Brief Introduction of Riverside Scene at Qingming Festival

In 2007, two "The Riverside Scene at Qingming Festival" met for the first time in Xiangjiang River. At that time, in order to celebrate the 10 anniversary of Hong Kong's return to the motherland, the Riverside Scene at Qingming Festival by Zhang Zeduan in the Northern Song Dynasty was exhibited in Hong Kong for the first time. With the appearance of the Xiangjiang River in Bianjing thousands of years ago, the Hong Kong Dance Company also presented its masterpiece The Riverside Scene at Qingming Festival at the Hong Kong Cultural Center in July 2007. Four years later, The Riverside Scene at Qingming Festival has become a classic work of Hong Kong Dance Troupe, with dozens of performances in Hong Kong and at home and abroad. The large-scale original dance poem "The Riverside Scene at Qingming Festival" is a masterpiece handed down from generation to generation with body interpretation, freehand brushwork and form as the spirit. Through the Chinese folk music concerto full of modern colors, it depicts people's lives on both sides of the Bianhe River in the Northern Song Dynasty, allowing the audience to relive the prosperous ancient capital of the Millennium and making the traditional folk dance more dynamic and modern. The Riverside Scene at Qingming Festival was created by Shi Zhiyou, a master of Chinese folk music, and played by the Asian Philharmonic Orchestra.

The producer and creator of the dance poem The Riverside Scene at Qingming Festival experienced the collection of folk songs in Henan Province, and extensively consulted professional scholars, including Yang Xin, former vice president of Beijing Palace Museum, and Wang Kefen, a China dance historian. After more than two years of textual research and planning on the history and dance of the Song Dynasty, they turned the moment describing the life of the Northern Song Dynasty on both sides of the Bianhe River into a dance poem composed of 18 chapters through freehand brushwork.

In the Song Dynasty, dance drifted from the palace to the folk, which promoted the development of folk dance to a prosperous period. On the basis of showing the traditional culture of China, the dance poem "The Riverside Scene at Qingming Festival" takes vivid picture scrolls as the theme and absorbs the rich dance culture in the Central Plains as the performance material, such as catkins, in which women dance with little feet and the dancer's rhythm is like a willow swaying in the wind; "Spring Suburb" reproduces the donkey caravan in the picture with the folk dance "Running Donkeys"; Different traditional dances, including "social fire parade" and "riding a horse with a whip" in traditional operas, have been integrated into hundreds of operas, presenting a lively scene of geisha entertainment and acrobatics in Beijing. There are also "boating", "fishing lamp", "chasing fish", "wearing a black hat with feathers", "walking on stilts", "playing the old man" and "walking short", and so on. The ever-changing Central Plains dance adds modern artistic texture, makes traditional folk dance more dynamic, and makes people think about the past and enter the dazzling and prosperous world with the pace of dancers.