In ‘The Butterfly Lovers,’ Hong Kong Ballet’s Radical Reimaginings Take Flight

Ballet’s living center is shifting eastward, with more and more of the most exciting arts and artists coming out of China, Korea and Japan. New and truly modern productions are being exported stateside. Supported in part by China Arts and Entertainment Group, China’s central state-owned cultural enterprise, ballet becomes a direct diplomatic bridge.

The repertoire at Hong Kong Ballet is where the mythic and the contemporary merge. Chinese legends sit alongside reimagined classics, as in a Romeo and Juliet where sword fights gave way to kung fu, which the dancers studied intensively to master. Untethered from European roots, both the artists and the art form are free to take root in new soil—where east and west, tradition and radical modernity entwine, germinating a wholly new cultural voice.

Hong Kong Ballet’s The Butterfly Lovers is as old as it is new, straddling the extremes of modern tech and ancient fable. Deploying projection mapping, designers from ballet and film, Tian Mi’s original voluminous score and the high-tech aesthetics of modern circus, the ballet is a tale of love and, more piercingly, a woman choosing—even to the point of death—to reject society’s masks.

Opening with a single girl under a spotlight playing the guqin (a traditional Chinese string instrument known for its subtle sound). We think we’ve met our heroine, Zhu, but moments later, the real Zhu appears from beneath the guqin’s table. She’s danced by the ballerina Ye Feifei, who is tall and elegant, with exaggerated arches and a technique at once voluptuous and restrained. She’s reminiscent of a Russian ballerina from the late-1990s—just before lines and range of motion became so extreme as to render certain steps unrecognizable from the generation before. Zhu’s character is a playful one: a girl in possession of her beauty but not yet aware of the responsibilities assigned to her through womanhood. In a scene echoing Shakespeare’s Juliet and her nurse, she impishly mocks the manners and carriage she’s being trained to display. At the start, Ye isn’t entirely believable—constantly playing outward to the audience, reminding us that we are watching a ballerina pretending to be an ingénue. Her regal carriage—ideal in many instances—betrays the ruse.

Through sets designed by Tim Yip, Jin Yau and Matthieu Chu Siu Ming, worlds are conjured with floor-to-ceiling panels that move between scenes, appearing and disappearing like mountains revealing new continents or new realities. The lighting design by Yeung Tsz Yan and video projections by William Kwok and Yicai Wang are poems unto themselves. The airspace between backdrop and floor is used to create three-dimensional holographic images. Our eyes are never unsatisfied, and yet, dead space exists purposefully, rhythmically—like the silence a singer uses to emphasize a note.

The relationship between Zhu and her parents unfolds. In a pas de deux with her father, played by Henry Seldon, choreographers Hu Song Wei Ricky and Mai Jingwen weave classical ballet with contemporary—even acrobatic—movement. Seldon, stalwart in the role, wears the mask of societal expectation. Zhu doesn’t yet realize she is expected to don her own. The dance with her mother takes place amongst many women, all identical. Zhu dances among them yet apart—looking to us as if we are with her, outside the matrix, while the others—many and yet one—move through a parallel world, bound to their prescribed roles.

Going away to study, Zhu travels for the first time on her own through a sea of green dancers, our eyes awash in verdant bodies and Monet-like skies. It’s here that she first meets Liang Shanbo, her soon-to-be love. A bridge appears—representing, as love does, a threshold between ourselves. Liang, danced by Ryo Kato, is a gentle beauty, whom we can easily imagine as the object of innocent first love.

In the academy scene, a giant statue of Confucius is lowered onto the stage as scholars dance in homage to the ancient master, dramatically (and noisily) unfurling their wooden scrolls—the point is made a few too many times.

Zhu and Liang, secretly in love, lie asleep on a standing wooden bed. In a striking and unusual bedroom scene, the would-be lovers sleep while their dreamlike alter egos, danced by Yang Ruiqi and Garry Corpuz, realize their longings. In fishlike costumes with one leg exposed, beneath fairylike lights, Ruiqi and Corpuz are supple and expressive. One wished to see much more of them once the pas de deux is over. Having been lulled into a dream of balletic China, we are jolted into a 19th-century white act (the term for a scene filled with white tutus that were common in many of the classics). As Zhu and Liang’s feelings deepen, we suddenly find ourselves in a sea of white. The tutus, sequined and fastened with visible zippers, are a departure from the otherwise exquisite costume design. Yet we forgive the interruption, because the group choreography is as beautiful and cosmically organized as any great classical ballet, while the video projections, performances unto themselves, carry us from the eye of red suns to spinning, light-filled universes.

Zhu receives a letter calling her home, claiming her mother is ill, though in truth, she’s to be married off. In the next pas de deux between Liang and Zhu, they plan to elope. Her mother—brilliantly staged as a towering shadow of a woman, ominous and unseen—was eavesdropping. Liang is caught and beaten. We understand his death elegantly, when he removes his outer clothes, like the ego stripped away in the passage from one realm to the next.

Up until now, the ballet has read like a gorgeous theatrical exhibition—a nonverbal Broadway show, sumptuous in costume, set and sound. In the scenes that follow, it evolves into something richer and more layered. It’s here that the ballerina Ye fully finds her emotional footing. She’s no longer playing to us, but for us. Zhu, upon learning of Liang’s death, finds her own truth extinguished. Surrounded by masked women—identical crones who observe and condone her ritualized erasure, as they themselves were once erased—the maids prepare her for marriage.

She is transformed through dress into a covered woman, a bride, subsumed into the collective. The coterie of crones walks her toward the altar. Passing Liang’s grave, she pauses—a brief visit—and suddenly leaps in. She is gone.

Zhu and Liang reunite beyond consciousness, transformed into butterflies in eternity. The stage is swept with delicate winged creatures in a kaleidoscopic yellow dreamscape—a heart-opening reprieve from the losses of self we endure in life. Heartache and catharsis alike are washed in a balm of insolent beauty.

For centuries, the arts have served as tools of soft power: from the Renaissance masters who framed an omniscient God as the ultimate arbiter of beauty and truth, often commissioned by the Medicis—themselves bankers and popes, wielders of spiritual and material authority—to the less obvious examples, like Russian (and Soviet) ballet, where the godlike bodies of silent dancers conveyed a culture so refined it could excel in the most ephemeral of the arts.

Ballet arrived in China, as elsewhere, through the Russian diaspora following the 1917 revolution. Artists tied to the czars became exiles and scattered to France, Germany, the U.S., Iran, China and so on. This diaspora seeded ballet’s global evolution: George Balanchine, the founder of New York City Ballet, and Igor Stravinsky, once stateless refugees, were part of this artistic reordering. Without it, their contributions as we know them might never have existed. The same post-revolutionary upheaval was the catalyst for ballet’s development in China and led to the eventual founding of a formal national Chinese school and company in Beijing.

Founded in 1979, now under Septime Webre’s direction, Hong Kong Ballet has become one of the rare companies in the world with heavier footing in the present than in the past. If the arts are a vehicle to market the values, the spiritual and intellectual status of a nation, then The Butterfly Lovers, which finished its run at Lincoln Center in late August, gives us a China that is at the forefront of dance’s artistic development. They have recreated ballet’s visual language in their own image, and what an image it is.

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