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Seventeen National Treasures Come Alive: Dance-Poetry Drama "Ancient Hues: National Treasures of Liaoning" Brings Millennia-Old Relics to the Stage
Reporter 欧亚时报编辑部
The large-scale dance-poetry drama "Ancient Hues: National Treasures of Liaoning," co-produced by the Liaoning Song and Dance Theatre (Liaoning Ethnic Orchestra) and the Liaoning Provincial Museum, with the Liaoning Ballet and other institutions helping coordinate the production, has recently returned to the stage and drawn wide attention. The work draws its creative inspiration from 17 nationally significant relics held by the Liaoning Provincial Museum, using the art of dance to "awaken" artifacts that had lain dormant for a thousand years, bringing them to life at the dancers' fingertips and toes and letting them take root in audiences' hearts. The production completed its first run at the Liaoning Grand Theatre from May 18 to 21, 2026, before appearing at Beijing's Erqi Theatre on September 15 and 16 as a selected production for the 7th National Ethnic Minority Performing Arts Gala, becoming one of the highlights of China's performing arts scene this autumn.
The structure of "Ancient Hues: National Treasures of Liaoning" is carefully crafted, using the jade pig-dragon, a signature artifact of the Hongshan culture, as the narrative thread running through the entire production. More than 5,000 years old, the jade pig-dragon is regarded as a key symbol of the dawn of Chinese civilization and a historical witness to the blending of cultures among early peoples. Built around this image of civilizational origin, the drama is organized into four chapters — "Ink and Fragrance," "Elegant Hues," "Serene Melodies" and "Radiant Artifacts" — comprising ten independent yet interconnected dance pieces, each corresponding to museum treasures from the categories of calligraphy, painting, music and artifacts, aiming to convey Liaoning's deep regional cultural heritage and its historical thread of multi-ethnic fusion through the language of dance.
In selecting specific relics, the production carefully drew on several of the Liaoning Provincial Museum's signature treasures. These include a gold filigree headdress in the shape of a flowering tree, excavated from a Murong Xianbei noble's tomb of the Former Yan period (one of the Sixteen Kingdoms) in Beipiao, Liaoning, which bears witness to the deep fusion of Xianbei and Central Plains culture; the renowned painting "Auspicious Cranes" by Northern Song Emperor Huizong (Zhao Ji), which breaks with conventional bird-and-flower composition to create a distinctively poetic atmosphere; and other heavyweight treasures including the "Wansui Tongtian" scroll, hailed as "China's finest calligraphy album," the Tang-era copy of "Court Ladies Adorning Their Hair with Flowers" attributed to Zhou Fang, and the Tang-dynasty guqin named "Nine Clouds Ring Pendant." Spanning several millennia and multiple categories — calligraphy, painting, artifacts and musical instruments — these national treasures together form the cultural imagery from which the entire drama draws.
In terms of artistic presentation, the production boldly adopts a time-travelling narrative structure reminiscent of "Night at the Museum," letting audiences feel as though they are following the dancers across a thousand years, moving freely between display cases and the stage. The staging itself is similarly inventive: the production team used a computer numerical control (CNC) system to dynamically raise, lower and shift mountain-and-river set pieces on stage, combining them to create ever-changing scenes of landscapes, clouds and moons, the earth, and unfurling scroll paintings — an attempt to visually recreate the historical atmosphere and aesthetic character embodied by the relics, so that the whole work carries narrative depth, visual appeal and scholarly substance all at once.
Since its 2025 premiere, "Ancient Hues: National Treasures of Liaoning" has been performed more than 71 times, receiving funding from the National Arts Fund and being selected for major platforms such as the 15th National Dance Showcase. Its first run at the Liaoning Grand Theatre this past May produced a historic breakthrough: every performance sold out in advance, tickets were extremely hard to come by, and at the audience's strong request the production team added an emergency extra show on May 21 — the first time this has happened in the Liaoning Song and Dance Theatre's recent performance history — with cumulative attendance surpassing 5,000. At the same time, related topics on social media drew more than ten million views, with many audience members praising the production, saying "every frame is a cultural touchstone," as the show's reception and market response far exceeded the creative team's expectations.
On September 15 and 16, "Ancient Hues: National Treasures of Liaoning," as one of the selected productions for the 7th National Ethnic Minority Performing Arts Gala, staged two consecutive performances at Beijing's Erqi Theatre, drawing large audiences from the capital as well as figures from the arts community. The Beijing run served not only as a nationwide test of the production's artistic quality, but also as an important opportunity for Liaoning's regional culture and the history of ethnic fusion in Northeast China to reach a wider audience through a national-level cultural platform. The production thus became one of the highlight works for Liaoning's delegation at this edition of the gala, alongside another selected Liaoning production.
The success of "Ancient Hues: National Treasures of Liaoning" is a microcosm of a broader trend in recent years in which Chinese museums and performing arts institutions have deepened their collaboration to make traditional culture "come alive." From Henan TV's "Wonderful Journey" gala series to immersive theatre and artifact-themed dance dramas launched by museums across the country, more and more cultural heritage institutions have begun moving beyond static display models, experimenting with cross-disciplinary fusion with dance, theatre and digital technology to tell the historical stories behind artifacts in ways young audiences embrace. The collaboration between the Liaoning Provincial Museum and the Liaoning Song and Dance Theatre is a representative example of this trend in Northeast China: the museum provides research and historical verification support, while the professional performing troupe handles artistic adaptation and stage presentation — their complementary strengths jointly driving the shift from "artifact display" to "cultural experience."
On a deeper level, the artifacts featured in "Ancient Hues: National Treasures of Liaoning" — the Hongshan culture's jade pig-dragon, the Three Yan-era Xianbei gold headdress, Northern Song court painting, and the Tang-dynasty guqin — belong to different historical periods and ethnic-cultural lineages, yet together bear witness to the long history of contact, exchange and integration among the many peoples of Liaoning and Northeast China. Through the form of a dance-poetry drama, the creative team strung together artifacts scattered across display cases into a complete historical narrative thread — both a creative transformation of local cultural heritage resources and a vivid artistic attempt to convey the pattern of diversity within unity that characterizes Chinese civilization. Some critics have suggested that this creative approach of "letting artifacts speak and letting history take root" offers a model that museums and performing troupes in other provinces could draw on.
It is also worth noting that "Ancient Hues: National Treasures of Liaoning" has previously held special performances at university venues such as Dalian University of Technology's Panjin campus and Peking University's Centennial Memorial Hall, continuing to expand its influence among young students. As the production's touring reach continues to grow, this dance-poetry drama inspired by 17 national treasures is gradually moving from a Liaoning production to a national stage, becoming an important window for audiences to learn about Liaoning's history and culture and experience the diverse charm of Chinese civilization, while accumulating valuable experience for further exploring the fusion of museums and performing arts. The creative team says it plans to keep refining the production's details based on feedback from the tour, and to explore linking the performance's content more closely with the museum's permanent exhibitions and digital guided tours, so that audiences who come for the show are inspired to walk into the galleries and experience the relics themselves up close.
