SEATTLE—As the Year of the Ox nears, Divine Performing Arts (DPA) Chinese New Year Spectacular brought a celebration of Chinese culture to the beautiful Emerald City on January 18.
In the heart of Seattle lies the historical and majestic Paramount Theater, where DPA enchanted thousands in two shows on Sunday. Among them were Mr. Barnes, a violinist, and Ms. Dillon, a vocational rehabilitation counsellor.
“I have always been an admirer of Chinese culture. I do Chinese painting and I thought it was very interesting from a Western perspective. It was beautiful, beautifully performed. … The music and dance matched very much together,” said Ms. Dillon.
Mr. Barnes agreed. “They complement each other wonderfully,” he said.
Dance and music complement each other
“Musically I thought the performance was excellent,” said Mr. Barnes. “There was a sense of what we call ensemble, which means the individuals are as a group. They are very much unified in their approach.”
The DPA Orchestra has assembled together virtuosos playing both Chinese and Western instruments, creating a masterful fusion of music from two of the greatest classical music traditions.
Mr. Barnes said he especially noticed a precision and subtlety in the music that “went beyond the mecanics of just performing a note” and that there was a “fluidity to both the music and the dance that was very unifying and very expressive.”
Swinging his arms to demonstrate the dancers’ different movements, Mr Barnes said “the expressiveness of the dancers is telling a story transcending the language barrier, so you could tell what the dancers were trying to convey and you could hear what the musicians were trying to convey to tell a story to people who do not have the language.”
Chinese classical dance, the centrepiece of the DPA shows, is one of the most comprehensive dance systems in the world alongside ballet. It is known for its expressiveness in addition to its training of strength and flexibility.
“They were very, very interactive. They obviously rehearsed very, very carefully and they are disciplined. And their technical performance was amazing,” said Ms. Dillon.
‘A wakeup call’
“My thought was that the Chinese culture has been recently bombarded with so much propaganda. … Because it seemed a lot more propaganda-oriented than our Western kind of cultural and artistically we seem to have more freedom, and probably we take it for granted,” said Ms. Dillon.
“And I think we don’t deal with so many issues in our culture because we kind of take our freedom for granted. We have a lot of freedom of expression and that’s not the case [in China]. So I think this is kind of a wakeup call for me to be more aware and sensitive to that.
“So it’s kind of a wakeup call for the cultural repression that the Chinese people have had to go through. So that’s what I really took away from [the show] more than anything else.”
China was referred to as the "Land of the Divine” by the Chinese people for the past 5,000 years. But for the last six decades, much of the essence and meaning of the culture was destroyed and denied under the communist regime, especially during the Cultural Revolution.
“I’m assuming the communist party and the influence of Mao and some of the very negative influences, in my opinion, they have on the Chinese culture,” said Mr. Barnes.
“The use of the word ‘Cultural Revolution,’ which was a much more negative thing trying to put a positive spin onto what I felt was very much a repressive regime. And I felt that Chairman Mao had a very similar philosophy—very negative to the country and very, very oppressive to the Chinese people, the Chinese culture, and those very things which I saw.”
A piece called, Heaven Awaits Us Despite Persecution, depicts a scenario paralleling many in modern China. A father who is a practitioner of Falun Dafa, a traditional spiritual discipline, is persecuted to death by the communist regime, leaving his family broken.
“[China should have] traditional value of what Chinese culture for thousands of years has represented as approached to how it’s been negatively influenced by people like Mao. And I thought there was definitely a statement saying there’s a different China and a different culture that exists from what we might, in the West, get from our own press,” said Mr. Barnes.
The Epoch Times is a proud sponsor of the Divine Performing Arts 2009 World Tour. For more information, please see DivinePerformingArts.org