"My dance is not something I learned from someone; my mentor is nature and I learn from watching nature," is how the Chinese star Yang Liping explained the roots of her art in a recent interview for The Japan Times.

Now aged 55, Yang is a member of the Bai ethnic minority in China's southwestern province of Yunnan, where she says her body reacted to the nature that met her eyes, and before she knew it she was dancing.

After joining a provincial song and dance ensemble in her early teens, by 1979 Yang had been promoted to a side role in "Peacock Princess," a production by the large-scale ethnic Yunnan Xishuangbanna Song and Dance Troupe that celebrated the avian symbol of the Dai people, just as the dragon and phoenix are symbols of the Han Chinese.