PORTLAND,Oregon—Two lifelong friends, both retired teachers, one specializing in music, expressed delight after seeing the Divine Performing Arts (DPA) Chinese New Year Spectacular debut in Portland at Keller Auditorium on Tuesday.
"A beautiful, beautiful show and everything…gorgeous. Just everything, I mean everything was beautiful,” said Sonja, who taught music in grade school for over 30 years.
“I like the live orchestra, I am glad they had a live orchestra,” she added.
The DPA Orchestra begins with a classical Western orchestra as its foundation and augments this with traditional Chinese instruments, enabling its compositions to at once mine the potential of Western orchestral music and yet be rich in Chinese qualities.
Sonja said listening to the mix of instruments was an enjoyable learning experience.
Her love of music began in grade school where she and her friend Rosemary both joined the school choir. Sonja later studied music at Portland State University and went on to the University of Oregon.
Throughout the years, she has often attended symphony, opera, and Broadway shows, but DPA presented her with something she had not seen before.
"I learned a lot from this, I just learned about everything […]Costumes, the color, the lighting and the photography and just the whole thing."
"All together it’s wonderful, I think it’s great," she said.
Both ladies enjoyed the dances that brought to life some of China's ancient myths and heroic legends, tales of virtue and modern day stories of courage.
One of those dances, Mulan Joins the Battle, tells the tale of one of China's most loved daughters.
While the pages of Chinese history are filled with tales of exemplary women, perhaps none so managed to fulfill the twin Confucian duties of service to one’s parents and service to one’s country as the heroine Mulan. Mulan disguised herself as a man and spent ten years in the military in the place of her aging father who was too old to answer the Emperor’s call to duty.
"What I learned was the self sacrifice of people in the villages and how they helped each other, and the co-operation of the villagers and that Mulan is willing to sacrifice for her father. I think the whole idea was everybody would help each other, was helping each other. That’s what I got from it," said Rosemary referring to the dance.
She said contemporary artists would benefit knowing more about traditional Chinese culture, as they did after seeing the DPA presentation.
Traditional Chinese culture revolved around a belief in the divine and the importance of cultivating virtue. According to the show’s program: “The guiding mission of Divine Performing Arts is to rediscover and renew humanity’s true, rightful cultural heritage. The company thus creates and performs works that center upon the true, divinely bestowed culture of humankind, and seeks to provide an experience of consummate beauty and goodness.”
The Epoch Times is the proud sponsor of the Divine Performing Arts.
For more information, visit DivinePerformingArts.org .