Encouraged, she began to improvise. Flower petals floated through the air as the spotlight followed her every gesture. Freed from the tightly choreographed structure of the traditional stage, she discovered a more spontaneous and intimate side of her artistry.

　　The chemistry that she has found with her new audiences is becoming a trend in this field.

　　During a livestream of Poetic Dance: The Journey of a Legendary Landscape Painting, a dancer slowly turned her face toward the camera. The movement would barely have registered from the back rows of a theater, but on a phone screen, the lingering glance filled the frame. Within minutes, the audience had swelled to tens of thousands.

　　While some critics and traditionalists worry that the intimacy of the screen may flatten the grandeur of the stage, the dancers see the medium differently. Meng Qingyang, the production's lead performer, calls livestreaming "a convenient aesthetic experience" that fits naturally into modern life.

　　"Attending the theater requires calculation -- scheduling the time, navigating the commute after work," she said. "Livestreaming allows people to experience the performance whenever they have a brief moment, lying comfortably at home after a long day."

　　Yet convenience tells only part of the story.

　　What reaches viewers is often more than a dance. The Poetic Dance, a widely acclaimed dance drama, unfolds like the 900-year-old handscroll that inspired it. Mineral blues and greens shimmer against the warm patina of aged silk, while dancers move with the measured grace of ink brushstrokes gliding across a landscape.

　　Beneath its beauty lies an aesthetic shaped over centuries -- one that finds strength in restraint, grandeur in simplicity, and meaning in the empty spaces as much as in the painted ones.