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By Robert Johnson
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Published on September 17, 2025
Photos by Theo Cote and Rosalie O'Connor
Butterflies, Lovers, Collages, and Stories
Hong Kong Ballet in The Butterfly Lovers
Concept and choreography: HU Song Wei Ricky // Libretto & associate choreography: MAI Jingwen
Music: Tian MI | Set and costume design: Tim YIP | Video design: William KWOK & Yicai WANG
Sound design: Roy CHEUNG // Lighting design: Taz Yan YEUNG // New York City Ballet Orchestra conducted by LIO Kuokman
Dancers: MA Renjie, Xuan CHENG, WANG Qingxin, Gary CORPUZ, ZHANG Xuening, Yonen TAKANO, Nana SAKAI, and Jeremy CHAN
The Butterfly Lovers, a spectacular evening-length production that Hong Kong Ballet presented on August 22 at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center, is based on an ancient Chinese legend sometimes equated with Romeo and Juliet. The besotted young protagonists, Zhu Yingtai and Liang Shanbo, run into a wall of parental opposition, leading to their tragic deaths.
Garry Corpuz and Xuan Chen. Photo: Rosalie O'Connor, courtesy of the Hong Kong Ballet
Unlike Shakespeare’s lovers, however, the Chinese pair seem exceptionally well-behaved. It dawns on Liang but slowly that Zhu, his best buddy at the Confucian academy, is a female in disguise; and the ensuing bedroom scene is a farce in which Zhu strives nervously to preserve her modesty. As the couple settle in for the night — separately — pinch-
Ma Renjie and Hong Kong Ballet dancers. Photo: Rosalie O'Connor, courtesy of the Hong Kong Ballet
Tian Mi’s orchestral score supplies atmospheric effects — notes of tinkling fantasy and romantic swells — rather than the rhythmic structures on which classical ballet depends. This probably explains why Hu Song Wei Ricky’s choreography emphasizes acrobatic lifts and poses over classroom steps.
Cheng Xuan, as Zhu, curves her body elegantly as she passes around her partner or over his shoulder. Though the character she plays is coy and docile, Cheng achieves grandeur as a sacrificial victim. Ma Renjie, as Liang, has more dramatic weight, expressing yearning and despair. Yip Tim’s ingenious scenery employs sliding screens, flying pieces, and projections to create gorgeous, dreamlike environments. The well-drilled corps augment these effects, portraying sly courtesans, water spirits, scholars, gangsters, and ghastly veiled spooks. Though chaste by Western standards, The Butterfly Lovers is clearly the stuff of which ballets are made.
Bill T. Jones / Arnie Zane Company in Collage Revisited and Story
Choreography: Bill T. Jones, Arnie Zane, Janet Wong, and dancers.
Music: Charles R. Amirkhanian, Blue Gene Tyranny, Franz Schubert // Lighting Design: Robert Wierzel
Costume Design: Liz Prince // Rehearsal Director: Seán Curran
Performers: Barrington Hinds, Jada Jenai, Shane Larson, Danielle Marshall, Jacoby Pruitt, Hannah Seiden, Philip Strom, Mak Thornquest, Rosa Allegra Wolff, Huiwang Zhang
The Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company kicked off the fall season on August 30 at Kaatsbaan Cultural Park in Tivoli, New York with a terrific double-bill featuring Collage Revisited, based on The History of Collage (1988), and Story/, a suite of dances from the evening-length Story/Time (2012). These revivals represent an important effort to preserve Jones’ work, and to define the legacy of post-modernism.
Shrouded in an atmosphere of surreal mystery, yet with a manic edge, Collage presents elegant designs within a stimulating intellectual framework. This dance satisfies on every level offering continual surprises. As a metaphor for a diverse society, the piece is most itself when groups costumed as parochial-school students, urchins, and office-workers integrate to form tableaux. Barrington Hinds and Rosa Allegra Wolff seize one another in an impassioned duet. The eclectic vocabulary mixes balletic lines in grave penchés and développés with scampering and rolling, and the movement alternates between luxuriant stretches and mechanical gestures. Costume changes become so rapid that two men forget their underwear off-stage — or do they?
The original Story/Time was a narrative tour de force, in which Jones himself recounted 50+ vignettes in one-minute increments. Inevitably, this story-telling overshadowed the dancing, which the current Story/suite now places center-stage. Jones’ choreographic invention never flags, and features wonderful moments like the mirror duet that becomes a five-way mirror as dancers accumulate. Soulful passages give opportunities to the dancers — all vivid individuals — and capture the elegiac spirit of its Schubert score. I remember particularly the heart-breaking delicacy of Jada Jenai, and the whiplash energy of Philip Strom.
On the other hand, the original Story/Time, with its ticking clock and criminal landlord had a depth the current version cannot match, poignantly conjuring a lifetime of experiences. Evening-length works are harder to preserve, but brilliant creations like Story/Time deserve to be seen in full.
