Dance Poem 'Only This Green' Marks Its Thousandth Performance at Beijing's Water Cube
The dance-poem production inspired by a Song-dynasty landscape scroll reaches 1,000 performances with a symphony edition at the Water Cube — a milestone for China's touring stage industry and its heritage aesthetic.
The National Aquatics Center — the bubble-skinned swimming hall Beijing built for the 2008 Olympics — has an unusual resident this week: a dance production celebrating a Song-dynasty painting. "Poetic Dance: The Journey of a Legendary Landscape Painting" (舞蹈诗剧《只此青绿》), known to Chinese audiences simply as Only This Green, plays the hall, better known as the Water Cube, on October 6–7 and 10–11 in a limited symphony edition — a live orchestra of nearly a hundred players, the full original cast returned — marking the production's thousandth performance.
The show takes its material from "A Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains," the blue-green landscape scroll painted in the 1110s by Wang Ximeng, a court painter of eighteen. Work on it began in early 2020, and it premiered at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in August 2021; its frame story follows a modern researcher at the Palace Museum, the scroll's custodian, who drifts into the painter's workshop. Its dancers wear the mineral blue-green of the original — and the production's signature pose, a back-arch that lowers the torso almost parallel to the floor, became one of the imitated images of Chinese stage dance after a Spring Festival Gala appearance carried it to a mass audience.
Between milestone nights the production still runs like a touring company. One of its dancers posted stage photographs from a Chengdu stop over the weekend, and the same dancer, Zhang Han, has been documenting the Water Cube build-up — including the arena itself, lit in the show's own shade of teal. "It happens to be teal-green," he wrote, under a two-panel photograph of the building in its Olympic blue and its current green.
The show's imagery has long since escaped the theatre. CCTV's music programs cut its choreography into pop performances — this year's pairing with a Yi Yangqianxi track among them — and abroad it has become a reference point in ownership disputes: when a Korean troupe's award-winning "One Dance" circulated online, described as inspired by a Korean court dance, Chinese netizens read it as borrowing from Only This Green — a comparison litigated since 2024 that resurfaced in searches this week.
A thousand performances in five years, with touring splits that have kept the cast on the road nearly continuously, is a scale few original Chinese stage works reach. The symphony edition is the production's way of making the milestone an event rather than a rerun; tickets went on sale in late August, and the run continues through October 11.