结业课展示

Posts of my trip will be location-/venue-based rather than the usual chronological order. This allows me to collate activities spanned across several days and list the most exciting/happening ones on top. Just like this one below.

As a Chinese Dance dancer, one must visit 北京舞蹈学院 a.k.a. Beijing Dance Academy if one is in Beijing. Otherwise the trip will be totally wasted. Mothership of Chinese Dance that produced all the Ding Hongs and Zhou Leis lei~!

So Fen and myself went down excitedly to the academy, and we saw this poster…

Wow… Graduation exhibition for dancers who took the performance profession in the classical dance faculty?! This is a performance not to be missed~!!! (Especially after our failed attempts to search for dance performances in both Shanghai and Beijing.) There were two performance timings. We went down to the first one only to be told that the performance was cancelled due to the absence of the pianist. We went down again at 10am for the second run (which happened to be our flight day too) only to find out that the venue was already full.

Cue Fen’s broken Mandarin (more on this in a separate guest post). We, one from Mauritius, one from Singapore and one from Spain, were finally seated on VIP seats.

The exhibition was fantastic. I was very 激动 during the last item, the 特殊技巧组合. I was totally mentally prepared to miss the flight to watch the performance in whole. 原来基本公也可以很好看～

Okay… Here we go. Be prepared for a whole chunk of dance below.

第一部分、基训课教材

• This was the opening to the exhibition. And was followed by 舞姿辗转组合.
• The girl in the front row and has bandage on her left hand is one of the best dancers. Her face emotes constantly, and was nicknamed “emo girl”.

• This was taken over various sections: 控制、踢腿、旋转、翻身、跳跃。
• The guy at the front of the triangle right at the beginning of the video is one of the best dancers.
• 0:18 – When can I ever do this 控腿 and change from 勾脚 to 蹦脚? ;(
• 0:33 – Aiya~ How can their 控腿 be so high even when they change from 后腿 to 前腿? ;(
• 0:41 – Looking upwards is one of the new directions that I noticed them doing which I rarely do…
• 1:25 – Notice them looking upwards again?
• 2:33 – There was a minor mishap where the dancers’ hands hit. That was the moment when one of the teachers attempted to stop us from filming the exhibition. Erm… Should have more confidence in the standard of her dancers right? That minor accident didn’t affect the standard of the performance lei~
• 2:57 – It was a long while later when I thought the exhibition was too nice to not record down the moves. And so I activated my camera and resumed video taking…

第二部分、个人组合展示

• Emo girl’s solo~! It’s a pity that my camera couldn’t capture her facial expressions clearly.
• 1:50 – Impressive~! But no beauty at all lei~

• The only thing I remembered about this dance is that the dancer had a different finger expression for each move she had. She was practically dancing with her entire body.

• Fen captured this video.
• The most zai male dancer~! Very sharp dancer with extremely good technique and core control. *Drool*
• 0:57 – SUPERB MOVE~!!!
• 1:19 –  Did a freeze frame of his front split jump and it looked horribly good. *Jealous*

• Fen captured this video.
• 1:06 – He did the superb move too. Just not as superb as the most zai male dancer.

第三部分、特殊技巧组合

My translation for Fen for this section was “Special Skills Exhibition”. I thought they were going to show some unique skills like maybe the ability of their tongue to touch their elbow. (No… Don’t start trying that now…) Little did I know…

• 0:34 – This is the second most zai male dancer~
• 0:54 – Once again, the dancer had different finger expressions for each turn. Quite a huge vocabulary that we seem to be missing…
• 1:43 – The constantly low spinning move is nice~!
• 2:26 – The most zai male dancer returns to show off all the variations you can do while doing turns! Whoo~!
• 2:36 – The guy flipping around the circumference has his hands touching the floor. Quite a unique move~
• 3:25 – I was really that close to tearing at this moment and my hands were trembling…
• 3:34 – A very Ding Hong move~

Whoa~ That’s all. It’s a pity that these video is only 30% of the whole exhibition. Must go Beijing Dance Academy and crash any of their class performance ok!!!

Here’s more information about the Chinese Classical Dance Course extracted from the programme sheet.

中国古典舞基本公训练课程，是古典舞重要的专业课程，通过基本公教学确立了自己在训练功能上的优势，特别为优秀表演人才的培养，奠定了重要的专业基础。训练体系是一个不断完善和实践的工作，古典舞的训练如何更好的体现身体文化形态所需要的动作风格属性与特征、技术特征与方法，通过不同班级的实践来完善训练体系的建设。

This is a three year course, with fourteen female dancers and twelve male dancers. Some dancers were absent in the exhibition above due to injuries incurred during the preparation. And so here are the dancers:

Good dancers anyhow pose also look good~