Beauty of the Tang Dynasty Revealed in Paris

In the middle of a marathon journey through 29 cities around the world, dozens of dancers, singers, and musicians from the NTDTV Chinese New Year Spectacular came to Paris, where it once again attracted a full house and surprised the audience with the richness of their performances. Spectators who came expecting to see just another show left awed and amazed, asking themselves if they had come back from a performance or an initiatory journey.

The 2006 Spectacular, also held in Paris' Palais des Congres, had as its underlying theme trait d'union, a union of cultures. Dragons and lions followed on the coattails of a symphonic orchestra; the melancholic accents of the ancient Chinese two-stringed Erhu echoed the clarinet of Giora Feidmann.

In 2007, this step is surpassed; it's deep into the myths and legends of ancient China that the organizers and artists lead us.

So, if the audience expected a typical Chinese New Year celebration with acrobatic displays, free-for-all martial arts combat, drums and firecrackers, and contortionists in skin-tight costumes, they were met with a shock: from beginning to end, the spectacular featured harmonious, celestial scenes, Buddhist images, and heroes embodying the Chinese nation's traditional values. The music invited the audience into gentle reflection, while at the same time opening its eyes. The audience seemed to begin to understand that the goal was especially to open up its hearts.

The story began even before history; in the time of myths, when the gods decided the future paths of dynasties, when they wrote the name of each emperor, each future "son of heaven." It followed with the story of young Mulan and the values of filial piety and respect she displayed, and carried on with the tale the great General Yue Fei, who embodied fidelity and courage. It explored the traditions of the Tibetans, Mongols, and other Chinese ethnicities; it revived Buddhist and Taoist beliefs.

One dynasty after another transmitted its most pure and powerful lessons, and when the audience expected to see the curtain fall after the dance of the ladies of the last dynasty, the Qing dynasty, the show continued on; the show had come out of the past to arrive in the present.

The next number depicted the repression of a practitioner of the meditation exercise Falun Gong by the Chinese regime. The scene and the way in which it was orchestrated, the arrangement of colors, seemed to symbolize the gentleness of a tradition of wisdom opposing the violence of materialism.

The recipe worked: the spectators marked the evening with respectful silences followed by thundering applause, and the Chinese left talking about the spectacular's or profound meaning, as well as the beauty of the costumes and the detailed precision of the choreography.

Mme. Sun Hong, from Finland, with her mother and her son: "I did not know that it would be so magnificent, I have never seen anything like that, even in China. Some traditional dances cannot even be found in China."