Dancing

Blog Post 10/6

As the teachers’ meeting on home visits also concludes with sombre tones, our ears still ringing with stories of impoverished households, broken families, and sick children, I follow other teachers out into the chilly autumn night for some sightseeing. A chilly evening wind creeps through my two layers of jacket. Concluding with an equally sombre, dusty blue hue, the daytime sky gives way to night, and a dark shroud falls over the town.

As a tourist location, Yanqing serves as the back garden for Beijing. Only a two hour drive, it boasts of cleaner air, mountain getaways, and among other things, ‘farmer fare:’ an assortment of fermented tofu and pork cooked in a large clay pot over a charcoal fire, eaten with a mind boggling sundry of small plates loaded with yams, pig liver, multicoloured vegetables, mushrooms, buns… At the centre of the city is a vast plaza, meticulously cleaned and newly built. Unlike Beijing, the town is not lit perpetually. Glowing from lights from nearby shops, the consummate-white tiles if the plaza are an eerie shade of gray.

I was surprised to hear the dull thud of drumbeats as we walked onto the plaza. With a tingling sensation, I caught the strained whine of Chinese bugles (I think that’s what I’d call them) meandering among the beats. The real surprise came as we continued through the plaza. A small stereo was playing a Chinese pop song remixed to follow a four count swing beat. Randomly matched in gender, height, and age, couples were dancing a simple version of the rock-step—step-step beat. To my amusement, two elderly men were dancing together, their wrinkled faces glowing with childlike smiles.

The drumming and bugles were further down the plaza, where two parallel lines of men, women, and children were copying the movements of two old men leading the line. Holding neon pink feather fans in each hand, the men were performing a folk dance native to the region. In another context I might have thought the dance was choreographed at Las Vegas. A black garbage bag next to the musicians was being raided by several middle-aged women, their hands reappearing with pink flashes. Bystanders would tap to the enticing rhythm (not quite one you find in Social Dance at Stanford) and join the line, fan or no fan. Again to my surprise, several of the dancers were middle aged men. The whole scene reminded me of a dark club room, with a ridiculously strong beat and hundreds of people moving in unison.

“The musicians come out here every day!” the man next to me responds. “They volunteer their time to come.”
“How does everyone learn how to dance?”
The man grins and turns to me. “You just follow the person next to you and hopefully somebody knows it.”

As bad as I am at dancing, I can understand the allure.