“There are no words to thank someone who has dedicated their lives to providing us a connection with a history that never deserved to be broken. It is a beautiful history,” said Ana Arnao, a former dance teacher.
“It is a profound history. And we can all learn from it. No matter where we are in the world, we can learn from the history that has been severed. It should never have been treated the way that it was by the Communist Party of China.”
“Thank you for gracing me with the beauty and the divinity and the glory that is all of you and what you do because you bring me to tears every single time and my heart beats harder for it for days after. It stays with me. It stays with me every single time,” she said.
“Absolutely you can see the energy and the dancers. They radiate a peace about them that you don’t see in people every day. And I think that probably has something to do with the message that they’re portraying in their dance and the fact that they are so connected to their own history,” she shared.
“So many people don’t have that, especially in a country like America, where we’re all from different places. We’re disconnected from our backgrounds from our history. So to see people who are living their ancestors’ lives on stage, it makes me cry every single [time]. They tell a story that all of us need to hear and that’s the story of staying connected to your roots staying connected to your history and staying connected to your gods.”
She shared that she could see colors coming from the stage and how they washed over the audience.
“On stage, it’s like this pure clean water. And it’s like the water from that is flowing slowly into the muddied waters that are the audience. And it creates this clear path,” she said.
“For the dancers, it ranges from a light calm blue into the light greens. It feels very natural, very peaceful, very calm. And sometimes you see the spike of those vibrant purples, when you can see the joy on the dancer’s faces, when they’re doing what they’re loving, that’s when it becomes vibrant, rather than this peaceful place that they center themselves in while they performed. That’s energy from them. Through and through,” she added.
Aside from the colors on the stage, Ms. Arnao said that she could see the energy in another form.
“It’s like a silhouette around them. If the angels are there, they are bolstering the dancers, they are giving the dancers that extra energy so they can tell this story and show how connected they are. That’s the way I see it,” Ms. Arnao said.
“That is their energy mixed with the energy of the Creator that they’re paying homage to because if that dance isn’t worship, I don’t know what is. If that’s not devotion, I don’t know what it is. They have to devote everything in themselves to be able to perform those types of dances and the fact that they’re doing it for their Creator. That’s devotion.”Reporting by Nancy Ma and Maria Han.