A dance-poem production titled Silk and Porcelain took the Fengming Jiutian Theatre at Tang Paradise in Xi’an on 8 November, inside the 12th Silk Road International Arts Festival, before an audience of just over 600.
Five Chapters and a Finale
The production is built on two local cultural assets rather than one: the Yaozhou kilns of Tongchuan and the sericulture belt around Ankang. Dance, poetry, music and drama carry the narrative, and two symbolic figures, a Golden Silkworm Girl and a Celadon Boy, move across four time frames: Han, Tang, Song and the present.
Silk, porcelain, medicine, calligraphy, painting and tea-making supply the material, and five historical figures from Shaanxi carry the argument at intervals: the physician Sun Simiao, the calligrapher Liu Gongquan, the painter Fan Kuan, the philosopher Fu Xuan and the historian Linghu Defen. The chapters run in sequence from a Han departure, through a Tang chapter that stages Tang dynasty clothing at the point where the western market filled with goods from outside, into a Song chapter of mountain landscape and quiet colour that answers with Song dynasty clothing, and closes on a shared finale titled New Rhymes of the Rainbow Robe.
Two lines carry the theme: one silkworm and one piece of porcelain strung across a thousand years, and one river and one canal raising the people on both banks. Between those chapters the plot follows a weaver on the Han river, the westward marriage journey of Princess Jieyou, the silk and porcelain trade inside Chang’an’s western market, and the transmission of teaching from one generation to the next. Kiln fires that never go out and a road that keeps extending are the images the production returns to.
Before the Curtain and After It
The programme begins in the foyer. Yaozhou ware and gold-silkworm merchandise from Ankang are laid out for handling before the audience takes its seats, and two city promotional films plus a film on the third Hanfu design competition run on a loop in the same space. It is an unusual arrangement: the audience inspects pots and textile samples first, then watches a stage that quotes both.
The running order then reverses. After the finale, past winning entries from the Nishang Wanxiang Hanfu design competition are walked in sequence, so traditional forms and newer designs appear on the same runway, and the full cast, crew and models come back for a curtain call. For a viewer interested in cut and layering, that closing segment is where the construction is easiest to read; the foyer display is where the materials are.
Why Two Cities and a University Share One Production
Credits explain the shape of the show. Three provincial departments, culture and tourism, education, and industry and information technology, guided the production; Tongchuan and Ankang hosted it together with Xi’an Polytechnic University. Two cities supplied two craft traditions, and a university supplied the design and staging capacity to put them on a national festival programme.
That structure is the point worth taking away. Yaozhou kiln firing and Ankang sericulture are both craft resources that normally sit in museums or workshops; here they became stage material, and the production doubles as a delivery vehicle for a design competition that has run for three editions. Three formats are stacked in one evening: dance carries the narrative, the costume segment carries form, and the foyer carries physical evidence. A visitor can check a collar on stage and a glaze in the hall, and the two readings hold each other up.
