Reuters published the following article on a dance troupe of disabled performers in China. I posted a YouTube video of this group a couple years ago.

This is a new video news story about the troupe.

China disabled troupe breaks barriers through art
Wed Feb 20, 2008 4:49pm IST

By Ian Ransom and Kitty Bu

BEIJING (Reuters Life!) - Feeling music through speakers and guided by hand gestures, a troupe of deaf dancers in Beijing takes steps to champion the rights of disabled people around the world.

In between them prances Luo Xiangjun, a 25-year-old from China's southern Guangxi region, who pauses to pick up a wooden ladle with his foot, then raises it to his head while balancing on one leg.

Luo's dexterity is impressive, but hardly surprising in China, where gravity-defying acrobatics have been an art form for centuries. Luo, however, has no arms.

He lost them after he touched a high-voltage cable when playing as a seven-year-old.

"In China, as with the rest of the world, we face a lot of obstacles. Disabled people are still a weak group in society," said Luo, in between rehearsals at a training school in Beijing.

"But I hope through my hard work and our efforts here, we can overcome these difficulties."

Luo is one of only a few dozen people selected out of thousands of hopefuls to train with the China Disabled People's Performing Art Troupe, a collective of some 88 dancers, musicians and artists who have turned their triumph over adversity into an acclaimed stage show.

OLYMPIC AMBITIONS

Since forming in 1987, the troupe has performed in more than 40 countries and has raised about 5 million yuan ($700,000) for disabled people's charities, according to organizers.

Its contingent of deaf dancers performed their signature "Thousand-hand Guanyin" dance -- a visually stunning movement where the performers' arms sway and flick behind a lead dancer -- at the closing ceremony of the Athens Paralympic Games.

"At Athens, the audience was huge. We had never played in front of so many people before. We were all quite nervous," said Tai Lihua, the troupe's deaf artistic director and a performer for over 15 years.

"But we were very successful and showed people the splendor of China," the 32-year-old said. "We hope to do the same at Beijing in 2008."

With little difficulty booking gigs for both commercial and charity events, the group also has no problem finding recruits among China's 90 million people with disabilities, said Tai, who lost her hearing at the age of two after receiving a tainted injection for a fever.

"We get calls and emails from applicants every day hoping to join up," she said.

The lucky few who make the grade sleep in dormitory accommodation at the troupe's base in Beijing, rehearse almost every day and generally only go home to their families, scattered across all corners of China, during the Lunar New Year holidays.

FEEL THE BEAT

"The biggest challenge for us is that we can't hear the music," said Wei Yujie, a 16-year-old student at the school.

"So we have to use our hands and feel the music's beats to learn," she said.

As dancers stand in line to learn different repertoires, teachers give instructions in sign language. Sometimes the dancers breathe on the back of their fellow troupe members' necks to let them know when to flick an arm or twirl a hand in time to the rhythm of the music.

The training is hard, but the dancers all feel fortunate, and grateful to act as ambassadors for Chinese culture, in a country where few disabled people have jobs or even access to aids like prosthetic limbs.

Beijing organizers hope the Paralympics will improve conditions and raise awareness for the country's disabled people, but even in China's sprawling capital, only 7 percent of the city's nearly 1 million disabled residents have gainful employment, the China Disabled Persons Federation said last year. Outside of big cities like Beijing and Shanghai, millions more face discrimination and poverty across China's vast countryside, where education levels are lower and resources scarce.

The challenges are not lost on Tai, even as she prepares to take her dancers to the United States for a tour to promote "My Dream", a home-grown film documenting the troupe's rise to the world stage.

"People have turned their pity for disabled kids to wanting to help them," Tai said.

"They are becoming more educated and society is improving bit by bit, but it will be a slow process."

Deja Vu! This weekend's entry looks just like last weeks! We have had over a whole week of the most Fantastic Weather! It's been beautiful out. Hard to believe it's still February. So we went back to the park down by the harbor. Last week we went here on Saturday, then on Sunday we went to another waterfront park: Boulevard Park. Boulevard has a couple unique attractions, but it was really overcrowded, there was no parking, and the play structure there has got to be one of the oldest ones around. So this week we were back at the harbor.

The other great thing about this park is that has wonderful, broad paved paths for riding bikes on, last week we had Kai on his two-wheeler and Shen on his trike. A trike just can't keep up with the chain drive on a two-wheeler, so we and got Shen his own little bicycle as well. I think this picture pretty well shows how pleased he is with it...


Mount Baker was out in all it's glory...


We watched boats come and go...


We threw rocks in the water...


We visited our next-door neighbor Melinda who was selling their Wild Alaskan Salmon from their boat. Oh, for local readers, this is the absolutely best place in town to buy salmon. They catch and process it themselves and have excellent fish. For more information visit their website: www.desirefish.com. Highly recommended!


Shen took a turn piloting the Desire...


After a picnic lunch, the boys played on the playground. All of us really enjoyed our outing!

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Winter in the Northwest is cold, dark and wet. We have been housebound for months, so this weekend we were extremely happy to get our first taste of spring. Days like these are why people love to live here. We took the boys down to the park by the harbor and let them play and ride bikes. Truly a beautiful day out!

When we were in China to adopt Shen, whenever we watched TV in our hotel room we tried to watch the Chinese programming as a way to see what people in China watched. We would also try to find children's programming as a way to let Shen hear Chinese being spoken to make him feel more comfortable. We found this one family sit-com being played over and over again throughout the day. We took to calling it "Leave it to Beaver" because it had two brothers like Wally and the Beav. However there also was a daughter. We found this very confusing as it was about a family with THREE children. How did a family in China have 3 kids?

Well in my searching for Chinese programming on YouTube, I was thrilled to find an episode of this show that someone has subtitled in English! The show is called "Home With Kids - Put Fear of God" and is about a couple that has "remarried" each with children from previous marriages, the husband has a girl and a boy, and the wife has a boy. The husband's kids have been living with their grandparents in California. In the first part of the episode on YouTube, the husband asks the wife if they should bring his daughter in California to live with them and then jokes "What do you think of being the mother who has the most children in China?"

So I guess it's really more like a Chinese version of The Brady Bunch.





If you want to see more, the rest of the clips are on YouTube here...
http://www.youtube.com/chineseye01

The Fuwa are the mascots of the Beijing Olympic Games. Fuwa means "good-luck dolls". They are a group of 5 characters designed to represent the 5 traditional Chinese elements: Water, Wood, Fire, Earth, and Sky, and also the 5 Olympic rings: Blue, Black, Red, Yellow, and Green.

They're names are Beibei, Jingjing, Huanhuan, Yingying, and Nini. these are designed to look like plausible names for small children, but when put together, they sound nearly identical to the phrase "北京欢迎你 Běijīng huānyíng nǐ" which means "Beijing welcomes you".

A 100-episodes Olympic-themed cartoon series featuring the Fuwa was released in China and I found them on YouTube. Kai and Shen really seem to like these. Kai will watch just about anything on TV, but I think Shen really appreciates seeing and hearing some children's programming in Chinese. Here's the first episode...

In China, Chinese New Year is known as the Spring Festival. One of the big official highlights of China's national celebration is CCTV's annual Spring Festival Gala TV show which is broadcast on the eve of Chinese New Year. From what I have read, the show is wildly popular - in terms of ratings it's like a combination Superbowl/Dick Clark's Rockin New Year's Eve.


The format of the show is the huge arena staged variety extravaganza that we found available for watching on TV pretty much 24/7 while we were in China. Now that we live in the age of YouTube we can watch program on online anytime we like. I've imbedded a few clips that CCTV put up. I found another poster on Youtube that has posted the entire program in 25 10 minute pieces.

Here's one of the promo spots...


Kai and Shen really liked this hand-shadow segment...


There has been a lot of news about China's over 200 million migrant workers whose only time to return home to see their families is during Spring Festival. This year many of them were stranded by the severe weather China has recently suffered. This segment of China's population endures incredible hardships. I thought it was interesting there was a big tribute number for them. The tone of the piece reminds me of the classic propaganda posters from the era of the Cultural Revolution...


And of course there was a tribute to the upcomeing Beijing Olympic Games...

Gong Xi Fa Cai! Congratulations and be prosperous in the New Year! Tonight is the eve of the Chinese Lunar New Year Celebration. The party lasts for seven days but we've already been celebrating for the last three weeks! These are pictures we took of the boys at the party their Chinese language teacher held last Saturday. We had a great time there, and then went to a party put on by our adoption agency.

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