Yongle Weiyang
A dance drama with a cultural and museum theme launched by China Oriental Performing Arts Group.

"Yongle Weiyang" is a cultural and museum theme dance drama jointly created by the China Oriental Performing Arts Group, the Shanxi Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism, the Shanxi Provincial Cultural Heritage Bureau, and the Ruicheng County People's Government, under the guidance of the Chinese Academy of Cultural Heritage. Co-produced by People's Daily Online and others, and exclusively operated and promoted nationwide by Shanghai Jingying Culture Media, it premiered at the Beijing Poly Theatre from October 3rd to 5th, 2025.

 

 

The drama takes the comprehensive relocation and preservation project of the Yongle Palace during the construction of the Sanmenxia Reservoir in 1956 as its core narrative thread. It connects, through a dialogue spanning over seven hundred years, the spiritual resonance between a modern architect and an ancient construction supervisor, a trans-temporal dialogue between a Yuan Dynasty female painter and a modern art conservator, and segments such as glaze artisans restoring the lost technique of peacock blue glaze.

 

 

 

The work revolves around the core concepts of 'Yong' and 'Le', unfolding its narrative across four aesthetic dimensions: ancient architecture, murals, glaze art, and cultural transmission. It extracts the "'bone structure through lines' aesthetic style" of Chinese painting, combines it with the artistic characteristics of Yongle Palace Murals—"unity of heaven and man" and "integration of divine and secular in painting"—to construct a stage vocabulary of "temporal and spatial synchronicity". The creative team consists of Artistic Directors Zhou Liya, Han Zhen, and Wang Yabin; Chief Choreographers Xie Yuanzhen and Xie Changhui; Playwright Xu Junrui; Composer Lü Liang; and Aesthetic Consultant Zhang Xiaoling. The advisory team comprises experts from the Chinese Academy of Cultural Heritage, the Shanxi Yongle Palace Mural Protection Research Institute, among others. The core creative team conducted in-depth field research at the Yongle Palace and held dialogues with individuals who experienced the relocation firsthand. The team members are primarily from the post-80s, post-90s, and post-00s generations.

 

 

Synopsis
Drawing inspiration from the artistic essence of the Yongle Palace murals, the dance drama extracts the aesthetic style of Chinese painting characterized by "taking lines as the bone structure" and "using lines to depict forms and convey spirit." It refines the quintessence of ancient architectural art, employing dance to present the magnificent artistic space of the Yongle Palace, which embodies the "unity of heaven and man" and the "integration of divine and secular in painting."

 

The drama will closely revolve around the two characters "Yong" and "Le." It selects and portrays the images of numerous cultural heritage professionals working on the front lines of cultural relics preservation. Through extraction and condensation, it aims to create archetypal characters with distinct personalities.