The year of the Wood Dragon is underway, with the lunar new year starting on February 10.
On Friday, students from Instilling Goodness Developing Virtue Schools at the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas shared dance, music and artwork with visitors to the Ukiah Library.
Dragons are considered to be powerful and benevolent, and a dragon year is expected to be auspicious in many cultures. For Cherry Ngo, a senior at Developing Virtue secondary school, the celebration at the library signaled an end to the pandemic years that marked her schooldays.
“This is kind of one of the big events we’ve done since covid,” she noted. “During covid, I think the community spirits of Ukiah kind of died down. It was really sad to see.” In the six years she’s been attending Developing Virtue School, “We used to do a lot of performances outside, but because of the pandemic, we had to stop doing those kinds of activities. After that, it was never the same. But today, it feels like that community spirit has revived a little. I was very touched.”
Katherine Wang is another senior, with extraordinary organizational abilities. She gathered a small group of Chinese dance club members in a matter of minutes to talk about the performance as a crowd continued to enjoy the festivities at the library. She said the club meets two to three times a week, to practice for about an hour. She credits her teacher, Miss Julie, who “likes to teach us a variety of different classical dance styles…She also likes to breathe a lot of new concepts into our dance, so it’s sort of an expressive way of showing what Chinese dance is supposed to represent,” Wang explained.
The dance was a mix of old and new, with most of the performers wearing costumes and hairstyles reminiscent of the Tang dynasty, a golden age of Chinese music, poetry and allegory that flourished between 690 and 705. “We represented statues who were traditionally statues holding lanterns to celebrate the lunar new year,” Wang described. “And as the dance progressed, as the music also became louder, we were trying to embody the concept of coming to life. As a statue, throughout the dance, we had our individual poses, our individual background stories, and by the end of the dance, we returned back to statues in our original starting position.”
But Ngo appeared in the performance as Howl, a character from “Howl’s Moving Castle,” an animated Japanese movie loosely based on a book by British author Diana Wynne Jones. “It’s not a traditional Chinese performance,” she conceded. “It’s kind of a twist to the original performance that we’re doing, but I feel it does breathe a new air into the event, and also includes other cultures as well.”
It is definitely a twist on senior Shine Yuan’s experience of dancing and celebrating the lunar new year in China. “It’s actually pretty different, because we usually come together to have dinner with our families,” she recalled. “We don’t usually go outside and perform on lunar new year day, because we would be at home having fun.” She was only able to study Chinese dance briefly in her home country, but her participation in the activity picked up when she met friends at the school in Talmage and joined the club with them.
Music teacher Sophie Wu noted that music and dance from Western and Asian traditions are a big part of the curriculum, which is heavy on the arts and humanities. Students from Instilling Goodness Developing Virtue put on a concert in collaboration with other local young musicians at the college last May, and are planning to do so again this year. But it’s been a long time since they filled the library with song and dance. “Last time they did it was back in 2019,” she remembered. “And now some of them are about to graduate…It definitely brings something to their hearts,” to share their studies with the public.
The program finished on a musical note, with girls in voluminous white blouses and flowing red skirts playing Chinese strings, flutes, and a Chinese mouth organ. It’s one of the oldest Chinese instruments, and it can play many notes at the same time through numerous pipes and reeds built around a bowl. It’s about the size of a saxophone, but it points up instead of down.
“I think it’s just really beautiful to be with the community through arts and music,” Wu reflected. “Music is really a universal language…It’s really great to see how much the community enjoyed it and how much we could understand each other, just through the music and the dance and the arts.”
