|
It's time to bring out the dancing shoes
(Agencies)
Updated: 2004-08-03 15:22
Liu Ping wanted so badly to be graceful, to dance away the night under the
stars like all those romantic couples she'd watched on TV. She also needed to
lose a little weight.
Women of different
ages get together to practice 'yang ge,' a traditional Chinese folk dance,
in a vacant lot of a Beijing community center during the cooler hours of a
summer morning. [baidu] | The chubby 47-year-old
recently decided to study ballroom dancing, but her husband refused. To dance,
he insisted, wasn't masculine.
So one Sunday evening, Liu arrived alone at a city park for her first lesson.
She and a woman old enough to be her mother moved awkwardly through the steps of
a waltz — like two sumo wrestlers grappling for advantage — as a drill-sergeant
instructor barked out commands through a megaphone.
"It looks easy on television," Liu said during a break. "But it's hard to
learn."
It's summer in China. And for millions of residents, that means it's time to
dance.
Morning and evening, during the cooler hours of the day, middle-aged workers
and graying retirees gather in vacant lots, neighborhood parks, elegant public
squares and even under bridges for what has become a generational rite of
passage.
The young may dance to a hip-hop beat in packed nightclubs, but more and more
older people are taking up dance with a vengeance, seeking exercise,
companionship and fun. And in an increasingly modern country, as children leave
home to find their fortunes, their parents dance to stave off the loneliness of
a phenomenon new to this society: empty-nest syndrome.
Many Chinese, like Liu, prefer ballroom dancing, in keeping with a revival
that has recently swept across Asia. Others choose a traditional folk dance
known as yangge, in which mostly older women perform a quirky combination of
line dancing and ancient Chinese step patterns — all to the cacophonous beat of
drums and cymbals.
More than 30 million Chinese — about the population of California — regularly
perform what the government calls sports dancing, including the waltz, the
jitterbug and the rumba. An equal number prefer yangge, according to statistics
from the Chinese DanceSport Federation.
In Beijing, an estimated 60,000 women flock each night to popular yangge
events. Dressed in bright costumes and accentuated makeup, waving fans and
ribbons, they sweat and stamp their feet, often just a few feet from couples
sweeping about in organized ballroom dance routines.
In Chongqing, in central China, 10,000 residents often gather in the city's
mammoth public square both for yangge and ballroom dancing.
Rather than frequenting private clubs or dance halls, many Chinese prefer to
shake their groove thing outdoors, where the dancing is free. Many throw
impromptu open-air dance parties that have the feel of an ice rink in reverse:
The more advanced take to the outside while the beginners wobble about in the
middle.
Ballroom dance was introduced to China in the 1920s at the Shanghai ballroom
known as Bailemen. As legend has it, even Chairman Mao Tse-tung liked to cut a
rug, though he outlawed ballroom dancing for ordinary Chinese throughout the
1966-76 Cultural Revolution.
Some say the structured moves of dances such as the waltz are a way to bring
order to a chaotic world, comparing it with the calm brought by the fluid
movements of tai chi. For many Chinese, the dance moves of yangge hark back to
the regimented exercises they were required to perform as schoolchildren.
For whatever reason, ballroom dance coach Guo Haizha said, business is
booming.
"Ever since the SARS scare, people pay more attention to exercise as a way to
stay healthy," he said. Guo charges a one-time fee of 60 yuan, or $7, and
students can keep coming back until they learn to dance. His outdoor classes are
packed.
In 10 years, Guo said, he has been tempted to refund a student's money only
once, to a short, middle-aged man who came each night for four months and still
could not master the steps to the waltz. He stepped on toes. Tempers flared.
Then one night, almost inexplicably, the man got it. "Now he can dance," Guo
said, "but he can't always remember the steps."
Still, many Chinese men consider ballroom dancing too feminine. "So we have
many all-female pairs," said Yin Guochen, general secretary of the Chinese
DanceSport Federation. "People are traditional. Many think that having an
unmarried man and women as dance partners might cause problems, like an affair."
At Guo's class near Beijing's Behai Park, conducted at the end of a large
open space along a lake where hundreds of residents milled about — walking with
their babies, doing qigong exercises or just taking in the night air — a dozen
couples moved in unison to the tinny sound of an old Communist revolutionary
song that goes, "Fish can't live without water, flowers can't live without
stems, and China can't live without Chairman Mao."
In the packed park, a bicyclist riding through the clutch of students was
almost socked in the face as a dancer thrust out a hand in an exaggerated move.
Retired book publisher Fan Houyun is a class regular. With his sweat-ringed
muscle T-shirt and round glasses, the 73-year-old looks more like a lumbering
Marlon Brando than a fluid Fred Astaire. As in the bird kingdom, where males are
more colorful than females, men are just more vivid on the dance floor, he
contended.
"A good male dancer can make a female look better," he said.
Several miles away, beneath a busy freeway bridge in working-class south
Beijing, Wan Xiuyin didn't need a male partner to make her dancing come alive.
Most nights, she and her two best friends don bright red blouses, put their
makeup on thick and head out for a few hours of yangge dancing. In a
generational twist, their daughters sometimes get embarrassed about the way they
dress.
But Wan doesn't care. In a male-dominated culture, yangge is all about
freedom: "We want to look good as a unit," she said. "And that means lots of red
and lots of eye makeup."
Yangge dates back more than 1,000 years to the Tang Dynasty but gained a
modern following in the 1940s when the Communist armies fighting against Japan
choreographed new movements of the folk dance.
To the deafening drum and cymbal beat that echoed under the bridge, Wan and
her crew moved in step, fluttering bamboo umbrellas that resembled larger
versions of those little parasols that come in exotic drinks.
"We pretend we're in the countryside harvesting wheat or riding horses," the
48-year-old seamstress said.
Yangge has its critics. Many complain that such rural entertainment doesn't
fit a sophisticated city such as Beijing. Many ballroom dancers look down their
noses at the hordes of yangge enthusiasts.
And yangge's accompanying drumbeat disturbs people nearby. Many yangge events
are held beneath overpasses, where the noise can be more contained.
Still, the government is looking to regulate the dance form by simplifying
the steps and replacing musicians with tape players.
But Wan's recent yangge fest had the let-loose feel of a Grateful Dead
concert. One woman in a blue dress shook her head and pranced about under the
bridge as though in some hallucinogenic stupor.
 Yang Guohua, a 40-year-old ballroom dance fan wearing a Kurt Cobain T-shirt,
shook his head in disgust. Stopping to watch the woman dance, the businessman —
whose cellphone ringer plays waltz music — had seen enough.
"If she were my wife," he said, "I'd kill myself."
|
 | | | Nicolas Cage weds 20-year-old former waitress | | |  | | | The tidbits of Beijing life | | |  | | | Liu Xuan issues new book for youth | | |
|
 |
|
|
|
|
Today's
Top News |
|
|
|
Top Life
News |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
