New video is out! Guess I'll use this space here to double as my blog post about this :)
Last Friday was International Women's Day (国际妇女节), and I learned from other exchange students that PKU's Guanghua school was hosting a party that night celebrating the event with food and games. Being a college-aged Texan with a big appetite still not used to the relatively small meal portions served in China and pretty much the rest of the world, the words "free food" grabbed me in an instant and I went with a group of exchange students to the party later that night.
At the party (which only had small snack foods as it turns out free meal events rarely happen in China unlike back home), we played karaoke games as the group message had stated, but what I didn't anticipate was that there were performances too. I had previously obtained information from a local friend about PKU's Hip Hop Dance organization, 风雷社 ("Wind Lightning Society", pronounced "Feng Lei She" in pinyin reading) and had found them at the club fair the week before; it turned out that they were performing for the festival as an opening act!
While they were performing, a gymnast had a solo and started doing flares, and my exchange student friends started asking me if I could do the move too. When I said yes, one of them yelled out loudly in Chinese "We have someone here that can do that too!", to which the gymnast somewhat angrily replied "If you can do it, then do it!"
Before I knew it, the crowd's eyes were on me and they began cheering me on to dance. I went to the center, performed the move, transitioned to some more acrobatic moves, and ended with a dynamic freeze facing their dance team, to which the crowd went wild and applauded. 风雷社 nodded in approval, then continued their performance after everyone had settled down. It felt great to dance again and see what the dancers here in Beijing were like, and I was now even more excited for 风雷社's informational and auditions, which were to take place the next day.
Oh yea, my friend and I were still hungry after the party, so we went out for some late night Japanese food and tried fried blowfish *spoiler alert*- it just tastes like really pure tasting fish.
Le fried blowfish for $8.67 USD, because yolo right?
The next night, I headed to the main gym for 风雷社's informational after a full day. They gave a brief description about each of the dance styles they offered- breaking, popping, jazz, and hip hop (choreography), followed by demonstrations of each style by groups of their team members along with a solo demonstration by their professional dancer that taught popping classes (they have a performance team and also host dance lessons with professionals for interested students). Immediately after the performances finished, they held auditions for their team and called my name first.
Since I come from a (dance) battle culture back in Texas and in a battle, a dancer has no idea what song is going to be played and oftentimes doesn't recognize the song that gets played, I had told 风雷社 on my application to play any song they wanted, as long as it was a breakbeat. After shuffling through a few songs to find one, I went out and did my thing. The crowd rang with applause and the bboys took me to another room to begin my first practice session with them.
During the performances, I had noticed that there were some very dynamic bboys who hadn't performed the day before. I approached them and learned that they were from the surrounding area, and that street dancers from the area gathered at PKU during practices to dance together- which meant that there were more bboys in Beijing than what I had just seen. I learned that they had originally come from other regions, and that there were bboys in all of the different parts of China, which widely took me by surprise.
When I was researching about Beijing back in America, it had been incredibly hard to find any information about the dance scene or Chinese Hip Hop culture, so I was under the impression that it was either really small or didn't exist. Yet here I was, practicing with Chinese street dancers and finding out that they have a massive scene, only unbeknownst to the Western World because of the social media cutoff. I learned that they even have their own website, "街梦网" (street dreams web) that they use to connect with each other and spread Hip Hop knowledge. During practice, one of the dancers, 大志 saw me dancing and asked if I wanted to join him for a 5 vs 5 dance competition happening in May. Looks like I'll be competing in China and meeting more members of their dance culture!
Every day remains really busy, so I apologize for how infrequently I've been posting on this blog and appreciate your patience! Adding on to my previous post, I will be writing blog posts attached to my vlogs just like this one when an additional story needs to be told that goes along with the video, and will also post about significant days that I don't have videos for. I'm off to eat a late night dinner, so be it on this blog or on other social media, I hope to see you all again soon!
-Germy
