How the Hong Kong Ballet reimagined ‘The Butterfly Lovers’—one of the greatest Chinese love story ever

It was the concerto’s worldwide fame that made the HKBallet team settle on The Butterfly Lovers for the new production. Moreover, Hu says that even though western audiences may not understand the significance of the marital and family traditions of feudal China that appear in the tale, they will “know that the story is about a love so great that it transcends death”.

“There is a reason why this story, which originated thousands of years ago, is still being told today,” he says. “The characters’ courage to love and sacrifice themselves for each other transcends [romance]: [it spans] from brotherly love to sacrificial love. Today, our perception of love tends to be more practical. What Liang and Zhu have is a quality that we can only dream of.” Hu and Mai admit they don’t relate to the protagonists, with Mai saying, “We may not have had the same courage [to die for each other] if we were them—but we’re not telling a story about us. Our interpretation of The Butterfly Lovers is not just about dying for love; it’s about love surpassing death. We hope to inspire the audience to reflect on the meaning of love and cherish people around them.”

The duo brought on board Chinese contemporary composer Tian Mi as well as Oscar-winning costume designer Tim Yip, known for designing the costumes for Hollywood wuxia film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) and the set for HKBallet’s Great Gatsby (2019).

The project began with the music. “It was a great challenge to rearrange and add to the original concerto, which was so iconic,” says Tian. The original composers Chen and He were students at the Shanghai Music Conservatory, where they studied the piano and violin respectively. To create the erhu’s lingering, sentimental sound, which is common in Chinese folk melodies, He experimented with violin bowing and fingering techniques. Adding these avantgarde elements to the concerto fundamentally changed the perception of Chinese music in the western classical music world. “The skeleton of the music is still western instruments, but the soul of it is oriental aesthetics,” Tian explains.

For the HKBallet commission, Tian retained the violin concerto’s famous motif but removed some of the more passionate parts for contemporary tastes. He compares his writing process to ink paintings, saying it’s important to “leave some areas blank”—in other words, he kept some of the score simple, because writing for an orchestra is different from writing for a ballet, where the music shouldn’t distract the audience from the dance itself.

In expanding the 25-minute concerto to a 90-minute score for a full-length ballet production, Tian adopted He and Chen’s vision of melding western orchestral music with Chinese characteristics, especially when developing musical themes for each character. For instance, he created different combinations of brass and string instruments to indicate Liang’s character development: from a powerful-sounding trumpet to show Liang’s suavity and ambition as a young scholar at the beginning, to a softer, lingering melody as he discovers Zhu’s gender and falls in love with her.

It’s not just the music that’s experimental—the choreography combines contemporary ballet with Asian elements, and is reflective of Mai and Hu’s experience as classically trained Chinese dancers before they switched to ballet. As well as Chinese dance props such as mirrors, foldable fans and scrolls (they had also thought of Chinese swords, but gave up on the idea), the two also incorporated signature movements from Chinese dance, such as wrists twisting; in other sections they combined ballet footwork with upper body movements typical of Chinese dance. This amalgamation of styles makes their production starkly different from the Shanghai Ballet’s 2001 production, which was predominantly a classical ballet, or the Hong Kong Dance Company’s version in 2015, which focused more on Chinese and contemporary dance.

Read more: How Hong Kong Ballet’s ‘The Rule Breakers’ is pushing ballet’s boundaries by subverting traditional gender roles, innovating with music and more

HKBallet is used to performing experimental pieces, such as Hu’s own The Last Song in 2022, an abstract interpretation of Oscar Wilde’s short story The Nightingale and the Rose; or The Rule Breakers, which was staged in March this year, and which captured the evolution of ballet in three short performances. But to take on a Chinese-dance-inspired piece is a tougher test of the dancers’ skills, as the two forms require the muscles to be used in completely different ways. “Ballet is about lifting your body and maintaining your poses, such as when you’re standing en pointe, whereas in Chinese dance, you feel as if your body is sinking towards the ground,” Mai explains. Hu adds that “something as simple as turning a wrist can be trickier than standing en pointe or doing pirouettes, especially for non-Chinese-dance [practitioners] who have never seen a Chinese dance performance.”

A challenge, however, can also mean an opportunity for artistic breakthrough, just like He and Chen’s pioneering work in writing a violin concerto with Chinese characteristics that is now celebrated worldwide. The HKBallet’s Butterfly Lovers is a first for the creative team in multiple ways: for the company to stage a Chinese story-inspired ballet; for Mai and Hu to choreograph a ballet production with Chinese dance characteristics; and for Tian, a movie, TV and game music composer, to write music for a ballet. Despite the intensive training and pressure, their enthusiasm to show Hong Kong the new piece is palpable: Tian says, “We’re like those composers back then, coming together to create something new, something exciting.”

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