New Tang Dynasty Television's (NTDTV) Chinese New Year Spectacular has left Australia and the Divine Arts Performing Group is now making its way through Auckland, New Zealand and then on to Taiwan for a staggering 11 performances.
In Australia it has left behind a wake of ideas, inspirations and aspirations about traditional Chinese culture, about the potential of performing arts and about possibilities in the future.
As Gloria King, a keen member of the audience in Sydney, explained after seeing the Spectacular's Saturday matinee session, "When you experience and see cultures of any people you are being expanded as an individual yourself and Chinese culture had reached pinnacles that are really not appreciated today," she said "When you see it, it makes that much more of your own being and your own soul."
One Sydney schoolgirl whose horizons will be expanded after seeing the show is Jessica Hwang of MLC Burwood. Jessica is currently studying drama for her Higher School Certificate, the New South Wales school educational qualification, and has chosen to do a research project on the NTDTV production, which will be worth 30 per cent of her drama mark.
Jessica, 17, was born in Australia but her father is from mainland China and her mother is from Taiwan. She is fluent in Mandarin but says she knows little of Chinese culture or its performing arts and was hoping to learn more about it through her study.
"I have done a bit of research and looked at how religion has been expressed," she told The Epoch Times, adding that after the Cultural Revolution "all of the culture was lost" and finding information was difficult.
Jessica, who had arranged to speak to some of the Spectacular's performers after the show, said she had a list of questions that she hoped they would be able to answer.
Lisa Jinga, who was responsible for writing the drama text lists for Year 12 in New South Wales and has been teaching Chinese dance at Jessica's school, said the drama curriculum had provided such a wonderful opportunity for Jessica to explore something meaningful while conforming to the education department's requirements.
Ms Jinga said the theme of Jessica's project would be how traditional Chinese culture is being preserved through its art forms and would require that she research her topic thoroughly, analyse it and then present it in the required form.
"We are interested in the process so to learn about the background, the culture, doing some research into what traditional art forms from China are, and then see this performance – where else can you see what those traditional art forms are in Australia?" Ms Jinga said.
Speaking to The Epoch Times after the show, Jessica said she had never seen anything like it before and it was hard to compare but the whole thing had been "amazing".
"I don't know the stories really well myself," she said, adding that "It was really good how they were able to demonstrate through the performance, different aspects of the ancient history of China."
Jessica said she was particularly curious about what traditional Chinese style was in performance art and would be exploring that through her project.
Spokesperson for NTDTV in New York Mr Yin Lei says there has been such an overwhelming response to the NTDTV Chinese New Year shows that they will host a dance competition for traditional Chinese Dance in May.
"We expect to promote more creative development of classical Chinese dance through the competition," Mr Lei said. "We also plan to deepen Western society's understanding of Chinese culture."
The competition is mainly open to dance teachers or dance performers between the age of 14 to 40 from professional dance academies or professional dance troupes. The preliminaries, semi-finals and finals of the competition will be held on May 20-27 in New York, and will be broadcast on NTDTV's Asian, European and Australian programmes.
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