On the Line

So I’m looking at the clothes I just hand washed in my bathroom sink with this orange bar of laundry soap that smells like cleaning solution and they don’t really look any cleaner than they did before. In fact, I think they look dirtier. I’m never quite sure if the water after washing my clothes looks dirty because of the dirt that came off my clothes, or if the water just came out of the faucet like that.

I am thankful for washing machines.

Long Sleeve

One of the classes we took at Beijing Dance Academy was long sleeve. Again, I’ll reference a fabulous Chinese movie, House of Flying Daggers and the awesome scene with the echo game. That’s long sleeve.


We, of course, we not nearly as articulate with our long silk sleeves, but we had fun making pretty designs in the space. We did discover how fun continuous shots with the camera can be when capturing movement, especially when falling off balance.

The Great Wall!

During the Warring States Period in China, seven different states started building walls and manning them with troops in order to protect themselves from each other. Then came, of course, the famous first emperor of China in 221 B.C. who unified these separate states (Hero, anyone?). To protect himself and his new empire from the Huns in the north, he ordered for the walls to be connected and fortified (Mulan!). Most of the wall building happened during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) with the construction of 4,600 miles to the total 5,500 miles. A lot of the wall has been destroyed and only about 1/3 of it remains intact.

Anyways, enough history. Here are some pictures.

Oh, and Meg and I ran up the last leg of the wall. We didn’t just climb the Great Wall, we ran! Thus, we needed a victory picture at the top.

The Egg

Otherwise known as the National Center for the Performing Arts, but we called it the Egg. We got to go see one night of the annual Modern Dance Festival in this amazing building. The whole thing is surrounded by a moat, and you have to go through a tunnel under the water to get into the building. We kind of expected the theater to be as big as the whole egg, but the place is actually filled with smaller theaters, which is probably much more practical.


We saw the City Contemporary Dance Company from Hong Kong perform, and it was contemporary dance at its finest: lots of good use of props, no side wings on the stage, very informal and almost un-presentational, no costume changes unless the costume was needed for use in the dance, dramatic lighting, almost unpleasant Meredith Monk music, and ridiculously amazing dancers. It was amazing.


Oh, and when we got back, the Chinese students had a cake and presents for Meg, who’s birthday was that day. They brought chicken feet. We only licked them.

Beijing Dance Academy

The Beijing Dance Academy is equivalent to (if not greater than) the Juilliard School in America. The differences are that here they focus solely on dance, and they are all Chinese—which means they are amazing. The students dedicate their lives to their art, from the time they are young kids, maybe 6 or 7 years old. On our first day here, we observed the beginning of a children’s classical Chinese dance class. All the girls were in class 10 minutes early stretching their middle splits. When they teacher did come in, and called roll, their way of saying “Present” was to go down into the splits and wait for the whole class to be marked.

The way it works here is that the students study through their childhood, then around age 17 or 18, they can go dance professionally. After a few years of that, they can come back for their undergraduate degree in performance, theory, choreography, or teaching. Some even go on to get graduate degrees. One interesting effect of this method is that all the teachers are pretty young, as opposed to the 60-year-old teachers we have at BYU.

After 8 years of persuasions from our professor, Jiamin, the Dance Academy is finally allowing outside students into their classes. This is the first time in the history of the school that they are opening their doors in that way, and we are the first students who get to dance with these amazing dancers! Intimidating? Yes. Some of the teachers were very kind and welcoming to us, and some of them seemed like we were pests to have in class, same with the students. Our first week, we took Chinese classical dance classes—which is like ballet, but there is all this detail with the hands and focus that is hard to grasp. The next week we took various Chinese folk dance classes, most of which involved fun props like brightly colors fans, or little porcelain tea cups that you clink together. Our last week, we took ballet. It was a relief to actually know what they were doing and what it was supposed to look like. I love ballet—at least I loved the men’s class that I got to go to, maybe because I could actually get my leg up as high as most of the guys, as opposed to in the girl’s class where I would have been far below standard.

Apart from taking their classes, some Chinese graduate students came and took out classes as well. Again, our days were pretty packed with classes, but we had a little more free time and short breaks between classes, so it didn’t seem as stressful as in Xi’an.

We also took Chinese calligraphy and Chinese painting classes. It’s interesting to me that everything in Chinese culture seems to be connected. These classes emphasized the use of breath and energy in order to create the right look. Those things are common elements in dance, and important parts of a lot of Chinese philosophy. It’s really beautiful how rich the culture is.

Saying Good-bye

We all really came to love Xi’an and the friends we made there. We felt like super stars most of the time. Everyone wanted to take pictures with us, and try to speak English with us. We had some great interpreters, students who wanted to show us around Xi’an, and the Chinese teachers who danced with us.

We received so many gifts from the people, we really had no way to repay them. When we drove away on our bus, we waved good-bye to a group of students standing on the curb who came to see us off.

Terracotta Warriors

Terracotta Warriors—the Eighth Wonder of the World? I don’t know when they added eight, or who gets to decide, but it must have been sometimes after 1974, when a lucky farmer, Mr. Yang, discovered the first vault while digging a well on his land. A few years later, two other pits were discovered around Vault One.

So where did these 8,000 distinct army men come from? The infamous first emperor, Qin Shihuang, of course. He wanted to immortalize his great army, while protecting his nearby tomb at the same time. Only about 2,000 figures have been unearthed so far, but each one has distinctive and different features, poses, and faces. Underground, the figures were all painted as well, but upon exposure to the air, the paint faded and disappeared almost immediately.

Sometime before its more recent discovery, parts of the underground army were discovered by a seemingly angry mob (according to the video they showed at the museum) and many of the relics were broken and destroyed. Thus, the excavation process is also an assembly process for restoring the figures and lining them up in the rows.