Shanghai Tan

There are plenty of reasons why they said that Shanghai is the most westernized city of China, one of them is that the Shanghaineses love to dance and sing and jazz. Of course there are full of Tai Chi practitioners in the park, but no where do I see so many people dancing together in just about any park in the city: cha cha cha, tango, waltz, but no samba or salsa or flamingo, those are more appropriate for the attractive people with sexy looks and healthy shape… Nevertheless, they dance everyday in the park, young and old, men and women, with nothing more than a portable CD player and a noisy speaker.

Dancers at Zhong Shan Park	Dancers at Zhong Shan Park
Why not?	Why not?
Cute!	Cute!

They sing Beijing opera called Jin Ju (京剧), a local opera called Suzhou Pin Tan (评弹), as well as western opera (I don’t understand the language used…), and of course the communist-style opera for those who grew up during that period. In the bars there is a long tradition of Jazz music in the city, but now pop and folklore are also as common.

Communist-style opera singer performing in front of an astonished crowd	Believe me, her voice is quite impressive!
Suzhou Pin Tan singer with musicians

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 19th, 2007 at 1:46 am and is filed under Shanghai Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.