BEIJING, Nov. 12, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- "National Treasure: Performance Season," a special season of the hit cultural TV program "National Treasure," returned to Chinese television on October 23, 2021. Converging modern technologies and diverse performance art forms, this special season aims to deliver a unique presentation of relics and inspire broader audiences to develop an interest in relics and museology.
The show airs every Saturday evening at 7:30 p.m. on China Central Television (CCTV)'s entertainment channel CCTV-3 and streaming sites including Bilibili, Tencent, iQIYI and Youku. With the first season airing in 2017, the "National Treasure" franchise focuses on popularizing cultural relics through combining documentary, variety show and different art forms as well as modern technologies to tell the background stories from fresh perspectives.
The special season took the opportunity of a special Palace Museum exhibition jointly organized by 25 museums at the end of 2021 and recruited creative and artistic talents to choose from the 81 national treasures featured in the past three seasons to create theater performances.
Each episode of National Treasure: Performance Season highlights three national treasures from three museums, with each treasure inspiring a theater performance created by leading art troupes and artists that tells the story.
In the third episode themed "The Starry Sky," indie rock band Re-TROS created and performed a powerful song "Sky, Eye" inspired by the Bronze Longitudinal Eye Mask from the Sanxingdui Museum. The relic was unearthed in 1986 at the No. 2 sacrificial pit of Sanxingdui site.
Re-TROS has taken the sound of pulsar collected by China's Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST) and blended it into avant-garde electronic music, presenting the history of human development through the "eyes" of the mask and paying tribute to the exploration spirit of ancient Shu ancestors and great astronomers.
The song opens with the mixed sounds of chimes, Sichuan opera, horns and a steam train with Chinese astronomer Nan Rendong's narration taking it to the climax, and concludes with sounds from space. The audience not only can feel the heartbeat and pulse of the universe, but also the sonorous drumbeat of history presented in futuristic expression.
Curating exhibitions on television has the unique advantage of making the relics 'come alive' with cutting-edge technologies, multimedia presentations and the combination of different art forms. Audience can see the lucid waters and lush mountains from Wang Ximeng's landscape painting 'A Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains' turning into a poetic dance on stage, and the history of Chinese porcelain sang in children's folk rhymes. Performance Season thrives on taking audiences on an exciting journey to rediscover the cultural relics with artistic imagination, especially emphasizing storytelling, emotional expression and details.
Since it was launched four years ago, the "National Treasure" franchise has assembled a panel of multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary experts and scholars from the fields of aviation, aerospace, construction, machinery as well as music, art, dance and craftsmanship to support the program from behind the scenes.
Each episode of "National Treasure: Performance Season" also invites a guest commentator to connect the three treasures with engaging stories. In the latest episode, commentator Li Geng, an associate researcher with the National Astronomical Observatory of Chinese Academy of Sciences and associate professor at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences and guest of the Golden Celestial Globe with Pearl featured in Season 3, walked the audiences through the performance from a scientist's perspective.
The show adopts CCTV's pioneering shooting technique combining AI and VR glass-free 3D, enabling the virtual presentation of national treasures to break through the limitations of time and space in physical exhibitions.
National Treasure: Performance Season explores the spirit and personality of each treasure and how they can connect with the present through artistic expression and modern technology, and the innovative approach allows the relics to reach into the households of thousands of people's lives.
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