Museum's night magic captured

Imagine spending a night at an art museum. Darkness envelops you. Strange sounds. May just be faulty plumbing but it could be...

The imagination runs wild. Magic happens when all the paintings come alive. Set to stirring music with portions of the paintings animated, a new theatrical production, Tan Yuanyuan And Her Friends－Magical Night at the Art Museum, is a unique and immersive experience that offers a parallel way to appreciate art: music, dance and paintings.

With Tan, who is the San Francisco Ballet's first Chinese principal dancer, as its artistic director and co-choreographer, the production will be staged at Tianqiao Performing Arts Center in Beijing on June 4 and 5, before going to tour nationwide for two months.

"Audiences here are unique and you can tell that they've seen all those world-class performances. As their tastes are of a high standard, we want to come up with something new to show them," says Tan, who co-initiated the project last year.

Echoed by artists, including director and scriptwriter Zhou Ke, composer Qu Dawei, and theater designer Chen Yu-hsuan, Tan invited leading Chinese dancer-choreographers, including Chen Zhenwei, Li Jiabo, and Xiao Fuchun, to join in the performance with each one of them selecting a painting as their inspiration for choreography.

Paintings such as Starry Night by Van Gogh, The Girl with a Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer, and Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains by Huang Gongwang from the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368), are featured in the performance.

Tan selected one of her favorite paintings, The Lovers, by Rene Magritte, which has a woman and a man locked in an embrace with each of their faces covered with a white cloth and they were kissing one another through the veils.

Considered as one of the most mysterious masterpieces of surrealist paintings, it leaves Tan open to various interpretations, which is captivating for her.

In 2000, Tan performed as the leading woman in a bright red dress in a dance work, titled Magrittomania, choreographed by Yuri Possokhov, former principal dancer with San Francisco Ballet. The dance work paid tribute to the painter Magritte.

"Magritte, with his art, presents paintings that are beautiful in their clarity and mystery, which provokes unsettling thoughts," adds Tan. "I believe that arts are mutual and they inspire one another. What we want to do is to combine them together and present them as a whole to the audiences."

For a long time, Tan wants to expand visions about dance through crossover projects, hoping to engage audiences with different perspectives about dancing and displaying choreographic creativity.

Besides combining paintings and music, the performance also offers audiences with different dance styles, including ballet, contemporary dance and classical dance.

"Hopefully, the audiences may participate in their own ways and become a part of the show," says Tan.

Born in Shanghai, Tan started her relationship with ballet at the age of 5 when she was impressed by the beauty of a performance of Swan Lake on TV. She began ballet training at Shanghai Dance School and graduated four years later. In 1992, Tan won a scholarship and went to Stuttgart, Germany, to further her ballet training. During her time in Germany, Helgi Tomasson, the artistic director and principal choreographer of the San Francisco Ballet, got in touch with her. He told her she would become the company's youngest solo dancer, and in 1995 Tan joined the company as a soloist. In 1997 she was promoted to be principal dancer of the company.

She has built up a large fan base in her home country with her performances at the CCTV Spring Festival galas in 1994, 2006 and 2021, one of the most-watched TV shows in the country, and Hunan TV's popular reality show Dance Smash last year.

According to Tan, the project, Tan Yuanyuan And Her Friends, has been running for years which gathers international artists. Unlike the previous shows, which are galas showcasing extracts of classic ballet works, such as Sleeping Beauty and Giselle, Magical Night at the Art Museum will be the first time for Tan to create a theatrical production with stories and a mix of art forms.

All the artists work together for the first time and they exchanged ideas through phone calls and online meetings last year during the coronavirus pandemic.

"It felt like that every day I was inspired with new ideas from those artists. They brought their knowledge from their own fields. This constant source of inspiration comes not only from the dancers' life experiences, but also from their keen sense of art," says Tan.

One of the artists working with Tan in this production is composer Qu Dawei, who wrote music pieces featuring a variety of musical instruments, such as piano, violin, classical guitar, pipa (a four-stringed Chinese lute), and bayan (a type of accordion).

The composer was impressed by Tan's solid techniques which seems to reach for the ideal. He was also intrigued by the idea that "the paintings are no longer hanging on the wall in museums but they are all alive," says the composer. "With dance, music and paintings coming together, they are no longer independent but expressive as something new"

"I chose pipa as the only Chinese musical instrument in this production because it has a unique sound of China and works well with other Western musical instruments," adds Qu.