SCCCA Chairman Janie : Performing Arts are The Most Beautiful Resonance Among Cultures

Thank you for joining us tonight to celebrate the Legends show, performed by the South Coast Chinese Cultural Center. I have always been a believer that performing art is the common language for all cultures. Tonight, you and I witnessed that.  

 

木蘭 (MuLan),Thru the sound of the drum sets, we see MuLan’s bravery and her devotion to family. 美猴王 (Monkey King), We see Monkey King shows his courage through his excellent WuShu.  And, those little monkeys. Their playfulness is adorable and their WuShu is really good too. I think they all deserve a round of applause.  

And, what I am most proud of is that we have about 200 performers here.  over 90% of the performers are the members of our Cultural Center’s community program participants.  Our teams range from an 83 year old Orchestra member, to the youngest of a 5 years old WuShu player.  5 to 83.  

Of course, we did not start those programs just last year.  Although The South Coast Chinese Cultural Center has been known for its language teaching, we have opened our cultural programs to the communities for several years.  In 2017, the Center established the Chinese Orchestra team, in 2018, we added the Drum Team.  As a cultural center, we wouldn’t perform music without the dance, would we?  So, in 2019, we formed our Dance team.  Right after Covid, we did not waste time, our WuShu team started in 2023.  So, some of the little monkeys only have their learning in less than one year. And so many beautiful dancers and Yes, we are all very proud of our performers!  And I am even more proud of our Chinese Cultural Center for performing at a scale like tonight. 

Actually, we have more to celebrate.  How do we tell those legendary stories?  How do we bring traditional cultural elements to still be relevant in today’s world? In our mind, it all starts with a story and its Music. It is truly our blessing to have Teacher He Bin leading our orchestra team. He is not only our conductor, he is also our composer. The musicals you heard tonight are 100% composed here in Teacher He Bin’s music studio. His authentic and original musicals, that may I say?, is a world unique piece.  So, When the music sheets get to the performing teams, like The Dance team, The WuShu Team, The Gymnastics Team, and even more teams in the future, we simply let the creativity swirl, and together we formulate the visual piece that makes those legends alive on stage tonight.  And our production team under Yulan Chung is only a 28 person team.  As you can see, there is a lot of passion, dedication, commitment, and hard work to make tonight a reality.