One of the audience members at Saturday afternoon's Sydney performance of the NTDTV Chinese New Year Spectacular, Kevin Mills from Beacon Hill appreciated the subtleties of the show, and the deeper inner meanings of the various performances.
Mr Mills attended with his friend, Fulan Zhang who was originally from Mongolia. With Kevin's help, Fulan commented on the performance, Herding on the Mongolian Plains, "the flags and the horsemen, that's just like where I come from".
The traditional Mongolian Bowl Dance also reminded Fulan of her native country and the traditions that played such an important part in their lives.
Kevin added, "It's all about the gestures when they are serving the tea…through the gestures they are showing their respect for one another, and also the people who are receiving the tea, they in return show their respect".
Showing such respect, Kevin added, could be more of a prominent feature in our culture if people were to take the time to turn off the TV or the computer and sit back and maybe learn from such age-old traditions.
"That's where you have these lovely spaces in time where you go into a two hour show and it takes you away from all that clutter around you, and sit and just touch a little bit of the inner peace that people look for".
Kevin has other friends from the China region and he has slowly learnt to appreciate their culture and that's why he came along to see the Spectacular.
He felt that the two commentators of the Spectacular were explaining things in very simple terms so that people could understand the performances – the myths and legends being told through song and dance.
"Each performance is only a slice of a story; it is not a full-on production for each single little aspect of the legend. They are just taking a slice of it to give you a taste of it because they can't show the whole thing otherwise it would be a separate show within a show".
The costumes also impressed Kevin and he felt they were faithfully reproduced, not only in design but also in the materials that were used, adding that they were excellent.
He mentioned that because of his short sightedness he used binoculars throughout the show and he was looking at the faces of all the dancers and noticed that they all did facial gestures. "Not just the hand gestures and body gestures, they were doing the facial gestures, to the music, to the dance, to the rhythm, everything. It made you feel a part of it, it was very good. That was one of the subtleties that others may have missed. Some people just take a superficial look at the performance. This was slices of different periods, different times, it was excellent," he commented.
"The good thing is my Chinese friends, they show me videos of shows and dances in China," said Kevin, "but it is all politically oriented, and a lot of the subtleties get lost within that because the Chinese government is projecting a particular thing they want to push politically. But these people today [performing in the Spectacular] they are showing nice subtleties… picking the essence of the nice part of everything and putting it all together in one show."
Kevin concluded with a message for the performers. "You are spreading the good word and there is not enough of the niceness today in the world. We tend to be living the last of the good life and some of it gets lost these days and it's nice to see it captured in a two hour show."
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