoke the various aspects of his life; in the clear and profound sounds produced by a guqin at a corner of the stage, the huge ancient painting displayed seems to have frozen time and space, creating a poetic air while taking the audience a thousand years back. The work represents an attempt made at exploring the temporal expression of the Chinese culture from an international viewpoint of art, as well as searching from a modern angle for the spirit of Chinese poetry, by combining traditional Chinese aesthetics with its modern meanings, and integrating Chinese dance, opera, martial arts and other arts of physical expression.

The chief director of the dance, Mr. Shen Wei, who is a choreographer, director, and painter, enjoys an international reputation for his extremely broad creative abilities and art visions, once heralded as “one of the greatest artists in our age” by The Washington Post. He founded Shen Wei Dance Arts in 2000, and has since received many international major awards, such as the United States’ top award for creative persons, the MacArthur Award (2007), the Nijinsky Award for Emerging Choreographer (2004), the John D. Rockefeller 3rd Award (2018), the ISPA’s Distinguished Artist Award (2022), and the Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival Award for Lifetime Achievement in Choreography (2022), among others. Among his representative works are Folding, Near the Terrace, and Rite of Spring. In producing Dongpo, Mr. Shen Wei also worked as the playwright, choreographer, visual effects art director, stage designer, costume designer, style designer and other roles. It is the result of Shen Wei’s decades-long artistic creation and performance. And again, for this drama, the noted Chinese-French composer and the music director of the Opening Ceremony of the 2008 Olympic Games, Chen Qigang worked as the music director, who excels at combining classical Chinese elements with Western modern symphonies, and who, in the case of this drama, ingeniously used modern symphonic music together with the guqin tunes played on the spot, creating a musical dialog beyond time and space; the lighting designer of the Opening Ceremony of the 2008 Olympic Games and Closing Ceremony of the 2008 Paralympic Games, Xiao Lihe worked as the lighting designer for this drama, who, graduating from the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University, was trained under the noted lighting designer for Chinese opera, Prof. Jin Changlie, and leading American theater professors Jennifer Tipton and Ming Cho Lee, among other famous lighting designers, and worked with the Shanghai Theatre Academy, and Queens College in New York, and as the special lighting designer, with Brown University, the United States, and Concordia University, Canada, among other foreign universities and colleges. Guo Changhong, Deputy Secretary-General of China Television Arts Commission, a National Grade-I Playwright, and a judge of the China TV Drama Flying Apsaras Awards, served as the co-playwright, and Yang Tao, Vice President of the China Calligraphy Academy and doctoral advisor, was engaged in design concerning calligraphy and seal carving. The interaction of poetry, calligraphy, music, and painting with modern light-and-shade technology puts fine traditional Chinese culture into a universal language, presenting to the audience a modern dance work of fused classical Chinese beauty and contemporary spirit.

The production is a part of China Arts and Entertainment Group’s Image China cultural exchange initiative, which aims to introduce traditional and contemporary Chinese performing arts to audiences around the world. Since its inception in 2009, Image China has presented works at venues across the globe, including Lincoln Center in New York; The Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.; and performance venues in Australia, New Zealand, UK, Germany, Italy, and throughout Europe.