The Michael Mao Dance Company will breathe new life into the traditional holiday story in their new ballet Firecracker, which opens tonight and runs until tomorrow at the Century Theater of Beijing.

Firecracker is not the story of young Clara and Fritz and their Christmas gift of a nutcracker followed by an adventure into the Sugar Plum Kingdom.

In Firecracker, which premiered in New York last December, it's a story of two bi-racial children set in 1937 Shanghai, an imaginative journey and later their actual migration to the United States at the onset of war.

Mao, the founder of the company and choreographer of the ballet, calls it the "immigrant version" of The Nutcracker.

Mao himself immigrated from Shanghai to New York with his family when he was five years old. The ballet is inspired by his trip back to Shanghai in 1999.

Mao was trained in dance at the Martha Graham School, the Joffrey School and the Cunningham Studio, and has devoted himself to cross-cultural communication through dance.

His ESL Dance Project "Learning English Through Dance" is designated by the US National Endowment for the Arts as a Model Program to be replicated nationally.

In 1993, he established his dance company in Manhattan and attracted about two dozen dancers from all over the United States, of various races and religions.

Mao says: "My dancers come in all different sizes, shapes and personalities."

With this fabric of vibrancy and multiplicity, Mao stages works that explore a wide range of stories and human emotions. His works have been presented throughout the United States as well as in Paris, Oslo, Hong Kong and Mexico.

Mao created Firecracker out of his memory of Shanghai, his birthplace, as well as other immigrants' stories.

Laurel Graeber of the New York Times calls Mao's Firecracker a "story for any person who is compelled to leave home and put down roots in a foreign country."

Mao said he has played with the idea of the production many times in his head.

"For many years I fantasized about re-setting Tchaikovsky's holiday classic. Four years ago I decided to act on the idea," Mao said.

But he also wondered how he would be able to re-set it in a way that is relevant to him and the dancers who are diverse, multicultural, multiracial and multinational and make it relevant to the audience.

A 1999 visit to his childhood hometown in Shanghai gave him ample fodder for his idea.

He didn't remember much but what he did recall had a profound effect on him, he said.

His babysitter was named Qijin, which means 7 jin or 3.5 kilograms, because that was how much she weighed at birth.

He also remembered a French candy store, a restaurant on the bank of a river and the hoarse call of the cleaver-man in a Shanghai dialect on a humid, lazy afternoon.

"I remembered the moment when the train pulled out of the station and I realized that Qijin was not coming with us," Mao recalled. "I was not prepared for it, and was inconsolable. I used to ask my mother why we eventually came to New York. She had said: 'Well, New York was the closest thing to Shanghai.' But it was not until I finally arrived in the city that I really understand what she meant."

In his return visit to Shanghai, an 80 year-old ex-neighbor asked him if he was Mrs Mao's naughty son. "My face was, as she said, 'a carbon copy' of my mother," he said.

Mao stayed at the Peace Hotel, formally the Sassoon House, located on bank of the Huangpu River. As he read the history of the house, he learned that the Sassoons were one of the many Sephardic families in Shanghai. There was a thriving Jewish community there which even had its own nightclub, synagogues and mansions.

In the early 20th century the Sassoons were a well-known rich family in Shanghai.

He also heard the story of another wealthy family, the Hardoons, from his mother. One Hardoon had married a Chinese woman and the couple adopted many interracial children, one of whom is a long-time friendly neighbor of the Maos in New York City.

All these memories and experiences have inspired Firecracker, Mao said. The performance involves a universal journey -- leaving home and returning, which Mao conceives as a Chinese answer to Tchaikovsky's family classic.

For the ballet, Mao assembled an extremely prestigious creative team, with artists from both the theatrical and dance worlds.

Legendary Broadway designer Ming Cho Lee designed the sets, which include authentic drawings of Shanghai in the 1930s. Some high-tech tools are also used to translate the magical qualities of the production.

"It is representative of Shanghai, a combination of Western and Eastern influences," Lee said.

Also a Shanghai-born Chinese-American designer, Lee said he felt personally nostalgic while working on the production.

"When Mao first approached me about Firecracker, I found myself immediately intrigued by the premise of a Chinese Nutcracker. It seemed to be a version of the original that I was ideally suited for because of my intimate knowledge of the culture and time period," Lee said.

Johathan Faiman rearranged Tchaikovsky's original score for the production. Each musical number selected from the original ballet has been altered in some way. All numbers have been re-orchestrated for at most 36 musicians rather than the full orchestra of 70-80 that Tchaikovsky specified.

In addition, certain pieces have been restructured and others have been harmonized. International folk music additions also add a visceral sense of the specific geographical locations in the work.

"In all cases, the alterations both preserve the spirit of the original and help bring a new and unique musical focus to the action on stage. Other musical selections, including Dudley Buck, Henry Cowell, Edward MacDowell, Charles Ives and myself, have been added to reflect the narrative at specific points," Faiman said.

(China Daily December 13, 2002)