Dance music: Liu Xing
Dance costumes: Zhang Fanyu, Ye Qianyu, Yu Feng, Xiao Shufang successively designed the costumes for the dance, and Xia Yayi's costume design was adopted after 1962
Dance premiere: Beijing 1954
Premiere group: Central Song and Dance Troupe
Premiere performer: Xu Jie, Zi Huajun
Awards: Bronze Prize of the Fifth World Youth and Student Peace and Friendship Festival Dance Competition in 1955; Award of Classical Works of the 20th Century Dance Classics Competition of the Chinese Nation in 1994.
In Dunhuang mural paintings, there is the imprint of our country's splendid and long history and culture, at the same time, Dunhuang is also a crossroads of a variety of cultural fusion and collision, Chinese, Indian, Greek, and Islamic cultures meet here, those murals and sculptures from the 4th to 11th centuries A.D., bringing people a very shocking artistic feeling. Flying Sky" is based on the dance images in Dunhuang frescoes, and this women's classical duo dance is the first dance work in China based on the image of the goddess Xiangyin ("Flying Sky") in Dunhuang frescoes.
The choreographer of the dance, Dai Ailian, is a famous dance performer, choreographer and educator in China.
In 1916, Dai Ailian was born in Trinidad, West Indies. 12 years old, enrolled in the local white dance class, and was the only colored child in the class. 14 years old in London has entered the famous dancer Anton Dahlin ballet dance studio and the Marianne Dahlin ballet dance studio. At the age of 14, she entered the famous Anton Dowling Ballet Studio and the Mary Lambert Ballet School in London, where she studied European dance. At age 14, she studied European classical ballet at the Anton Dolin Ballet Studio and the Mary Lambert Ballet School in London.
In 1936, Irene enrolled in the Wegman Dance Company's Leslie Dance Studio in London, where she studied modern dance. Two years later, she discovered her ideal dance form while watching a performance by the Eus Ballet that combined human movement with inner emotion in a way that was both technically and artistically expressive.
Despite having no family in China, she boarded a ship at the end of 1939 to return to her home country in the midst of a national tragedy. After Pearl Harbor, Dai and some other artists traveled from Hong Kong to Guilin, Guangxi, by way of Macau, and finally arrived in Chongqing, where they began to actively campaign for China's war against Japan.
Under the care and encouragement of Zhou Enlai and Deng Yingchao, as soon as Dai Ailian returned to China, she began to search for the roots of Chinese dance and to work for the development of Chinese national dance. In the history of modern dance in China, Dai Ailian earlier processed the rich and colorful national folk dance into theater art on the stage, so that people can see the rich treasure of dance art owned by their motherland.
"Flying" is the outstanding representative work of Dai Ailian's long-term commitment to the inheritance and development of traditional folk dance. In "Flying", she once again inherits and develops the technique of long silk dance in China's traditional dance, and reproduces the image of "Flying" on the stage with condensed dance vocabulary and lyrical and romantic techniques. The dance is elegant and beautiful, infused with the author's yearning and pursuit of freedom and light.
In addition to finding inspiration from the frescoes and discovering dance styles, "Flying Sky" also draws on the long-sleeve dance of opera dance, and through the processing, organizing, and re-creating of the long-sleeve dance technique, it portrays a pair of nymphs who aspire to freedom and happiness. Elegant, beautiful, pure and quiet "Flying", for the first time in the Chinese stage reproduces the splendid and long-lasting national culture of Dunhuang, the fluttering lines of the ribbon and the colorful changes of the "silk flowers" expresses the heart of the "Goddess of the Fragrant Tone", and also shapes the purity of the young girl, elegant and unassuming image of the girl. and the image of the maiden. This pair of goddesses, on the stage, or a high and low, a movement, a quiet, a left and a right, or linking hands, looking at each other, intertwined, long sleeves and silks, such as the rainbow, and then if the cloud, unpredictable, fully demonstrated thousands of years of Chinese traditional dance skills.
"Flying" and "Lotus Dance" are the representative works of Dai Ailian in the 1950s, and the dance was very popular with the audience after the public performance, and it became a dance that many dance groups in the country competed with each other to learn and perform and has been performed for a long time. The Times (UK) has published a review, saying that this dance "reflects Ms. Dai's extraordinary talent for dealing with the human body and the structure of the stage space".