Liaoning Ballet is reviving Swan Lake this year to celebrate the 30th anniversary of its founding.
The company is celebrating its 30th birthday and continues to open up Chinese ballet to the rest of the world.
When Liaoning Ballet was formed in 1980, with around 20-odd dancers culled mostly from Shenyang Conservatory of Music, there were just three pairs of dancing shoes among them. The company has made strides since then. Now, on the threshold of its 30th anniversary, Liaoning Ballet is more of a platform for global cultural exchanges.
The company has traveled across half the world with its repertoire. Its 65 professional actors, chosen with a fine-toothed comb from among hundreds of hopefuls, do more than 60 shows a year. The star dancers, Lu Meng and Jiao Yang, have brought back trophies from prestigious international contests in Varna, Bulgaria, and Nagoya, Japan. Acclaimed ballet exponents from the United States, Germany and France have touched base to direct productions for the company.
The ballet school run by the company since 1994 is China's largest. Of the 540 students on its rolls, there are, almost always, around 15 from Japan or South Korea.
What makes Liaoning Ballet, stashed away in an ordinary eight-story building, located off the historic site, Zhao Mound (Beiling Park), such a point of cultural convergence?
"The teachers here are excellent. They are so easy-going, and so are the dancers," says Misaki Rita, a Japanese dance teacher associated with Toyama Prefectural Artistic and Cultural Association, who has been bringing a class of her students here every year since 2006. "I would like to have my students trained here again and again, for here's where they receive the kind of professional training that would be hard to find in Japan."
French classical ballet exponent, James Amar, who has been creative director with the company for the last seven years, praises Liaoning Ballet's openness and adaptability. "They don't just make collaborations. They are eager to take features from other cultures and retain them," he says.
"I am very happy in artistic and personal terms," says Brigida Pereira Neves, the only European ballerina, who has been dancing with the company for the last year and a half.
She is glad about the company's willingness to internationalize, to seek out world-class professionals, like James Amar, whose creative input in productions like Giselle have made Chinese audiences wake up to the ballet's Gothic charm.
The mood is upbeat in the dance studio. Dance instructor and vice-head of the company, Qu Zijiao, is showing one of the ballerinas how to stretch her torso and maneuver her fingertips, emulating the delicate twitch of a swan's wings as it swims across the water. Star dancer Jiao Yang, as Prince Siegfried, supports the ballerina, playing Odette, on his right palm. She puts up her left leg, toe pointing skywards, now in a straight vertical line with her right, before they freeze the composition.
