Spring Day Feast
Immersive performances separating the audience from the artists are replaced with super-large digital, immersive and visually impressive painting exhibitions. Immersive experience has become the new fashion. The Spring Day Feast in Yue Opera Town offers a rare opportunity to truly immerse oneself in picturesque scenes, climate and natural phenomena, delicacies and festivities, and graces such as playing Guqin, playing chess, writing calligraphy, making paintings, composing poems, tasting Chinese wine, sipping tea and enjoying the view of flowers.
On April 21, 2019, a Spring Day Feast was organized in Yue Opera Town. Activities included reciting poems on the Shanxi River, calligraphy practice and chess-playing experience along the banks of the Shanxi River, solo Guzheng performance, solo Pipa performance and solo flute performance in the Plum Garden, and tasting tea at tea stands scattered in the town. The Spring Day Feast is both a feast of delicacies and cultural experience.
The Spring Day Feast is a recreation of traditional way of life in honor of the ill fortune-dispelling rituals performed by ancient Chinese people. Ancient people in as early as the Spring and Autumn period (770 BCE to 476 BCE) had performed rituals along the banks of river in late spring, called Fu Xi, by washing oneself in the river to dispel ill fortune and evil spirits. In the Wei and Jin Dynasties (22O AD to 420 AD), refined scholars liked to play the game of wine cups floating down the winding river. Cups with wine floated downstream. When the cups stopped moving, whoever standing at the spots the cups stopped would drink the wine and compose poems. Later in the Tang Dynasty (618 AD to 917 AD), spring outings and riverbank banquets and drinking become the joy of the imperial family, leaving with later generations many marvelous paintings. In the Song Dynasty (960 AD to 1279 AD), spring outing became popular among the ordinary people. People would follow their natural instincts and relax themselves in nature during spring outings when everything came to life. Spring outing, in ancient China’s context, carries many cultural connotations.
Starting from scratch, Yue Opera Town has been able to build its own brand and enrich its cultural and tourism elements by holding one event after another. The Spring Day Feast in Yue Opera Town proceeds from traditional culture, develops aesthetic living space for the modern people, and awakens their true perception of climate, natural phenomena and life by offering immersive experience. It is a call of beauty and a farewell to spring. It is a reinvention of ancient ill fortune-dispelling rituals and an encounter of the past and the present, following the ancient Chinese philosophy of doing things at the most suitable time.
