The dance of homecoming

By the time Erfan Omar's face is painted near the end of Odes to Heroes, his character is no longer the boy who has spent years wondering why his father left the family.

He has become the man he once imagined his absent father to be — responsible, courageous and willing to shoulder a greater duty.

"For me, the most moving part is that, in the end, I become the person I want to become," says Omar, a principal dancer with the Guangzhou Song and Dance Theatre, who plays the protagonist. "I want to become a man like my father — someone with responsibility and a sense of duty."

That transformation lies at the heart of Odes to Heroes, a dance drama that brings together the vigorous Lingnan folk dance yingge with qiaopi, the letters and remittances sent home by overseas Chinese.

Premiered in 2024, the production has toured extensively, with more than 150 performances in about 20 cities. It returned to Beijing on Wednesday and Thursday as part of the ongoing 7th National Ethnic Minority Art Festival before heading to Southeast Asia in September and October for performances in Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand.

The overseas tour will take the production back to a region closely connected to its narrative: Southeast Asia, where generations of people from southern China settled, built new lives, and maintained close ties with their homeland.

Set in the late 1930s, the drama follows a family in Guangdong province. A father leaves home for Southeast Asia in search of work and eventually disappears. His wife raises their son alone. Years later, during the Lantern Festival, the son picks up a pair of yingge mallets left behind by his father.

The mallets draw him into a dreamlike journey through the past. As he encounters fragments of his father's life, he gradually begins to understand the struggles and sacrifices of a generation shaped by migration, war and responsibility.

"I feel that throughout the dance drama, I am actually an audience member onstage," Omar says. "It is my character who leads the audience into the story."

His character's journey mirrors the audience's own discovery of the history behind yingge and qiaopi: moving from misunderstanding to recognition, and from personal loss to a deeper understanding of family and collective memory.

Codirected by Qian Xin, the production uses qiaopi as a narrative thread. Emerging in the 19th and 20th centuries, qiaopi refers to letters sent by overseas Chinese to families in China, often accompanied by remittances. The letters carried not only financial support but news, homesickness and reassurance across thousands of kilometers.

"Odes to Heroes turns that history into a story of one family, but its emotional landscape is much broader," Qian says.

While yingge provides the production's central movement vocabulary, the stage is filled with other elements of Lingnan (a region in southern China) heritage, including wood carving, qianci porcelain inlay, Chaozhou embroidery, iron-branch puppetry, beef balls, and Chaozhou oil-paper lanterns, adds codirector Wang Sisi.

"These elements are more than visual embellishments. Together, they create a multifaceted portrait of Lingnan culture and show how different traditions can connect through a shared cultural heritage," she says.

The production uses these traditions to move between the personal and the collective — from the fate of one family to the broader history of migration, mutual support and shared struggle.

At the same time, Odes to Heroes does not simply reproduce yingge as a folk performance. Its traditional movements are reshaped for the theater and woven into the characters' emotional journeys.

For Omar, mastering the form has been a process of continuous learning.

He first encountered yingge in 2024, when the folk dance was gaining widespread attention through short videos and television programs. Its forceful rhythms and explosive energy immediately attracted him.

"I was struck by the energy and excitement of this dance form and its vibrant street culture," he says.

The theater subsequently invited practitioners of intangible cultural heritage to train the dancers. They first learned the traditional movements and techniques, and then worked with the creative team to integrate them into contemporary stage choreography.

The yingge mallets have proved particularly demanding. Omar's character carries a special pair throughout the drama, turning them into a recurring link between different times and stories.

"It took a long time to go from not knowing how to spin the mallets to being able to spin them well," he says. "And on every tour, in every performance, we are still constantly refining and thinking about it."

That process reflects one of the production's central challenges: how to preserve the character of a traditional folk art while giving it new theatrical possibilities.

"You can't simply move a street performance onto the stage," Omar says. "Two hours of pure yingge would be too much for the audience. We have to develop it creatively — give it a story, give the characters a journey, and bring in real historical stories and stories of unsung heroes."

For Omar, that task carries particular significance. Born and raised in Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, he came to Beijing to study at age 10 and has lived in Guangdong for nine years. Although yingge comes from a cultural tradition different from his own, he sees a connection in its exuberant energy and collective spirit. The experience has also made him more conscious of the responsibility involved in interpreting a traditional culture from a different region.

"There are certainly regional cultural differences," he says. "When we encounter this outstanding traditional Chinese culture, I feel a great sense of responsibility. We can't casually change it. We need to be cautious, but at the same time, we need to be bold enough to innovate."

That balance between preservation and reinvention runs through Odes to Heroes. Its yingge dancers carry movements passed down through generations, while qiaopi carries the words of those who left home. Together, they create a bridge between generations and across the sea, Qian says.

The Southeast Asian tour will extend that bridge further, bringing a story about migration and homesickness back to the region where generations of Chinese migrants once began new lives, the director notes.