Bay Area Core, Art Guangzhou. The 2024 Guangzhou Art Season has arrived as scheduled and will make a stunning debut from May 9th to September 1st. This year's art season will feature four major sections: "Art Tide Rushing", "Colorful Art", "Gathering of Famous Masters", and "Sound in the Ear". A total of 140 outstanding plays will be performed, covering opera, musicals, plays, dance dramas, concerts, acrobatics, opera, etc., showcasing the remarkable achievements of Guangzhou's efforts to build an international performing arts center. The Guangzhou Art Festival is hosted by the Propaganda Department of the Guangzhou Municipal Committee of the Communist Party of China and the Guangzhou Municipal Bureau of Culture, Radio, Television, and Tourism, co organized by China International Culture Group Co., Ltd., organized by China Performing Arts Theatre Development Co., Ltd., and executed by the Guangzhou Grand Theatre. With the theme of "watching Guangzhou with good dramas", it invites renowned domestic and foreign boutique performances to showcase their wonderful performances, making "phenomenal" popular performances a norm for the people and attracting citizens and tourists to enter the theater and approach art. While increasing efforts to benefit the people, it also accelerates the integration of culture and tourism, showcasing a new look of high-quality development of Guangzhou's urban culture in a comprehensive and multi-level manner. The opening performance of this year's Guangzhou Art Season features the Cantonese version of the musical "Lion Boy", adapted from a phenomenal Chinese animated film IP of the same name. It focuses on the Lingnan lion awakening culture and local customs, telling the story of an ordinary young man who has gone through hardships, learned to dance lion heads, and participated in lion awakening competitions, tirelessly pursuing his dreams. Continuing the exciting content and high reputation of the Mandarin version, the Cantonese version gathers excellent cultural and artistic forces from the Greater Bay Area, welcoming more outstanding creators to join and injecting vitality into their creations from a new perspective. The Cantonese version of the musical "Lion Boy" has been invited to an important cultural event in the international art world this spring - the 52nd Hong Kong Arts Festival. Its debut received rave reviews, and this performance will be the mainland debut of this version. The closing performance was the 100th anniversary tribute play "War and Peace" directed by renowned director Rimas Tuminas at the Vakhtangov Theater in Russia. This five hour masterpiece of the era, with almost impeccable performance, powerful musical rhythms and stage tension, and profound audio-visual metaphors, transforms Tolstoy's million word masterpiece into an ethereal and imaginative stage work. This play will be performed continuously for 4 nights from August 29th to September 1st, with only one stop in South China. The surging trend of art promotes the deepening of Chinese excellent culture in the hearts of the people. This year's Guangzhou Art Festival has selected a group of representative Chinese excellent literary and artistic works, which creatively promote the spirit of traditional Chinese aesthetics with excellent artistic quality. The Kunqu Opera "1699 Peach Blossom Fan" is starring Shi Xiaming and Shan Wen, two winners of the highest Chinese Drama Performance Art Award, the Plum Blossom Performance Award. Based on the delicate, gentle, and elegant traditional art characteristics of Nankun, the drama integrates the common artistic concepts and styles of the East and the West into the traditional retro and modern innovation of China's "ancestor of all kinds of plays". The winning work "Cavalry" at the 17th Wenhua Awards and the 16th "Five One Project" for spiritual civilization construction is the first original ethnic dance drama in the history of Chinese stage art with cavalry as the theme, and it is also a tribute to the spirit of patriotism