Bridging two cultures

A troupe of 30 Chinese and American dancers present a theater production about the life of Pearl S. Buck. The dance drama will kick off its China tour next year. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Over the past couple of decades, memorials and museums dedicated to Buck have been created in China.

For Tang, the biggest challenge when producing this dance drama was to create a production that would be accepted overseas.

She recalls when she first took the script of Pearl-Spring, River, Moon, Flower and Night, to American dancer-choreographer Daniel Ezralow, four years ago, Ezralow was not very interested.

However, after Tang split the story into five chapters, which parallel the poem, Spring, River, Flower, Moon, Night, by Chinese poet Zhang Ruoxu of the Tang Dynasty (618-907), Ezralow, who is interested in Chinese culture, agree to join in.

She also fed him with ideas of Chinese elements such as calligraphy, tai chi and traditional folk music.

Ezralow, choreographer and director of the show, has also created original works for the London Contemporary Dance Theatre, and the Cirque du Soleil, and choreographed the opening ceremony of the Sochi Olympics in 2014, "I did not want to do a narrative show. I wanted to do an impressionist show," he says.