Posters for ballet Hamlet Photo:Courtesy of Beijing Dance Theater
 

Seven years ago when the film The Banquet by Chinese director Feng Xiaogang premiered, its dazzling orchestral score and visual effects impressed moviegoers across the world, especially where Qingnü dances to "Yuerenge" - a love song from the Han Dynasty (206BC-AD220) - for her lover, Prince Wuluan, pushing the film to its climax.

Choreographed by Wang Yuanyuan, the president of the Beijing Dance Theater, this poignant dance interlude adds a touch of grace and great emotional delivery. Wang is now ready to stage a ballet version of the film, something she intended to do long ago.

"When I was choreographing The Banquet in 2006, I had the thought of adapting it into a ballet drama for the stage," said Wang. "The story in the film was drawn from Shakespeare's Hamlet, which has a strong expressive power and is well suited to the stage," Wang told the Global Times.

Conceptual Hamlet

As a film, The Banquet is set in the Five Dynasties and Ten States period (907-965) in China's history, showing the struggles for power and love within the imperial palace. For the ballet version, set to premiere at the Tianqiao Theater on December 3, Wang chose to return to the original classic story.

But still, a striking difference from the classic is all the names of the original characters are simplified and more abstract. Hamlet is identified simply as "the prince" and his mother is just "the queen". "As a work produced for both domestic and foreign audiences, we take out the names of those characters as well as the places, so that audiences don't feel locked into any particular time or place," Wang said.

Even the dancers are shrouded in mystery and their faces covered with masks. This also serves to keep audiences fixated on the chorography.

Masked dances are actually traditional for some Chinese minorities. This also appears in the film The Banquet.

Hamlet has been staged as a ballet many times over in companies around the world. But for Chinese audiences, this is the first domestically-produced rendition.

Presenting a world classic solely through body language is not an easy job.

"Dancing in nature is not the form of telling stories," Wang said. "It is abstract, creating an artistic mood and leaving audiences to imagine." As the saying goes, there are a thousand Hamlets in a thousand people's eyes. Wang hopes that audiences can have their own feelings and interpretations when watching her version.

In the story, the mother of the prince marries his uncle after the king dies. The prince suspects the uncle of killing his father, and so he sacrifices love for the sake of revenge. During this pursuit, the prince pays heavy price and suffers deep inner turmoil.

"In this Hamlet, audiences just need to feel what the prince is feeling, to imagine his pain," Wang stressed.

Tapping into the male ego

Wang has already produced many successful works such as The Color of Love (2006) and The Golden Lotus (2011), and choreographed for some state-class directors' works including Zhang Yimou's Raise the Red Lantern (the stage version, 2004), but she found this current one to be far more challenging than anything she's done before.

"Most of my previous works are female-focused stories, in which the emotions and inner feelings of those characters are easy for me to understand and express," Wang said. "But Hamlet is all about the prince and a man's psychological confusion among so many emotional entanglements, like his distorted relations with his mother and uncle, his hesitant personality and the hidden Oedipus complex."

"It's hard but also an exciting experience to follow through such a man's soul journey," she described her feelings of choreographing Hamlet. "We rehearsed many times for even a look in the eye, or a gesture," said Wu Yan, who plays the prince in the story.

Big dreams

As one of the few choreographers who decided to leave those government-supported troupes and set up her own dance theater five years ago, Wang's reputation is even bigger abroad than within China. Their 2009 work Haze, has been invited to perform in world-class theaters including John F. Kennedy Arts Center and Sadler's Wells Theatre in the UK.

"More than half of our performances have been outside of the country from the inception of the theater," Wang said. "Now we are trying to make it more even, as domestic audiences begin to accept this more abstract stage art."

As an independent theater, most of her works are on a small budget - no more than a few hundred thousand yuan, which makes it hard to compete with well-funded, State-owned troupes.

"The National Ballet of China can spend 18 million yuan on a production like The Little Mermaid, which is unimaginable for us," she said.

However, small in scale as it is, the theater has big ambitions. Wang hopes that one day her theater may become the Chinese mainland version of Cloud Gate Dance Theater from Taiwan.

Yearning for more financial support from the government, Wang expressed that for now, she's heartened by the fact that her dance group has made it for five years, and is still on the rise.