An artistic performance event for the 2025 Heze Peony Culture Festival was co-hosted by the China Arts and Entertainment Group(CAEG) and the China Performing Arts Agency (CPAA) under the theme of "embracing Heze and Singing Praises to Peonies" in Heze, a city of East China's Shandong Province, on the night of April 19 and 20 respectively.

The artistic performance event was one of major cultural activities for the 34th Heze Peony Culture Festival. With diverse artistic forms, it presented to nearly 30,000 audiences a cultural feast that boasted traditional essence and contemporary charm and was watched for over 10 million times on the internet.

Numerous stars get together to praise the elegance of peonies

The artistic performance event drew the attendance of many leading domestic singers such as Tu Honggang, Dai Yuqiang, Liu Hegang, Chang Sisi, Zheng Zhihua and Sammi Kao across the Taiwan Strait, who gave their representative songs and interpreted the elegance of peonies through classical, ethnic and pop musics.

The artistic performance event was directed by Hu Juying and staged by over 400 performers from the School of Music and Dance at Heze University, Heze Caozhou Martial Arts School, the Troupe of Heze Special Education Center, Heze Galaxy Arts School and Heze NEWBOX Steet Dance Troupe.

Technological empowerment creates immersive mirage

With the core concept of "blossoming peonies," the stage design adopted such facilities as CNC lifting, rotating platform, the special effects of cold smoke and air columns, and dazzling lighting to create a dynamic aesthetic scene where people danced together with flowers. Performers held real-time interactions with virtual peonies, portraying a visual spectacle that flowers followed the movement of actors and shadow augmented flowers' beauty.

The seamless performance combination between singers and dancers seemed to bring the audiences into a world of peonies. "It is the largest and most dazzling stage I've ever seen in Heze over the past three decades. Technology has drawn peonies from painting into reality, where every frame is a flowing poetic and breathtaking beauty," said an attendee surnamed Sun at an interview.

Closer collaboration between centrally-administered art performing enterprises and localities opens a new chapter of cultural tourism development

The two-day artistic performance event was among major measures taken by the CPAA to implement the cultural collaboration strategy between centrally-administered art performing enterprises and local governments. It fully integrated local cultural strength with top and high-quality domestic resources.

Thanks to its decades-long large-scale performing practices and experience, the CPAA has forged sound cooperative partnership with many localities. It is another new approach taken by the CPAA to send high-quality cultural services to the grassroots level.During the past years, it has reached strategic cooperation deals with many local governments and bureaus of publicity and cultural tourism to further deepen cultural exchanges between the centrally-administered art performing companies and localities and help them foster unique cultural tourism brands.

According to the Publicity Department of the Heze Municipal Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC), the artistic performance event was not only an artistic engine of the peony culture festival but also a three-dimensional promotional film of city image, realizing a virtuous cycle of "promoting tourism development with cultural sector and revitalizing the city with tourism."

Culture forges soul and nurtures new growth engine

The CPAA has firmly followed the development path that features with content innovation and industrial collaboration, and pressed ahead with the exploration of regional culture that ranges from peony symbolism exhibited in stage performance to the cultural empowerment behind urban development.

The organization of the artistic performance event has shown the professional strength of the CPAA in cultural performance sector and its obligation in driving regional development with cultural empowerment. In the years ahead, it will strive to fully meet the demand of localities in terms of cultural tourism development, inject new brand value into their cultural tourism, empower city development with "culture plus" approaches, promote the high-quality development of relevant cities via soft cultural power, and forge new momentum for building China into a cultural powerhouse through vivid practices.