Dancing Chinese Culture —- Notes on the Chinese Dance Culture Class at ASU STARTALK SUMMER CAMP (Photos)

Dancing Chinese Culture —- Notes on the Chinese Dance Culture Classes at ASU STARTALK SUMMER CAMP (Photos) New Oriental…

New Oriental Art School (EAA) Contributed by

At 2 pm on June 15, at the invitation of ASU STARTALK SUMMER CAMP, Vanessa Qiuzi Hu, a dance teacher from the Eastern Art Academy, went to Arizona State University to give a lively Chinese dance culture class to high school students in the Confucius Institute STARTALK summer class. Nearly 40 high school students participating in the summer camp came from various cities in Arizona. They have different cultural backgrounds. On this day, American students of different skin colors gathered together, and they all showed great enthusiasm for learning Chinese culture.

Teacher Hu Qiuzi started with the question "What is Chinese dance?" Through a slide presentation, he showed a series of Chinese dance pictures of various styles to test the American students' familiarity with Chinese dance. Surprisingly, most students can identify classical dance and Tibetan dance as Chinese dance. But he expressed doubts that peacock dance also belongs to Chinese dance. So Teacher Hu gave a detailed explanation of the classification of Chinese dance on this issue, distinguishing and displaying the three major categories of Chinese dance: classical dance, folk dance and folk dance, and comparing the dance styles and costume characteristics of each other. In order to deepen the impression of the students, two famous dance clips were shown in the class - classical dance and Xinjiang dance, which vividly demonstrated the performance characteristics of classical dance and folk dance. And compared the commonalities and characteristics between the two.

The following interactive session was even more enthusiastically welcomed by the students. Teacher Hu brought nearly ten sets of national costumes and dozens of dance props, including water sleeves, fans, handkerchiefs and ribbons, so that every student could have the opportunity to better understand and experience Chinese dance. The girls were a little shy at the beginning, but the boys were already eager to try it. At the beginning of the interactive session, Several older boys rushed up impatiently, grabbed a red fan each and started posing, which made the whole class laugh. As a result, the atmosphere in the class became more and more lively. Gradually everyone joined in, wearing costumes and shaking sleeves, and it was quite lively. Teacher Hu divided everyone into groups according to the type of props, and taught several complete sets of movements and formations based on the props. Everyone imitated them in style, and some even learned them vividly in a short period of time. The whole class was full of laughter, and everyone had the most perceptual experience of Chinese culture in the harmonious atmosphere.

The two and a half hours of happy time passed quickly, and the students reluctantly changed into their national costumes and said goodbye to the class. After class, the person in charge of this activity, Fannie Tam, the deputy director of the ASU Confucius Institute, said that the Chinese dance class serves as a cultural class to assist Chinese teaching. It plays a very important role in the STARTALK summer camp. Over the past few years since the summer camp opened, the Chinese dance culture class has become one of the most popular classes among students and well-received by parents. This year, she is very grateful to teacher Hu Qiuzi from New Oriental Art School for her contribution to spreading Chinese culture and serving the community together with the Confucius Institute.