Shangri-La: The Legend

SHANGRI-LA explores China’s past through several pieces in which the dancers hark back to ancient times, when men and women struggled to survive and triumph over the elements. Vivid costumes and vigorous dance steps, often enhanced by dramatic masks, singing and drumming, evoke nature’s bounty, women’s multiple roles, love and the search for spiritual meaning.

SHANGRI-LA is a distillation of a dance piece created in 1998 by Liping Yang, who decided to assemble a showcase of the diversity of China’s cultural traditions, as well as the native costumes and dance traditions of some of China’s “minority groups” from various regions. The result was a program featuring more than 50 native dancers from these areas. Since then, SHANGRI-LA has won national and international acclaim as a powerful and entertaining work that blends cultural traditions with contemporary choreography and music. After triumphant performances in Beijing’s national theatre in 2000, the company has toured every major city in China and many cities abroad, including Paris, Moscow, Amsterdam, Tokyo and St. Louis.

The music for this work was specially composed by China’s premier classical and pop composer, San Bao. Yang, who is both artistic director and prima ballerina, is renowned for her interpretations of China’s most traditional “peacock” dances, as well as for her daring and energetic contemporary choreography. Both are on display in SHANGRI-LA, first in the opening sequence, when Yang performs in silhouette behind the “moon,” and later in a peacock dance. With her long fingernails, evocative gestures, fluid arm movements and a costume incorporating a feather design, she and her corps of female dancers summon the spirit of the peacock.