Welcome to the Year of the Pig
by Andrew Seguin
 To usher in the Chinese New Year, a group of Chinese performers visited Chapin last Friday and performed several songs and dances in the Assembly Room for Lower School News. And as this year is the Year of the Pig, they brought a pig — though not a real one. One of the performers dressed as a pig and was admonished by his cohorts to wake up and bring in the New Year, which he did by shaking off his feigned slumber and dancing around the stage with a staff in his hand. Despite his show of strength, the girls decided to refer to him diminutively as “Piggy.”
Chinese teacher Sunny Zeng arranged the performers’ visit, which fits in well with the Chinese language program and Class 3’s study of China. Prior to the performance, several of Ms. Zeng’s Class 5 students met the performers and practiced speaking Chinese with them. “We asked them questions like, ‘How are you?’ and ‘What animals do you have?’” one of the girls mentioned. “And they said, ‘You have good pronunciation,’” which must have encouraged this young learner.
The Lower School girls also got to try Chinese pronunciation. Before each song or dance, Ms. Zeng asked the audience to repeat its Chinese name. There was the Red Ribbon Dance, a Korean drum dance and the Fan Dance, as well as traditional Chinese music.
The most popular dance was the Lion Dance, the grand finale, which brought the performers off the stage and put them among the audience. It featured an enormous dragon wielded by the performers and some special guests — five Lower School teachers. The teachers were already experts at weaving through a sea of girls, so they had no problem doing it while dancing with a dragon in hand.
Click here to see a photo gallery of the performance.
|
