Viral videos of Chinese dance troupe’s 90-degree back bends spark ‘blue green waist’ craze and challenges on China’s TikTok
- The all-female traditional dance troupe featured on the annual Lunar New Year show on CCTV, prompting people across the country to try and recreate the moves
- ‘Blue green waist challenges’ on Bilibili, including some comically unsuccessful efforts, have even caused doctors to warn not to try them at home
China has just come up with its own version of the Limbo.
“Blue green waist”, or qingluyao, is trending as a search phrase and fitness fad in the country after an all-female traditional dance troupe wowed the audience at the annual CCTV Spring Festival Gala with elegant and demanding backbends.
The television extravaganza, a Lunar New Year ritual for many in the country, featured a segment from a sold-out dance show which made its debut in August 2021 at Beijing’s National Centre for the Performing Arts.
Choreographed by Zhou Liya and Han Zhen, two rising stars in China’s dance theatre world, Poetic Dance: The Journey of a Legendary Landscape Painting is based on one of the most famous classical Chinese paintings of all time: Wang Ximeng’s A Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains.
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The Painting Journey: Behind the scenes of China’s Spring Festival gala poetic dance hit
The undated scroll, now kept at The Palace Museum in Beijing, is the only painting in existence by the Song dynasty artist, who lived nearly a thousand years ago. It is considered an exemplary example of a “blue green landscape” because of how Wang used the two colours to highlight an extensive mountain range.
Dancers led by the regal Meng Qingyang swayed and whirled in blue and green against a golden backdrop during the January 31 New Year’s Eve gala, which CCTV said was viewed by nearly 1.3 billion people around the world.
Online comments included many that applauded the “Chinese aesthetics” and “cultural confidence” that the show was seen to embody, in line with the nationalistic promotion of Chinese heritage that lies at the heart of President Xi Jinping’s goal of “rejuvenating China”.
At the same time, the dancers’ crane-like forms, amplified by elongated head gear, set China’s Twitter-like Weibo platform ablaze when they bent sideways and backwards uniformly in a show of flexibility and strength. Meng stole the limelight by doing 90-degree bends effortlessly.
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A video published by its sports desk shows Meng showing off her “blue green waist” followed by footage of Russian freestyle skater Alexandra Trusova doing her signature cantilever, which her Chinese fans refer to as the “crab move”.
“The ‘blue green waist’ is awe-inspiring, but Trusova’s ‘crab move’ is no less impressive!” the post read.
