Hessian State Ballet · XIE XIN
The Broken Sense Of Beauty| World Premiere: 18 Oct 2024 | Staatstheater Darmstadt, Germany
Credits
Choreographer: Xie Xin
Composer: Sylvain Wang
Set Designer: Hu Yanjun
Lighting Designer: Gao Jie
Costume Designer: Li Kun
Dramaturg: Lucas Herrmann
Artistic coordinator:Liu Zhonglei
Choreographer’s Notes
After this experience, I cried quietly at home. I never thought a fire would destroy my "home". For me, the dance company’s studio is my home. When I returned to it, I saw that everything was gone—all turned to black, with indelible marks left behind. At that moment, a truth sank deep into my heart: things may happen to you, but they can never fully control you.
Life goes on, and you have to live through it, and then a new order will follow. Through such an experience, you gain a strong heart and learn to see things from every perspective. Like an old wall, over time, it accumulates countless marks—whether from the erosion of wind and rain or man-made damage—what’s left simply remains. When you contemplate it with an appreciation for the beauty of brokenness, you embrace everything and grow into a bigger version of yourself.
To me, the most profound beauty resides in things themselves. These things may be covered in marks, or like us, have holes in our hearts—the scars left by life, by people, by relationships. We have all endured pain.
There’s an old Chinese saying that one must taste eight kinds of bitterness in life: birth, aging, illness, death, parting with those one loves, being unable to let go, craving what one can never truly have, and resenting what or whom one cannot escape.
Sometimes, people complain about life and ask themselves why we have to bear so much pain; yet the answer lies within us. When we savor these moments, the light inside us shines through our own vulnerability, and we behold the purest, most honest and infinitely complex beauty in the world.