This Day, That Year: Dec 30

Editor's note: This year marks the 70th anniversary of the founding of New China.

In late December 1959, the National Ballet of China was founded as the Experimental Ballet Company of the Beijing Dance School.

The Beijing Dance School (now the Beijing Dance Academy) was the country's first institute of dance, which opened in 1954.

Before the Beijing Dance School formally opened, then-Soviet ballerina Elena Oleg Alexandrovna helped to establish a regime based on the Bolshoi Academy in Moscow.

During the 1950s and 1960s, ballet entered a period of rapid development. The graduates of the school's ballet major became the first members of the troupe.

From then on, the first generation of ballet teachers, choreographers and dancers gradually emerged, and ballet teaching, creation and performance systems were basically formed in China.

In 1958, the school successfully performed Swan Lake, featuring Bai Shuxiang as the white swan.

An item from Jan 6, 1982, from China Daily showed Bai in Swan Lake.

From 1959 to 1961, under the instruction of Russian experts, the National Ballet of China staged Le Corsaire and Giselle.

In 1964, China's first original ballet production, Red Detachment of Women, by the National Ballet of China, premiered in Beijing.

It is best known in the West as the ballet performed for former US president Richard Nixon during his visit to China in 1972. Since then, the company has produced many classic ballet performances, both adaptations of Western ballets and original Chinese pieces.

Thanks to the reform and opening-up policy, Chinese ballet recorded swift development again in the 1980s, when the country had far greater communication with foreign ballet artists and troupes from the United States and Europe.

Nowadays, foreign choreographers are invited to China, and Chinese choreographers also help foreign ballets create dances.

In 2006, the Royal Danish Ballet invited Wang Yuanyuan, director of the Beijing Contemporary Dance Theater, to choreograph The Color of Love.

It was the first time a foreign theater had commissioned such work from a Chinese choreographer.