The Bird Wings Runner
Music and Dance Theatre “The Bird Wings Runner” produced by Shanghai Concert Hall was first devised in 2021, after a 2-year development process, it was premiered in May 2023. It is a piece that provides a brand new immersive experience from the senses to the soul.

 

It's a story about love, growth and gratitude. 

A little bird grows into a phoenix through the storm, a youngster, who saved the bird by accident as a kid, grows up through the difficulties in life and comprehends the meaning of life. In the real world, they blaze their own trails, in the spiritual world, they accompany and nourish each other.

 

 

Inspired by traditional Chinese mythologies, this work combines dance, physical movements, dramatic elements and stage installations to bring audience into a dream of pure beauty.

The composer of The Bird Wings Runner, Sylvan Wang, follows a neoclassical creative method to integrate the original sound (piano trio) and electroacoustic instruments to construct a dream-like space in the theatre. The live music performance intertwine with the dancer's movements, the emotions are conveyed with minimalist notes.

 

The stage is designed to be a “bird nest” with feathers surrounding the stage and the auditorium. With the use of new media visual design, the entire stage exhibits a natural scene of Art Nouveau style.

The stage area could be a room, a forest, and even an ocean... Within the limited space, the boundary between mythics and reality, abstraction and figuration, mind and physicality, the seen and unseen was blurred... Digital installation and lighting together generates a universal contemporary visual aesthetic experience.

 

 

"This work is about the truest emotion of mankind, it doesn't have a clear plot, the expressive physical language together with the stage installations has enough power to touch audience's heart. This is a rather advanced language of art. The flowing scenes on the stage were made up of the simplest props and physical movements, abstract yet expressive, poetic and lyric."

"Unlike traditional stage arts like opera or musical, music and dance theatre doesn't follow a specific plotline, instead, it uses the entire stage as its  channel of expression. It's a bold and challenging approach as it requires all elements in the theatre space to be unified. In my opinion, The Bird Wings Runner achieves a perfect balance between physical expression and dramatic tension while retaining a nice interactive experience for the audience. The wooden stick on the dancer's hands is sometimes a prisoner's cage, a boat, a bow, or even a ladder. The incredible imagination enables the audience to travel freely between abstraction and reality."
Shanghai Art Research Center - Chen Jie