#guangchangwu

[fuckyeahchinesefashion]

OP: more and more young people are doing square dancing

[simozanotti-samochineseversion]

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“GuangChangWu” is what makes Chinese elder ladies crazy! It's a really popular dance, I mean, quite contagious, you can find it in lots of squares and pedestrian roads in Sh! Chinese women are so concentrated that they can dance among benches, trees and people passing through them! #eastnanjingroad #shanghai #guangchangwu #dance #chineselife #omg #chinesewomen (at www.tumblr.com/blog/samochineseversion )

[dancinginthesquares]

"Aging and being beautiful are two entirely different matters. Life is like going through the seasons and it's only a change of sceneries. You can't just appreciate the spring while disparage the winter."

Said Leading dancer Yang yesterday between two dances when another granny was flipping through the photo album on her phone and moaned.

[dancinginthesquares]

Reports on Shanghai's recent survey on guangchangwu

Shanghai's Statistics Bureau: Survey on local noise pollution

Wall Street Journal: In Defense of China’s Dancing Grannies: Shanghai Residents Speak Out

《参考消息》：美媒：上海居民大胆直言支持大妈跳广场舞

[dancinginthesquares]

To draw from the observation so far, I think I can say that the dances that are called guangchangwu in general can be roughly divided into two categories: the disco-like dance and that closer to traditional Chinese folk dance. For the former (shown in the video), the movements tend to be more “modern”: sometimes such dance is just like a slow and simple version of some mixture of calisthenics and disco, like stretching the arms and snapping the fingers. While the in latter case, the moves usually consist of typical choreographies that can be found in ethnic minority dances, especially those of Mongolian dance (raising the shoulders, for example) and Tibetan dance (such as the stride).

Of course there are dances that are in-between. What really matters to me is these two categories of dance seem to suggest a convergence of a modern and a traditional stream in the form of dance. And most importantly, it is “modern” in the sense that it is outdated enough from the perspective of the young, and it is “traditional” probably only in the scope of modern music and dance industry, where “ethnic styles” are produced in great quantity and reproduced rapidly through the internet. 

[dancinginthesquares]

This piece is highlighted on top of Weibo today. What interests me here is not really the poor articulation of the report itself, but its natural association made among grannies, guangchangwu dancers, and the trivial profit-- "Many grannies join for free t-shirts," says the report. And of course, jogging, accordingly, is just a 2.0 version of the dance in terms of the disturbance, for the noise is now walking around.

Although the reporters use grannies as THE synonym for the jogging population, they seem to forget they are precisely writing about the death of a "middle-aged man" in the last paragraph. Hence, the question we have asked before should be advanced again: what does it mean when one is called "dama"-- the "big-mother" or "grown-old-mother"?

[dancinginthesquares]

Dancing in the rain

[dancinginthesquares]

Note that guangchangwu is the first activity on the list among all other "social sports."

Screenshot: China Association of Social Sport Instructor (截图来源: 中国社会体育指导员协会)

06/13/14 Some of "my grannies" took the Social Sport Instructor (level 3) exam today. The training + exam consists of two parts, respectively, a keynote lecture on social physics education knowledge following an open-book test, and a practical session in which test-takers learned and performed a set of qigong and a set of guangchangwu. 

I stayed for most of the day except for the open-book test and chatted with grannies and staff who organize this annual event. Among the many discoveries, the most important one is probably that I realize the government is really promoting guangchangwu as part of the larger "national fitness" (全民健身) project. One of the person in charge of the exam introduced me that the exam had been held annually for many years, and each year one or two kind(s) of activity/activities is/are assigned as the subject(s) to test, while guangchangwu had been chosen for three or four consecutive years. When I asked what were the criteria to decide the subject, she answered it was those "most in demand."

Noticeably, if what she told me was valid, we may draw that qigong is sort of making a come-back in official language.

Questions to be ask is,

1) what's the relation between the "national fitness" project and the healthcare reform?

2) Does the official's acquiescence of the dance regardless of the social controversy over it has anything to do with the "fitness" purpose?

3) What difference does the instructor certificate actually make among the members of a given dancing group?