IT'S BEEN ADAPTED for stage, screen, animation and even a rock concert, so you might think The Butterfly Lovers has been done to death. Not yet, says Yuri Ng Yue-lit. The award-winning choreographer has created a 30-minute ballet, The Story of Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai (Butterfly Lovers), which puts a fresh spin on the century-old folk tale.
The production is part of the 20th anniversary of the International Festival of Dance Academies and the ongoing Hong Kong Dance Festival. It also marks Ng's first collaboration with the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts and his second attempt to adapt the popular classic, after he choreographed The Butterfly Lovers for the Hong Kong Ballet in 1998.
In the original tale, Liang Shanbo falls in love with Zhu Yingtai, a female classmate disguised as a boy because girls weren't allowed to attend school in China 1,600 years ago. He dies of a broken heart after learning that Zhu is to marry into a wealthy family. The story ends with Zhu leaping into Liang's grave and the two souls take the form of butterflies, never to be separated again.
Ng's new piece uses The Butterfly Lovers Violin Concerto, written by Chen Gang and He Zhanhao in 1959, as his point of reference. Everything else to do with the original love story is stripped away. His production, featuring 30 dance students, is more an analysis of 1950s China, with costume from that period. 'I was wondering if it was possible to use images to analyse that era in China,' Ng says. 'And I think [Zhu pretending to be a boy to attend school] is hardly something we understand or have a connection with because we all go to schools now.'
The 42-year-old stresses that his piece is open to different interpretations, one of which will be political. In one scene, while all their classmates are holding red books, Zhu and Liang have green ones. 'Those who get the symbolism will go, 'hmm'. But those who don't might just associate red with authority and green with a piece of grassland, which symbolises freedom.'
To illustrate the kind of social conformity that characterised Red China at the time, all his dancers move in unison in this particular sequence. 'Conformity and order represent the era and the society at that time,' says Ng, a former gold medallist of the Genee International Ballet Competition.
'One may never know how strong the impact is when 1,000 people are [asked to behave the same way] at the same time. I want my dancers to know this because it also applies to ballet training - chorus dancers should not have a sense of self, as they have to become one.'