A stage photo of A Dream of A Floating Life, a performance combining ballet and China's Kunqu Opera （COURTESY PHOTO）

Inspiration arose when a mutual friend of Wu Husheng and Zhang Ting proposed the idea and introduced them to each other. After Wu got in touch with Zhang, they immediately clicked and started devising the creation of A Dream of a Floating Life.

China's Kunqu Opera and the art that is ballet performing together on the same stage? A feat perhaps far-fetched before, yet, as the world rests on the cusp of change, no longer beyond realization. One might be curious as to what the combination of the two arts, opera and dance, East and West, looks like. A Dream of a Floating Life will provide the answer to that question.

Wu, principal dancer with the Shanghai Ballet, together with Zhang, an actress from the Shanghai Kunqu Opera Troupe, brought the transboundary work to the stage of the National Center for the Performing Arts of China in Beijing this March.

A love story

A Dream of a Floating Life is based on The Peony Pavilion, a masterpiece by Tang Xianzu, considered the greatest playwright of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). It is also a classic composition in the Kunqu Opera genre, telling a love story that moves against the constraints of tradition.

A Stroll in the Garden and An Interrupted Dream are arguably the most brilliant and representative chapters in The Peony Pavilion. They describe a beautiful young noble lady named Du Liniang who was strictly educated at home and could not set foot outside her chambers without her parents' permission. One day, Du ventures into the garden with her companion and, suddenly struck by the beauty of nature, experiences the intense joys, as well as pains, of life.

Tired from the stroll in the garden, Du falls asleep and dreams that she encounters a young scholar named Liu Mengmei with whom she then shares an intimate moment under a plum tree. Awakened from the dream by her mother, Du feels that her real life is aimless and confined.

The latter parts describe Du's death, how she wastes away overwhelmed by a sense of lovesickness for her dream lover, and how she haunts Liu until he promises to exhume her. Du is subsequently brought back to life and joined in marriage with Liu. They live happily ever after.

Wu chose the first part as the foundation of his dance drama. However, he made some changes. A modern man meets an ancient woman in the dream. And he uses ballet and Kunqu Opera to describe the story.

"I personally think that A Stroll in the Garden and An Interrupted Dream are the most intense chapters of The Peony Pavilion. The classic love story between Liu and Du is very romantic. They meet and fall in love in the dream, striking a chord with many in the audience," Wu told Beijing Review.

Two different styles

The ballet traces its origins back to the Italian renaissance when it was developed as part of court entertainment. It is a formal academic dance technique that combines with other artistic elements such as music, costume and stage scenery.

Kunqu Opera is one of the oldest forms of opera still active on stage in China, with its origins going back to the late Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368). It has distinguished itself by the virtuosity of its rhythmic patterns and has exerted a dominant influence on all the more recent forms of opera in China, including Peking Opera. It is reputed to be the "ancestor of traditional Chinese dramas."

In 2001, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization proclaimed Kunqu Opera a masterpiece of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity.

"I have to admit, it was a difficult start. When I first studied the Kunqu Opera video excerpts sent to me by Zhang, I was baffled as it is so much unlike ballet," Wu told Beijing Review. The prototype of this idea at the time was still very vague; ballet and Kunqu Opera both have deep roots, but distinguish themselves through artistic expressions and styles.

Ballet features more rhythmic change, prediction, and transition—it is an art that emphasizes visual indications and bursts of emotions. Conversely, Kunqu Opera is almost all adagio. The challenge is how to maintain the original flavor of both forms, while preventing them from appearing incompatible on stage.

To further complicate things, Wu and Zhang had not been very involved in each other's artistic style before.

Combination, innovation

"The two outwardly unrelated art forms can actually work together," Zhang told Beijing Review. Kunqu Opera is characterized by both singing and dancing—its dancing can be combined with the moves of ballet; its singing can be used to express the movement of ballet to enrich the plot.

How to present Kunqu Opera in the language of ballet without destroying the original framework proved another challenge when Wu first embarked on drafting the drama with his colleagues.

"Both ballet and Kunqu Opera are treasured creative practices that have undergone years of development and accumulation. We, as the younger generation, do not easily change, destroy, or fabricate the art, but are more willing to learn, inherit, and spread. Us working as artists, this very endeavor pays our respects to the various forms of art out there," Wu said.

Zhang added that for the development and innovation of Kunqu Opera, artists must maintain awareness that any adjustment or transboundary experiment must be based on tradition; otherwise it will cease to be Kunqu Opera.

Finally, they came up with the idea of dividing time and space, with the two protagonists reunited in a dream across time and space, in which they meet, identify, and dance with each other, reinforcing their mutual melancholy once they wake up from the dream.

Zhang said the feeling on stage is not much different from that on the Kunqu Opera stage. Her costumes in A Dream of a Floating Life are completely unchanged. "I just changed the form of music and sang faster than I would in the traditional performance. Also, I try to adjust the rhythm of my body movements to the rhythm of the ballet dancers."

The biggest difference is that the ballet stage differs from that of traditional Kunqu Opera. For example, it is big and uncarpeted.

"We used to try to innovate on the musical side of things, using a symphony orchestra or band. This is the first time that we have attempted innovation on the performance side, and it inspires us to try more in terms of transboundary exploration," Zhang said.

Kunqu Opera is relatively static while ballet is more dynamic; the current artwork is a combination of the dynamic and the static. One is Chinese and the other is Western, so it's also a combination of East and West.

In the future, Wu will consider presenting this work to other countries and have more audiences see and appreciate it. When asked if he is worried that foreign audiences may not understand what they are trying to express, Wu replied art appreciation is always a highly subjective experience. As the saying goes, "There are a thousand Hamlets in the eyes of a thousand readers."

"I hope that every audience member can create their own understanding after watching the performance rather than be informed about certain concepts prior to seeing it with their own eyes," Wu said.

(Print Edition Title：A Transboundary Trial) 

Copyedited by Elsbeth van Paridon

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