Pingtan Impression Staged in Xi'an to Open the Dialogue about "City and Sea" on the Silk Road

"Wild, simple and unsophisticated, mysterious, unbridled," "The feeling that comes from ancient times comes to the fore," "the 'soul' in full bloom can really be felt," and other quotations - On June 14-15, the famous dance artist Yang Liping's dancing work Pingtan Impression was successively staged in the Opera Hall of Shaanxi Opera House in Xi'an, which was proved to be a huge success, attracting nearly 4,000 audiences and approximately 70,000 re-posts on Weibo.

It is reported that Pingtan Impression is rooted in the "Maritime Silk Road Culture" on both sides of the Taiwan Straits. Created on the unique scenery and elements in Pingtan, the dancing work shows the richness of the marine culture in the form of stage art, and is seen as a "Cross-strait Cultural Masterpiece" with international vision and high artistic standard. It tells a story that the ancestor of Haitan "Junshan King" and the daughter of the sea "Pingtan Blue" met and fell in love with each other, jointly resisted foreign enemies and pursued a better life, presenting the scene of blending "mankind with the sea" in art form.

This performance tour in Xi'an is not only a promotion of culture with distinctive marine attributes, but also a dialogue and exchange between the "Silk Road Culture" and the "Maritime Silk Road Culture." Wen Ling, producer of Pingtan Impression said that Xi'an is a historical and cultural city with profound humanistic connotations and the starting point of the ancient Silk Road, while Pingtan is an emerging international tourist island and a strategic hub city on the Maritime Silk Road. This allows the two places to show extensive opportunities for cultural tourism resource sharing and tourist market cooperation.

For this performance, Yang Liping met with the audience at the Shaanxi Opera House in the ancient city of Xi'an on June 3, telling the behind-the-scenes tidbits about Pingtan Impression in advance. "There is too much great stuff unexploited on this land. How to showcase the local traditional cultural connotations and refine the marine and island cultures in Pingtan Impression is the soul of this work," said Yang Liping who insists on returning to nature in creation and going back to human nature so as to deeply explore the possibilities of art.

"The difficulty in taking the 'sea' related acting further to the 'soul' related acting is to put civil labors such as beach combing onto the stage. Pingtan Impression comes from life, but dramatizes life. Stage art should have a soul of its own, instead of a simple pile of culture," commented Liang Geluo, a famous drama critic, when talking about the stage performance of performers in Pingtan Impression.

Since the tour began in January 2018, Pingtan Impression has been staged across 32 cities in 14 provinces, with 75 performances and nearly 100,000 live audiences, covering more than 90 million people and attracting countless fans. As of mid-June this year, the 2019 national tour of Pingtan Impression has been over half way, still with performances in Shenmu, Shaanxi, Guangzhou, Guangdong and other regions in the coming days.