One Table & N Chairs, Chinese Modern Dance
China Today Arts Week 2011, September 26 – October 2 in Malmö, Sweden was a success and gave the audience the opportunity to experience Chinese culture of different kinds.
Just over a year ago, Musik i Syd had a guest performance by the Beijing Contemporary Dance Theater, organised with help from the Chinese Embassy in Sweden. We were asked if we would be interested in hosting the China Today Arts Week 2011; naturally we saw it as a great honor. Musik i Syd is a regional music institution and a hub in the rich music scene of Skåne; operating in many different areas, from school concerts and chamber orchestras to festivals in all different musical genres. In addition to this, Musik i Syd runs three theatres, one of which, The Palladium in Malmö, was the main venue for China Today Arts Week 2011.
12 months ago an intense, open and very rewarding collaboration with the CFLAC (China Federation of Literary and Art Circles) and the Embassy of China began to plan a week’s program exploring a broad variety of Chinese culture. Great importance was placed on the opening concert which featured dance, acrobatics and a traditional orchestra, which was a huge success and enthusiastically received. The concert took place at Malmö Konserthus, where the program consisted of a traditional Chinese orchestra and dance, and the marvellous acrobatic team of Wei Baohua and Wu Zhengdan, known to many in Sweden due to their performance at the Royal Wedding concert in 2010. The audience got the opportunity to hear virtuosos at many different instruments, which they may never have heard before, and see colourful and perfectly executed dance numbers from several different regions of China.
We had a strong desire to feature a guest performance by a contemporary dance company, and to our great pleasure we got to welcome Beijing Dance/LDTX and their performance ”All River Red”, to the music of The Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky. This strong and suggestive performance gave the audience an experience so full of emotion, that I’m certain it will still linger in all of our memories for a long time.
Perhaps it was the first time for the Malmö public to see traditional Chinese puppet theatre, so when we gave them the opportunity to see The Shanghai Puppet Theatre, the show sold out, TWICE! Stories like the Monkey King, Lion Dance and Going to Town made the whole family laugh out loud, gasp for air in fright, and cheer enthusiastically. The Shanghai Puppet Theatre also toured around the region of Skåne allowing more people to see their performance.
At the end of the week there was a carnival parade with Lion Dance and dragons walking through the center of Malmö. The unusually warm and pleasant weather contributed to this event; so many came to watch and enjoy. There was also a cinema program with five Chinese films: My Mongolian Mother, Forever Enthralled, Go Lala Go!, Aftershock and The Message. The Grand Finale of the week was the group Haya. Haya stems from Mongolia and mixes traditional throat singing and the instrument Morin khuur with rock, meditative singing and percussion, and they gave us yet another dimension of China’s rich musical treasure.
To work with cultural exchange between countries is one of the most rewarding, rich experiences you can have. It is a great pleasure to be able to present a different culture to the audience, it opens the senses and may even inspire an urge to travel and experience more.
Over the last 10 years, Musik i Syd has had several Chinese guest performances, and it is our wish and intention to continue this collaboration between our countries. We hope to be able to arrange new concerts with more groups that we couldn’t fit into the program this time, but that we have heard a lot about during the preparation. We also hope to present some of Musik i Syd’s ensembles in China.
It has been a great pleasure and enriching experience to liaise with the CFLAC and present the China Today Arts Week 2011 in Malmö with them.
