NEW YORK—A former student of professional dance in China, who later joined the Chinese army to continue his dancing career, was touched by the Chinese New Year Splendor on Thursday night.
Zhou Yanfeng is originally from Wuhan, Hubei in China. He now lives in Brooklyn, New York where he teaches at the Chinese Cultural Association. He is also Head of the Liaison Department of the China Social Democratic Party.
He said the Splendor was "very good."
"It has a lot of cultural depth, it's very touching. The form is typically, traditional Chinese," he said.
He said he had not seen authentic traditional Chinese dance for many years.
"A lot of movements, probably when I say something, many people don't really understand the jumping, we call she yan, or da she yan, or the spinning we call kua zhuan, this kind of skill is really, I haven't seen it for many, many years," he said.
He said Chinese dance has a very long history.
"The system of Chinese dance in fact, has a much longer history than European, or typical European dance such as ballet," he said.
"Chinese dance was taught systematically I think in Yuan dynasty, that was about 800 or 900 years ago. This kind of system of training has been lost. But now I think this kind of performance is bringing back the lost culture," he said.
He said he believed Divine Performing Arts managed to preserve the dance styles from hundreds of years ago.
"In this performance it shows a lot of traditional—real traditional—dance movements, real traditional dance cultures," he said.
He said he enjoyed every aspect of the show.
"Everything is marvelous. And also, combined with modern technology, the lights, that's very good.
"It seems like I don't know how to find the right words in English. English is not my language," he said.
The Chinese New Year Splendor continues in New York through Saturday, Feb. 9.
For other shows in the Divine Performing Arts world tour, please visit: http://www.DivinePerformingArts.org/
The Epoch Times is a proud sponsor of the Chinese New Year Splendor.
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