Dances Of The Orient is an annual showcase of chinese dances by Theatre Arts Troupe. This year marks the 30th Anniversary of the Troupe's existence and audience will be thrilled by 2 dance segments. The first half is a collection of traditional ethnic folkdances of the minority tribes and the second half will be a mini dance drama that is based on a loose adaptation of the novel, "Cold Nights" penned by renowned Chinese writer Ba Jin.

The story is set in Chongqing, 1944 amidst the wartime tension from the invading Japanese. The dance portrays a man’s slow death of tuberculosis. The main character, Wang is tormented lesser by the consumptive diseases than the debilitative generational tension in Republican China, torn between his traditional mother and his modern wife. With air raid alarms blaring in the background through the cold winter nights, the constant incessant arguments between mother and daughter-in-law that are the most deadly, dealing more blows to the already ill and poverty-stricken man

Through the dances, it will be understood that the relationship between the worldviews of mother and daughter-in-law will never be amicably settled. It is like a man caught during the early days of Republican China who is torn between two mutually exclusive worldviews of conservatism and cosmopolitan modernity, and any attempt to genuinely combine or reconcile these two notions would not only be impossible but procrastination in the resolution one way or the other would ultimately prove deadly.