Arts Activities Support

More Minnesotans know and like to attend art activities. In two days, about 1300 audience members came to watch our shows. The audience gave a lot of good comments to Twin Cities Chinese Dance Center students’ performance. It is the first time all 400 tickets of days show were sold out by O' Shaughnessy. More Minnesotans attended our arts activities. Sally Tu came from St Cloud and joined Sunday shows. The annual production of 2017 Rooster Chinese New Year was so successfully. About 1300 audiences attended two days show. Our students after a yearlong learning and training, they performed 9 different ethnic dances, delivered the authentic Chinese culture of Art. They performed in solo, trio and group dances format. Twin Cities Chinese Dance Center is the only arts group to perform the variety Chinese folks and ethnic dance programs in this celebration season. On the stage, they performed well in reflecting what the features of the ethnic dance compare with other dances, what is the typical movement of the essential concept of one specific ethnic, in the manner of the arts performance, they told the audiences that core belief and spirit in Chinese dance movements for each program in ethnic, modern and classic dance formats. Our students were so excited in costumes with the lighting and music, they did not simply repeat what they learned from the classrooms, and they paid attention to deliver the characters of the ethnic/traditional dances. It is time again we use moving and video clips controlled by programming on the back screen, dynamic fireworks, and blowing flags, children cartons, etc. gave the strong vision impact to the audience. Most words we heard from the audience were “Amazing!” Our students made progress and have enriched their performance integrated dance skills, culture features, and their personal intelligence successfully. Ingrid Yelkin sent an email to Twin Cities Chinese Dance Center board: Wow! Joy of Dance VIII, we attended the Chinese New Year celebration on Sunday, my sons and I learned so much! The performers were impressive. I am reaching out to see if your dance group would be interested in participating at the Celebration of Cultures at the Countryside Elementary School in Edina. There is an issue as of last year, the lighting in O’Shaughnessy is showing they still not being able to match our vision requirement; they have limited light colors available now, cannot provide wider range of the light colors, so we need pay more attention in selecting the costumes’ colors to make sure we can maximum the light and color vision effecting to the audiences. This activity was planned to celebrate Chinese New Year, we mainly serve to Asian and Chinese communities in twin cities. However, more other race people called for buying tickets to attend our performance. There were about 1100 people attended our shows, and market share remained in stable in Chinese communities since the qualities of our shows have built up. Many audiences have watched our show more than twice. We think from the large view point, we brought Chinese culture to the residents of twin cities even though it is a small part of Minnesota culture. In our shows, we added some other culture components, our Mexican youth students performed Latin dance, and all audience gave the huge applause to the young artists. We selected O’Shaughnessy as the place of our show project. It is wheelchair accessible as well as free parking sport to attended audiences. In our brochure, we print wheelchair accessible sign, we wrote both English and Chinese to introduce our artists and program details, so the audiences know what the dance was about for. As we stated earlier, we sent our postcard to community and asked them to join us. We give about 10% free tickets to public schools, foundations, arts groups, and low income families. If we had more resources we would put one ad to commercial newspaper, and more people would know the show activity.