Do you know anything about classical chinese dance?

If you are curious about Chinese culture like me, then Vancouver is the place to see it all. In October of last year, The Forbidden City exhibition was open to the public at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Not only were you able to see some of the original artifacts brought in from the Palace Museum in China, but also the exhibit taught you a great deal about

the intriguing history of The Forbidden City. They also featured a contemporary exhibition called “Unscroll”  that included works by Sun Xun & Liu Jianhua, to name a few.

Liu Jianhua Container, 2012 installation of porcelain sculptures Courtesy of the Artist

This year a taste of chinese culture hits Vancouver yet again. If you haven’t seen any of the advertisement around, then you must have been living under a rock because anywhere I looked I saw banners, stands, flyers that advertised the “Shen Yun Performing Arts” at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre.

If you can bypass the idea of being cramped in tiny seats while smelling the foul breath of your neighbor then you might be able to appreciate some of the performances. A series of “stories” were portrayed through classical chinese dance. The costume designs were geniously incorporated into the dances. The set on the other hand lacked a great deal of authenticity. The visual effects could have been a little more realistic. Nonetheless there was some incredible performances, of which I enjoyed the most: a solo by Lu Sun who played the “erhu”, a two-stringed bowed instrument or “the chinese violin”, but please don’t call it that. Lu Sun did an incredible job capturing the audience’s attention, who began to fall asleep shortly after intermission. 

The message behind the show was “truth, compassion and tolerance”. Despite the cheesiness and bad comedy, it left me proud that the tradition of chinese classical dancing thrives to keep itself alive in modern day society. If you know anything about Chinese history, you would know that these performances are forbidden in China today along with many other things, such as meditation.

Did you know? I didn’t:

• Music was an earlier form of medicine in China
• Shen Yun means Divine Rhythm…kind of, look it up.
• The Chinese Government has attempted to cancel several “Shen Yun” shows across the world. I won’t get into politics here though.

I will leave you with this, if you haven’t seen it, go see it. Its different from the usual theatre productions we have here in Vancouver, but you will have to wait until next year since the last performance was yesterday!

#getcultured