The elegant figure and the grace of the peacock has been the inspiration for many dancers. But Yang Liping, famous for her vivid imitation of this beautiful creature in her dance The Spirit of the Bird, is universally regarded as the "Peacock Princess" in China.
She has performed on stage for dozens of years. But Yang Liping will forever remain the beautiful young spirit in the eyes of most people. A native of the Bai ethnic group of the Dali Bai Autonomous Prefecture in the southwestern province of Yunnan, she has devoted herself to the development of the ethnic dance.
The curtain has just been lowered in the Shanghai Grand Theatre on the fourth "Lotus" awards, which are the highest honors awarded for dance in China. Yang Liping and her troupe reaped three major awards. Their dance drama Dynamic Yunnan which was choreographed and directed by Yang, and in which she performed as the principal dancer won the golden prize for the best dance drama. Yang Liping herself also too won the awards for "best director" and "best principal dancer".
It took Yang Liping more than two years to choreograph Dynamic Yunnan, a large scaled dance drama, which is a panoramic depiction of the colorful life of the ethnic people in Yunnan province. The whole process of creating this dance drama was full of difficulties.
This master piece Dynamic Yunnan had its beginnings in a coincidence. In 2001, Yang Liping went back to her hometown Dali to shoot a dance album as a conclusion to her dance career. While she was there the Yunnan Travel Song and Dance Troupe called her in to help them create a dance drama about the life of ethnic people.
Yang agreed and was excited about it. She thought doing a dance drama for her hometown was a more meaningful way to put a full stop to her career than making an album for herself.
Yang Liping said, "We were very careful in choosing performers for this dance drama. It’s not a solo dance, in which you can control yourself very well. It’s a panoramic one, in which the performers take a key role in expressing local characteristics."
Having visited nearly every village in Yunnan province, Yang Liping then spent a year choosing her performers, 60 young boys and girls with the right singing and dancing talent to act out the drama.
"No one in the troupe had ever enrolled local people, say, people in countryside that haven't received any formal dance training before. At the beginning, they all disagreed with my choices. They would say some of the dancers I chose were not beautiful, not tall enough. They would say their skin was dull, or they didn't know how to move their feet directly. And I would say, 'Do you want them to perform ballet? They are chosen to perform ethnic dance. We are showing our local dance, so I have chosen local people.'"
It was Yang's first experience of choreographing and directing such a large scale dance drama. At first, she was not clear about what she wanted the whole thing to look like. She had only a vague idea about it. So she had to follow her artistic imagination and weave the plot little by little.
Yang Liping said, "I'm not good at choreographing for large dance assembly. But thanks to so much of the inspiration being rooted in the local area, I didn't need to try hard to invent dance movements. All you need is to choose the best elements from the local people and arrange them into an impressive large performance."
However, the process was time consuming. The Yunnan Travel Song and Dance Dance Troupe, which originally persuaded Yang Liping to the task, finally gave up and drew back all of their investment. It left Yang Liping facing sixty eager young people, one of them only six years old, and with a dilemma. Did she hold on or give up?
Yang Liping said, "I like the local things very much. There are many villages such as one named 'Green Village', in which there is a kind of drum called 'magic drum'. Only one or two old women know how to beat it. There are 70 sets of different beating rhythms. Young people, especially those who return after a period away from the village, feel jeans are fashionable, and they don't like to wear embroidery any more. They also don't want to learn how to beat this kind of drum, because they have found other ways of communication. I feel it's a pity we are losing these traditions."
Yang Liping's younger sister said, "She has been saying that she will stop dancing on stage and live in Dali, our hometown. Enjoy the leisured life being with nature and doing the things she likes. But she met the financial problem for this dance drama and told me she sold her house in Dali."
With help from friends, Yang Liping's house was sold for 400,000 yuan, or some 50,000 US dollars. But this money was not enough to cover the expenses for the troupe. The money was quickly used up and her troupe faced financial difficulties again. Water and power supplies were cut. She had to go back to stage herself, to dance and raise funds for her troupe.
Yang Liping said, "I felt I could finally handle all these things. I'll would do anything for the troupe if I needed to. I couldn't give up. I regarded this dance drama as an enterprise. It didn't belong to me, but to everyone. I decided you shouldn't only make it perfect from an artistic point of view, and you must also devote your funds and energy to it. I thought that's only natural."
The final product, born out of Yang Liping's painstaking and determined effort, turned out to be a huge success. Dynamic Yunnan is a unique dance drama that is rich with the strong flavor of the life of the ethnic people of southwestern China. It was finally presented to the public. And the public loved what it saw.
(CCTV.com April 13, 2004)
