SEARCH
“The colors were very beautiful. They really used their hearts. Their costumes were very beautiful and attractive,” said Mrs. Zhang.
Mrs. Zhang graduated with a master of arts from a university in Taiwan, and then spent thirty years in Italy. She is half-Italian and half-Taiwanese. Although not a dancer, she has participated in creating stage sets before, and also has an understanding of choreography.
These days, she runs an Italian restaurant and does translations on the side. During the interview she jumped between Mandarin and English to express her thoughts: “From young to old, I’ve seen many performances. They really use their hearts, they stick together so well, and they are so clean and refined. It’s clear they’ve spent a lot of time practicing, to keep in unison like that.”
Her friend, Mrs. Liao, a former newspaper editor, said, “I think it’s very beautiful—the stage settings, the costumes, it really livens people up. It’s all very good.
"Probably the performance that left the deepest impression on me is Monk Ji Gong Abducts the Bride—we’ve all heard this story, so seeing it like this, I feel like I can really understand it. Ji Gong saves the world, this makes us feel like, this Ji Gong, he’s great, he’s truly excellent!”
Mrs. Liao’s nephew, Pinhan, also shared what he thought of the show. While only 13 years-old, he was dressed very smartly in traditional Chinese clothes and expressed his thoughts with confidence and good vocabulary: “I thought every dance was extremely good, and matched with the screen very well. All the movements had such a skilled and refined feeling."
He was referring to the projected 3-D backdrops, which grace the stage with picturesque landscapes, celestial palaces, Mongolian grasslands, and cascading clouds.
"My favorite was the The Udumbara’s Bloom. This one seemed to be particularly beautiful. All the clothing they were wearing was so nice.”
As the interview concluded, Mrs. Zhang had another thought: “There’s another point I want to make. The way they have taken stories from history, big stories and small stories, and expressed them through dance—this is really not easy. In such a short period of time, between three or four minutes, to express it like that, this is the first time I’ve seen something like this. It’s a lot of hard work. This is a new way of presenting these things. Usually we Chinese will just use the stories, but this is different,” she said.
For more information, please visit DivinePerformingArts.org
