On July 8 the 18th Emilia Romagna Festival inaugurates with an Italian Premiere. The Chinese Dance Theatre Lanzhou will perform at Diego Fabbri Theatre in Forli with the original work ‘The Tales of the Silk Road- Dunhuang my Dreamland’, a ballet in a prologue and four acts.
The Ancient China is the background for the love story that will be staged with original choreographies, soundtracks and incredible scenographies.
Following the recent cultural opening of western China, the Chinese Dance Theatre Lanzhou will perform for the first time the ‘Tales of the Silk Road’ in Italy , precisely in Forli, where the major Chinese community is located.
The Silk Road was a huge web of streets which joined the West and the East together.
It has existed since the Romans traded fabric with the Chinese merchants.
Today you don’t have to travel along those ancient streets to get to the Forbidden City, but the Silk Road is still the symbol of trades between the West and the East.
Apart from the name, it is still possible to spot the traces of the ancient centres of intersection.
One of those are the Mogao Caverns, a complex of hundreds of temples carved in the rock.
The Mogao Caverns, full of mazes, secret walls and hidden rooms, have created a huge repertoire of mythological legends.
Those stories have inspired the Chinese Dance Theatre Lanzhou to create the ‘Tales of the Silk Road’, a pyrotechnic ballet summarizing the legends and the art of the Chinese ballet-so different from ours.
The story imagines the mythological origin of the name of the caverns: Mogao, a young painter got wounded trying to get to the Dunhuang Caverns and risked to die in the desert.
After he was saved by a young general, he managed to reach the Caverns to find out, later on, that his savior was a girl.
Mogao fell in love with her, hopelessly hindered by an extremely powerful Great General.
The Chinese Dance Theatre Lanzhou was created 40 years ago as the State Theatre and it has produced more than 10 dramas, 50 gala events and 100 symphonic concerts.
Nowadays it is known worldwide and it brings an original opera to Italy for the first time, as a symbol of opening and exchange.
‘The Tales of the Silk Road’ have already been staged in Beijing and in over 50 Chinese cities, gaining huge recognition and success in important theatres all over Europe and Japan.