美文阅读Dance of love.docVIP

Dance of love and fortitude Awesome, thrilling, tear jerking ... these are the words used by many to describe the Kwan-yin of 1,000 Hands performance on the CCTV Spring Festival gala on the eve of the Chinese New Year. It was an unusual dance performed by unusual people. With 21 young deaf-mute performers, the dance featured the 1,000-hand Kwan-yin, goddess of mercy in Buddhism. It required all the dancers to perform in sync as one being in rhythm with the music. Without the ability to hear or speak, these dancers achieved the feat through signs. To help the dancers catch the rhythm of the music, sign language coaches were at the four corners of the stage. The signers and the dancers performed beautifully as the dance earned six rounds of applause. “I want to cry,” Zhou Tao, one of the masters of ceremonies at the gala show, told the audience immediately after the dance came to a close. “The dance should be performed on every Chinese Spring Festival mega show from now on,” said one of the thousands of messages posted on the Internet about the dance. “This Chinese Spring Festival gala can be considered successful only because of the Kwan-yin of 1,000 Hands,” said another Internet posting. The 21 dancers range from 13 to 27 in age. The 27-year-old leading dancer Tai Lihua is the soul of the dance. Tai lost her hearing at age 2 after an injection of streptomycin that was meant to cure a fever. But she showed her extraordinary gift for dance when she was very young. She began at a school for deaf-mute people at the age of 7 and shortly after felt the rhythms of a drumbeat played by one of her teachers. She first felt it in her feet. From then on, she knew dance could be a visible form of music for her to express the beauty in her mind. Tai started her formal training as a dancer at the age of 15, after she was accepted into the China Disabled People’s Performing Art Troupe. There she learned to let her body feel the music and express herself with the lang