About Hamlet - The Banquet

In 2006, director Feng xiaogang invited Wang Yuanyuan to work on his film The Banquet, specifically to choreograph dances for the leading actor Daniel Wu and actess Zhou Xun. The film, based on Shakespeare's Hamlet, sowed the seeds for a stage production in Wang's heart. With the captivating dances in the film garnering much enthusiasm, Wang began discussions with Feng about a stage adaption of The Banquet, and the project was thus conceived.

This year marks the fifth anniversary of the BDT, a great occasion for another collaboration between Wang and Feng. The dance drama Hamlet is borne out of the film, and adapted from Shakespeare's Hamlet. This is special Chinese Hamlet at once coming out of and departing from the film, it explores Hamles's psychological landscape from a fresh perspective. We confront his melancholy, his compassion for humanity, his doubt in the face of death and destruction. We present before you the beauty and darkness we found within Hamlet.

The story is set in no particular time , With the main characters extracted from the original work (the Ghost, the New King, the Queen, the prince and the Floral Spirit), we shape a story of life, death and love. The Ghost of the murdered King haunts those alive; the Prince avenges his father and thereby destroys love and life; the New King, the Queen and the courtiers angage in transactions of soul and flesh, struggling between good and evil. This is a tragedy of epic proportions and the stage presentation surmounts a new summit in contemporary dance theatre.

About Beijing Dance Theater

Founded in 2008 and led by artistic director/choreographer Wang Yuanyuan, the Beijing Dance Theater (BDT) has graced China’s dance stage with quality productions. Collaborating with renowned directors, composers, and visual artists, BDT continues to showcase contemporary Chinese stage art to the world in style.

With amazing creativity and productive momentum, BDT has built a repertoire of twelve different works, which represent the creative team’s critical reflections on various facets of contemporary society. The repertoire includes: Stirred from a Dream, a dance-drama adapted from the Kunqu opera Peony Pavilion; Diary of Empty Space, an energetic triple-bill and the company’s opening performance; Haze, a contemplation in a time of crisis; Prism, a triple-bill featuring work by choreographers from Sweden, Denmark, and Canada; The Color of Love, a sensual exploration of the emotional landscape of women in their 20s, 30s and 40s; Harvest, a collection of Wang Yuanyuan’s short dance pieces; Martlet, which depicts life in Beijing; and 6, a collaboration with French choreographer Anthony Egea that integrates the movements of ballet, hip hop, and Tai Chi. BDT has toured Haze in world-class venues including the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) in New York, the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London, Perth International Arts Festival.

Commissioned by the Hong Kong Arts Festival in 2011, BDT opened Golden Lotus to critical acclaim at home and abroad. It was followed by the premier of Wild Grass in September 2012 in Suzhou and Shanghai, a new work soon invited to Europe premier in Germany in May 2014, and brings BDT back to BAM's Next Wave Festival and Kennedy Center in the same year, followed by a U.S. tour and a South America tour in the year after. 2013 has once again seen BDT commit to a new main-stage production Hamlet inspired by Shakespeare's novel of the same name and Director Feng Xiaogang's The Banquet.

Over a course of five years, the BDT has also toured to over thirty cities in more than a dozen countries including Germany, Iceland, France, Spain, Denmark, Sweden, Serbia, Italy, the Netherlands, Mexico, Columbia, and Ecuador. Prism won the 2013 Best Modern Dance Ensemble, awarded by LUNAS, the Mexican National Concert Hall.

2015 will see BDT’s contemporary dance creation The Nightingale and the Rose world premiered in Shanghai International Arts Festival, and 2016 another world premier Le Poison commissioned by Festspielhaus St. Pölten in Austria.