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Birmingham will host its first International Dance Festival from April to May next year, which the organisers promise will bring outstanding dance from across the globe, including Taiwan’s Cloud Gate Dance Theatre, who will open the Festival, and a National Ballet of China production, choreographed by Akram Khan.

A joint venture between DanceXchange and Birmingham Hippodrome, the month-long Festival will take place across the city between 28 April and 24 May 2008.

International Dance Festival Birmingham will capture the imagination with a world-class programme that encompasses all styles of dance and expresses the youthful, diverse and energetic spirit of Birmingham.

It will bring outstanding dance from across the globe, showcasing the work of world-renowned dance companies including Kirov Ballet and Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan, alongside specially choreographed commissions and large-scale participatory and site-specific performances. Akram Khan MBE presents his new collaboration with National Ballet of China, bahok, as one of the Festival highlights.

Featuring some of the world’s greatest choreographers, International Dance Festival Birmingham promises to engage established audiences and newcomers alike through the sheer diversity of its programme.

Major new Festival for Birmingham gets City dancing!

 

The Terrocotta Army exhibition is so popular that British Museum is planning to extend the opening hour to midnight, even 24 hours a day, to accommodate the visitors. Almost all of the half million pre-book tickets have been sold. There are 500 on-the-day tickets every day. ‘The First Emperor: China’s Terrocotta Army’ exhibition is becoming the second most popular exhibition of British Museum, only beaten by the Tutankhamun exhibition in 1972.

The Daily Telegraph reports:

The British Museum is planning to take the unprecedented step of staying open 24 hours a day to meet the huge demand for its exhibition of Chinese terracotta warriors.

The demand to see the terracotta warriors is so great that the British Museum is planning 24-hour opening.

Total visitor numbers are expected to exceed 800,000 - more than twice the figure predicted when The First Emperor opened in September.

 

Some of the photos of Dong Yi’s Zheng Recital at the Great Hall of the People, Beijing. Photos courtesy of the concert organisers. Dong Yi is a graduate of Edinburgh University, and a postgraduate student of London School of Economics and Political Science. More about Dong Yi’s Zheng Recital at the Great Hall of the People, and the concert programme.

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Glamour of Jasmine: Dong Yi in Zheng Recital

Conductor: Hu Bing-xu

Accompaniment: China Philharmonic Orchestra

19:30, 8th Nov 2007

Auditorioum, The Great Hall of the People

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Dong Yi, an Edinburgh University economics graduate, is to give a concert at the Great Hall of the People, Beijing. Dong Yi will Zheng (筝), a traditional Chinese music instrument, accompanied by China Philharmonic Orchestra. Glamour of Jasmine will be the first time a female musician playing a traditional Chinese instrument to give a solo performance at the Great Hall of the People.

Only 25 years old, Dong Yi is a prominent musician in China and has many years of Zheng performance experiences. She is now studying a master degree in London School of Economics and Political Science.

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There is a small, but growing number of Chinese novelists who use Foreign languages to write books. For example, Ha Jin has published several critical acclaimed books in English, and recently two stories from Li Yiyun’s award-winning debute, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, has been adapted into two movies by the Chinese-American director Wayne Wang. In the UK, Guo Xiaolu’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers entered this year’s Orange Broadband Prize shortlist.

The following is an interview with a Chinese author, Shan Sa, who writes in French:

TOKYO (AFP) — Chinese author Shan Sa’s identity has circumnavigated the world — she lives in France, is impassioned by Japan and is now turning her attention to her homeland.

The novelist, whose real name is Yan Nini, has lived in Paris for more than half her life as part of a literary diaspora that stretched its wings as China began opening up to the world three decades ago.

Like many other emigre authors who write in a foreign tongue — Dai Sijie in French or Ha Jin in English — Shan Sa has written mostly in French, apart from her first book of poems when she was 10 years old.

Her books include “The Girl Who Played Go,” which won an award in France and has been translated into English but remains unpublished in Chinese.

Her most recent book is “Shall We Meet in Tokyo at Four in the Morning?” in which she explores her own roots. It has been published first not in French but in Japanese in a collaboration with Richard Collasse, head of French fashion house Chanel in Tokyo.

Full report.

 

LONDON (AFP) — The record price for a Chinese contemporary artwork was smashed in London on Friday, Sotheby’s auction house said, for a painting based on the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing.

Yue Minjun’s “Execution” fetched 2,932,500 pounds (5,964,700 dollars, 4,210,300 euros) after two telephone bidders battled it out. The pre-sale estimate was between 1.5 and two million pounds.

The previous highest price paid at auction for a Chinese avant-garde artist was set in June for Yue’s 1997 work “The Pope” for 2.15 million pounds.

Full report

 

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, directed by Wayne Wang (The Joy Lucky Club, Chinese Box), won the Golden Shell For Best Film award in San Sebastian Film Festival. Henry O, the leading actor, also won the Best Actor Silver Shell award. The film is based on a story by Chinese author, Li Yiyun, whose debut novel, A Thousand of Years of Good Prayers, a compilation of short stories, had won her many international awards. The film tells the story of a retired scientist coming to visit his daughter in the States. He tries to comfort his daughter who is recently divorced but finds it’s difficult to communicate. Wayne Wang has directed two films from the same book. The other one, Princess of Nebraska, was also shown in the Festival.

Charlie Lam won Best Cinematography award for Hong Kong director Pang Ho-cheung’s Exodus. British director Conrad Clark’s debut Soul Carriage, which was shot in China, won the New Director award.

Source: Chinese Movie Database

 

China’s Terracotta Army on BBC TWO

Sat 15 Sep, 8:00 pm - 9:00 pm  60mins

Dan Snow follows the making of the British Museum’s biggest exhibition in a generation and tells the story of its subject, the First Emperor of China. Qin Shihuangdi is one of the most important but least well-known men in history. He founded the world’s oldest political entity and created the spectacular Terracotta Army to guard his vast tomb.

With exclusive access to the BM team for over a year, Dan follows the curator Jane Portal, and the design team, as they create a blockbuster exhibition in the historic Round Reading Room and he travels to China to see the original Great Wall, the sacred mountain Tai Shan, and the great necropolis at Xian with its thousands of warriors.

 

From Chinese Movie Database

Ang Lee’s second world war drama Lust, Caution won the Golden Lion Best Film Award at the 64th Venice Film Festival. Rodrigo Prieto also won the Osella Award for Best Cinematography.

Lust, Caution, starring Tony Leung Chiu-Wai and newcomer Tang Wei, tells the story of a young student (Tang Wei) who is asigned a mission to seduce and destroy a senior official (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) who works for the pupet government under Japanese control. The script is based on an Eileen Chang’s novel. The cinemetographer Rodrigo Prieto also worked with Ang Lee in Brokeback Mountain. At the award ceremony, Ang Lee dedicated the award to the late Swedish director Ingmar Bergman.

In the other awards, Taiwanese director Lin Jingjie’s The Most Distant Course won the International Critics’ Week Awards.

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