CAAM Chinese Dance Theater performed "China the Beautiful: from the mountains to the prairies" at O'Shaughnessy Auditorium of St. Catherine University this weekend. These photos are taken from the January 21 dress rehearsal. Tomorrow is the Chinese New Year and the beginning of the Year of the Dragon. CAAM is based in the Twin Cities of Minnesota.
A Kazakh-themed harvest dance:
CAAM Chinese Dance Theater performers act out a Mongolian festival:
We reported last Monday on the levitating government officials from Huili County in our post "Chinese internet meme of the day: party officials head from Huili to the moon" (many sample images can be found at the link). The viral story/meme on Weibo (Chinese Twitter) about the botched Photoshop propaganda job has now spread across global media.
Adam Cooper writes in the Sydney Morning Herald:
Government officials in a rural corner of China wanted to inform residents they were inspecting a new road.
Instead, it appears they have gained global ridicule and notoriety as the stars of what is being described as a contender for the worst-doctored photograph in internet history...
The result was an image of the trio seemingly hovering over a section of road, not dissimilar to the look of early science fiction films...
In a bid to minimise ridicule, officials from the county, in Sichuan province, even signed up to the popular Sina Weibo social media site to post an explanation, the Guardian reported.
But that did little to hose down the lampooning.
Soon enough there was a flood of parodies circulating on the web, some of the officials on the moon surface, another of them surrounded by dinosaurs and, one with North Korean leader Kim Jong-il.
How is Chinese media handling this?
The EastSouthNorthWest (translation) blog quotes this excerpt from Southern Metropolis Daily:
On the evening of June 26, an Internet user made a post titled <Too fake: the propaganda photo for our county> at the Tianya Forum. "I had nothing to do today so I visited the website for our county government. The headline story was about the upgrade for the road to the countryside. I looked at the photo and I almost coughed out half a liter of blood! Even a rank amateur like myself can tell that this was a PhotoShop job, and they had the nerve to put this on the home page!" The post included a screen capture of a photo, in which three men were "floating" over a road. There were clear indications that this was a composite job. According to the caption: "County mayor Li Ningyi and vice-mayor Tang Xiaobing are inspecting the newly constructed country road at Lihong Town." This post drew plenty of readers, and the Huili County Government website was even down for a while because of the heavy traffic volume.
On the afternoon of June 27, our reader interviewed the Huili County Government publicity department director Zhang Yongzhi. According to Zhang, several county leaders went out to inspect the road. An accompanying worker took some photos for the record. But when it came to posting onto the website, the worker decided that "the background of the original photo did not look very good" so a decision was made to crop the leaders onto a different background. The Huili County Government has removed all relevant information and reprimanded the worker who handled the photo. The Huili County Government issued an apology at the Tianya Forum and the Sina.com Weibo.
Still waiting for a Photoshop artist to draw them walking on water.
Chinese cheerleaders perform at Chaoyang Park beach volleyball venue during the Beijing Grand Slam on the FIVB Swatch World Tour in 2011. Chaoyang Park was also the site for the beach volleyball games during the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
Click to see more photos of beach volleyball.
Click to see Beijing Grand Slam photo gallery.
More photos of the Shanghai Ballet
More photos of Swan Lake
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