Lady White Snake Dances Back Onto China’s Stage
JIANGSU, East China — This time, White Snake frees herself. Leifeng Pagoda, her prospective prison, having sunk beneath the waves, she wraps her rebellious counterpart, Green Snake, in a gentle embrace.
“Be Real. Be You,” flashes across the screen above the stage.
The “Legend of the White Snake” is one of China’s best-known myths, the tragic tale of a demon who masquerades as human until she is punished for violating the laws of heaven. But in “Lady White Snake,” a reimagining of the story by the Shanghai Grand Theatre’s Creative Center, the character gets both a feminist update and a happy ending.
The show, a revised version of a production that premiered in 2022, features a blend of ballet, Chinese classical dance, and contemporary dance to explore a woman’s journey of self-discovery and resistance to gender norms.
“We live in a different era,” the show’s director, Zhou Ke, told press on Feb. 22. “I believe today’s women have begun to awaken. They no longer have only one path: becoming someone’s wife.”
After premiering Feb. 22 in the eastern Chinese city of Suzhou, the production will move to Shanghai for three performances from Feb. 28 to March 2. An overseas debut is planned for July at the Lincoln Center in New York City.
In older tellings of the myth, White Snake is a demon who learns to transform into a woman. She lives together with a less experienced shapeshifter, Green Snake, before falling in love with a learned man, Xu Xian, and bearing a child. Eventually, she is discovered and imprisoned beneath Leifeng Pagoda, beside Hangzhou’s West Lake, by the monk Fahai.
The new show, choreographed by Edwaard Liang and Wang Peixian with artistic direction from ballerina Tan Yuanyuan, puts a modern spin on the tale, opening with a group of housewives pushing shopping carts down the aisles of a grocery store. The towering shelves are depicted as part of Leifeng Pagoda, a cage trapping the women inside their lives and marriages.
The show then jumps back and forth between the traditional and modern worlds, in the latter of which White Snake is married to Xu Xian and seeing a therapist, Fahai, to tame her desires and become an “ideal wife.” In this telling, Green Snake represents the personification of White Snake’s unrestrained curiosity and desires — her raw, untamed id which must be extinguished for the therapy to succeed.
“We wanted to create a journey of spiritual exploration for women,” Zhou explained. “A process of self-discovery, doubt, and ultimately, self-acceptance.”
It ends when White Snake triumphs in her struggle against Fahai and embraces her other half.
The initial 2022 staging of “Lady White Snake” met with tepid reviews on release, earning a 6.7 out of 10 from users of the rating site Douban. This year’s update features new choreography from Wang that emphasizes White Snake’s internal struggles.
“Green Snake and White Snake are two sides of the same coin,” Wang told media Saturday. “The contrast between them accentuates the themes of the story.”
The choice to update and restage the play after three years may pay off, given the rapid growth of China’s theater industry in that time, especially among female audiences. In 2024, nationwide box office revenue for theater performances approached 12 billion yuan ($165 million), up 38% from 2023, according to data from the China Association of Performing Arts.
Roughly 79% of the audience for opera and dancing performances are women.
According to Bai Huiyuan, an associate professor of literature at Beijing Normal University, feminist readings of “The Legend of the White Snake” have become more common over the past century.
“From the 1940s and 1950s onward, adaptations of the story began to emphasize the importance of Green Snake’s role and explored the possibility of women saving women,” Bai told Sixth Tone in a phone interview Friday. “That’s in contrast to the original story, where it was White Snake’s son who eventually rescues her from Leifeng Pagoda.”
“The choice to reimagine Fahai as a therapist is also quite interesting,” Bai added. “The therapist actually represents the more conservative side of psychoanalytic theory. For contemporary women, if they want to break free from the confines of marriage and relationships and truly pursue freedom, they need to channel more of Green Snake’s power within themselves.”
(Header image: A stage photo shows White Snake and Green Snake triumph against monk Fahai during “Lady White Snake,” 2025. Courtesy of the production team)
