The Pillars is China’s first large-scale dance drama devoted to the country’s ancient architecture and the research and preservation of its ancient architectural heritage. Drawing on the lives and legacies of pioneering Chinese architects and architectural scholars, includingLin Huiyin, Liang Sicheng and others, it presents a collective portrait of a generation of intellectuals who, in a time of national peril, stood as the “pillars” safeguarding the cultural heritage of Chinese civilization. Taking the pillar as its spiritual metaphor, the work weaves the wisdom of traditional Chinese architecture—embodied in the interlocking precision of mortise-and-tenon joints and the strength of beams resting upon columns—into its narrative and choreographic vocabulary, and builds its dramatic framework upon the traditional Chinese system of architectural construction, surveying and drating. Blending the moral integrity and cultural ethos of modern Chinese intellectuals with contemporary stage aesthetic, it reveals the beauty of ancient architecture, the memory of civilization and a deep sense of national identity through the rise and fall of timber structures and the rhythms of the body, writing an epic of a generation of scholars who devoted their lives to preserving their nation’s cultural heritage.
