Beijing Contemporary Dance Theater's hip-hop ballet, Middle, presents a surprising new dance genre. Provided to China Daily

An experimental show infuses ballet's classical prancing with modern dancing. Han Bingbin reports.

Ballerina Wu Shanshan slaps her hands and feet on the floor and crawls, glowering with ferocious eyes. She is portraying an evil black spider in a performance that is a far cry from the tiptoe grace of her previous stage appearances as a white swan.

Her wriggling on the floor demonstrates the daringness of the experimentalism of the Beijing Contemporary Dance Theater's show, Middle. The idea is to show the more powerful side of ballet, using such unconventional devices as hip-hop dancing.

The troupe's artistic director, Wang Yuanyuan, says she took inspiration from last year's staging of French choreographer Anthony Egea's "hip-hop ballet".

Wang believes hip-hop can provide a potent supplement to ballet, which is traditionally regarded as a slow tempo art form. So she invited Egea to cooperate with her on a show.

They initially set out to create "a ballet show accompanied by hip-hop elements" but ended up inventing "a surprising new dance genre", she says.

The result is ballet that's down-to-earth in two senses. First, it's more about popular dancing than the classical prancing that defines the genre in many people's minds. Second, it's a chance for dancers to literally hit the ground running and swap tiptoe locomotion for handstands.

Egea, who calls himself a "curious pharmacist", says he tries to avoid stiffly inserting disparate elements into a show but rather works to smoothly blend them into singular new forms.

He started his career as a self-taught hip-hop dancer in 1984 and went on to earn a Ministere de la Culture Scholarship at the Rosella Hightower School in France's Cannes city. He says it was there that he honed his training and learned about various genres, including classical dance.

While watching a ballet performance during his studies, he says he came to the realization the dancers were flying around the stage in ways that convey a completely different sense of space compared to his daily routines.

"Ballet is the art in the air, while hip-hop is the art on the ground," Egea says. "If a dancer can master the skills of both, then he becomes extremely strong and can climb to heaven or fall to the Earth as he likes."

Egea sees the fusions of dancing techniques as an irreversible trend of the genre. But many dancers remain confined to their specific fields of expertise, which limits choreographers' creative space.

He believes it should be easy for most dancers, especially physically powerful and flexible ballet dancers, to adapt.

The greater challenge is for them to be open-minded and "ready and (willing to) to accept new things", Egea says.

"If a dancer can possess a variety of skills, the choreographers will have a lot more possibilities. They can come up with a lot more creative movements."

And dancers who can capitalize on a wider array of visual possibilities can appeal to broader audiences, Egea believes. This is important because dance as an art form remains a niche market globally, he adds, largely because most people have never actually seen a performance.

"Once they do, they'll surely love it," he says.

"Anyway, dancing is never hard to understand. You sit there for an hour, and don't have to think about anything. Just embrace the feeling that a dancer, a piece of music or a flash of light conveys to you."

His optimism comes from his belief that dancing remains a more popular art form than music or cinema.

"Everyone should have had a moment in his life when he unconsciously dances a little bit," he says.

"Many are especially devoted to it. In Chinese parks, old people are dancing every day, and the young people are also dancing in night clubs."