THE ORIGIN OF CREATION AND THE AESTHETIC TRANSFORMATION FROM TRADITIONAL PAINTING TO STAGE DANCE "ONLY GREEN"

Abstract

This study examines how the dance-poetry drama Only Green transforms the visual and philosophical language of Wang Ximeng’s A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains into contemporary stage expression. It addresses two questions: how the stage work translates the painting’s cultural and aesthetic resources into color, body, space, and artistic conception; and how these transformations are perceived by a professional dance audience. The study combines literature review, structured observation, comparative aesthetic analysis, and a questionnaire survey of 155 undergraduate dance-performance students from five universities in Shanxi Province. Descriptive statistics were used to summarize audience evaluations across four aesthetic dimensions. The analysis shows that the work does not simply reproduce the painting visually; rather, it reorganizes mineral blue-green color, landscape contour, spatial composition, and the Song-dynasty ideal of harmony between humanity and nature through embodied and theatrical means. Questionnaire responses indicate consistently high recognition of the four dimensions, with overall artistic conception and landscape body language receiving particularly strong evaluations. The study therefore proposes a four-dimensional framework—color, body, space, and artistic conception—for understanding the cross-media transformation of traditional Chinese painting into dance, while also identifying the limits of a professional-student sample and descriptive survey design. These findings offer a reference for research and practice concerning the contemporary stage activation of traditional Chinese visual culture.

Keywords: Only Green, Dance-Poetry Drama, Cross-Media Transformation, Chinese Classical Dance, Audience Reception