Dancing, motionlessly, through time

The academy's Party secretary, Ba Tu, says the school plans to open a museum on its campus to display her sculptures and tell the story of each set.

Teachers with the school's classical Chinese dance department will work together to do research about these figurines and choreograph new dances based on them.

There are many dance pieces born out of the study of ancient Chinese paintings, murals and clay statues.

One is Xianghe Ge, which is adapted from a traditional Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 220) dance that was often staged during banquets at that time. It was a re-created dance piece performed by female students of the Beijing Dance Academy and by choreographer Sun Ying that later featured in the popular TV show, Wu Qiannian (Dancing Through the Millennium), coproduced by Henan TV and Chinese video platform Bilibili in 2021.

In the performance of Xianghe Ge, the female dancers, wearing costumes of the Eastern Han Dynasty (25-220), chant poems and dance on and off the tops of drums, creating rhythms with their feet. Since it premiered in 2009, the dance piece has become an excerpt of Sun's dance drama, Tongque Ji (Dancing Girl of Tongque Platform).

Such modern presentations of ancient Chinese dances have been gaining popularity among the younger generation. The viral dance piece, A Tang Dynasty Banquet, produced and staged by Henan TV in 2021, portrays such national treasures as Tang Dynasty (618-907) clay figurines.

"Those dances bring ancient ceramic statuettes to life and tell their stories onstage, which is a creative approach to showcasing the treasures," says Xu Rui, president of the Beijing Dance Academy.

"Thanks to Wang Qian, we have these dancing figurines, which will inspire us to be creative and imaginative with the choreography."