Charnwood Arts
'The Immortality of Shu'


In 2001 the site of an ancient culture was discovered at Jinsha, a village on the outskirts of Chengdu, the capital city of Sichuan Province in the south west of China. The Shu civilisation occupies an important place in Chinese history in that it bridges gaps in previous knowledge and is now seen to unite what, until recently, were thought of as more disparate cultures.

The city of Chengdu is extremely proud of this cultural heritage and the artefacts so far unearthed are presented in a large scale museum complex outside the city. The development of the show 'Immortality' represents part of a major undertaking to make these discoveries known to a wider audience - both within Sichuan and beyond.

The musical show itself, financed from Hong Kong, is a spectacular production incorporating so many surprising elements including stage nudity, pyrotechnics, spectacular sets, comedic interludes, elements of classical Sichuan Opera, western style ballads and trapeze artists! As well as a cast of thousands of course!!

I was only allowed permission to shoot in the performance after the first half an hour of the show due to the contractual conditions set around the stage nudity - a very rare phenomena in Chinese stage performance. I used a hand held Canon 5D with a 70-300 mm lens with image stabiliser, generally shooting at 1600 ISO from around the mid point of the auditorium.

These images are part of a collection of many hundreds of images of different arts, cultural and performance based encounters with contemporary and traditional Chinese artists during March and May 2007 in south west China.

Kevin Ryan, Charnwood Arts.