The dancers, in transparent gauze and nude bodysuits, unravel the tale of long-forbidden taboos under dim red lights.

Wang created the piece specially for the Hong Kong Arts Festival. It premiered in March this year and ran for four days. Wang and the dancers from the Beijing Contemporary Dance Theater won instant acclaim.

Tickets were sold out before the dance company even landed in Hong Kong. According to Wang, the praises were many and unexpected, and viewers described the performance as a "living oil painting".

When Wang brought the work back into the Chinese mainland in September, she encountered her first roadblock in Chengdu, her first stop. Eight months after the work's premiere, Wang has yet to succeed in staging it again, and she is resigned to the fact that its controversial content may have stopped its progress for good here.

"I don't think the work will be seen by audiences in the mainland soon," says Wang in her office at the Beijing Contemporary Dance Theater, a company she founded in 2008 after her successful adaptation of the kunqu opera, Peony Pavilion.

"It's like telling a child not to touch something dangerous. Kids are hugely curious. The more you tell him not to do something, the more eager he is to try," says Wang, who says she is in her late 30s, although her delicate features and taut body belie the facts.

"That's the case, too, with sex education in China. It's still a subject cloaked in mystery."

She had actually said as much when she expressed her doubts during the Hong Kong Arts Festival early this year. She had said then: "I don't know if this show can open in the mainland".

Wang understands that it is not a matter of the dancers being dressed or undressed that has roused the censors' attention. It is the subject of sex, which is still a taboo subject in China.

For the 20 dancers on stage, performing The Golden Lotus was also a challenge at the beginning. They are all mainly aged between 17 to 28, and nearly all knew nothing about the book apart from the fact that it was part of the classic erotica repertoire.

For Yan Xiaoqiang, who takes the lead role of Ximen Qing, it was a different set of challenges.

"The role is all about desire, money, sex and power," he says. The Shanxi native, who has danced classical ballet since childhood, joined Wang's company in 2008 attracted by the theater's freedom.

"Frankly, I am not too curious about the book, especially the sex scenes," Yan says. "For me, the difficult thing was how to coordinate with the female dancers. We have a lot of body contact, sexual moves. Trust is important."