The last week of October was a very, very busy week – honestly, the last month and a half of the program was packed, much more so than the rest of it. We had activities pretty much every day of the week in addition to classes and preparing for our week in Qufu.
On the evening of Thursday the 29th we attended SDNU’s 65th anniversary celebration. Students and faculty came together to celebrate the school’s birthday with poetry, dance, and music performance. Some of the performances we’d seen smaller-scale versions of earlier in the semester at the pre-departure performance of the group that traveled the world visiting various Confucius’ Institutes, but that was fine; the repeat performances were done with larger student ensembles from the rest of the performance art college classes, and the sound in this theatre was much better coordinated (that should say something, because we were sitting literally fifteen feet in front of five-foot-tall speakers).
A group performing a melody with er’hu (called the “Chinese violin”), dizi (a type of flute), guzheng, and flutes and violins.
This dance performance ended with some lion dancers coming out into the audience!
Singing faculty…
Lotus dance~
The performances were punctuated by congratulatory anniversary messages from other universities in China, as well as from SDNU faculty and collaborating professors working abroad. There was also a brief award ceremony to recognize the accomplishments recent graduates, which was pretty cool.
And a cool shot of (almost) everyone at the end!
Beautiful magic black-swan boys… Who danced to the theme from the 2004 Peter Pan film.
And a cool shot of (almost) everyone at the end!