the Marimbist

We visited two middle schools on the Saturday of our weekend visit to Fenghuang.  About 80% of these children stayed on the school grounds and there was a holiday in the following week, so the classes were extended through the weekend to allow the students to visit their families during the upcoming holiday.  It was clear that I was the first foreigner most (or all) of these students had ever seen.  These students and teachers at these schools were wonderful, but the poverty that surrounded us was quite surprising.  Restrooms on the school grounds were more like the latrines that I experienced during bivouacs in Army.  (Smell and all.  There’s a delicate line between ethnocentrism and concern for the health of the students…)

After a greeting (and drinking:  see previous post) at the school’s gate, we were treated to an outdoor drum concert.  A group of girls danced around both sides of eight large red traditional Chinese drums while one other girl beat out a metronomic pulse on the shell of one of the drums.  Their sticks were decorated with long red strips of cloth that danced around as much as the girls did.  They had choreographed the dance in such a way that they were hitting the drums in all directions—even behind them while they were spinning around!  I had a lot of fun watching this.  Obviously.

Next they asked me to play for them, so I improvised a riq solo for them and they asked me to play on one of their drums, so I was also happy to oblige them on that account.  I will include some video below, and I have all of their performances on video (and some of mine), but I’m only going to upload a couple of the files here.  (I’ll be happy to show other files to anyone who asks.)

Once we made our way into the school compound, the basketball court was set up for a number of performances by the students.  There was dancing and singing, then more dancing.  Some of this was to live music provided by other students.  As always in China, some of the dance was performed to “canned” MIDI-ish music that was really cheesy.  The dance was fun, though.  They invited us up to dance with them on the most dangerous of the dances—dancing somewhat complicated steps while mischievous students are trying (and succeeding, in my case) to trip you with their supposedly rhythmically moving bamboo poles.  I still think that one of them tripped me intentionally, but there’s an infinitesimally small chance that I put my second left foot down in the wrong place.  (This happened BEFORE the “I Can Dance” post…)  More dancing followed, but this was less dangerous and I succeeded in following my guide student around the large, ubiquitous, folk-dance circles.

Our next treat was an arts-and-crafts demonstration where the students were making all kinds of traditional Chinese handicrafts:  paper cutting; “grasshoppers” out of long stiff leaves; shoe sole embroidery (I don’t quite understand this one, but I’ve got a pair of them…); drawing, and calligraphy.  We also visited two music classrooms where the students sang songs and played drums.  I played drums with them again and played one of my riq compositions.

A quick bit of warning:  If you ever find yourself in the midst of several hundred students who’ve never seen a foreigner before, think about what you’re doing when the first one says, “Hello” in that particularly melodic way that children have.  If you respond audibly—maybe with your own melodic “Hello”—then you’re liable to be spending the next substantial amount of time repeating the same trick!  Likewise, if ANYONE in China asks you if they can take their picture with you, take a surreptitious look around to see how many more are going to follow suit.  In one of these schools, I made both of these fauxes pas and ended up making my friends wait for me at the bus.  These kids REALLY wanted their picture taken with me.  And puzzlingly, they didn’t even care about the fact that it was on MY camera and that they’d never see the picture.  They were adorable and I made sure that every one of them that wanted it got a picture and a “Hello.”  But it was a time investment 

We went to a second school in the afternoon, but it was pretty uneventful.  The students there were martialed into a large room where we harangued them for awhile about the importance of learning English.  We also answered all the standard questions:  How long have you been in China?  Can you eat our spicy food?  Where are you from?  dot.dot.dot.   The kids were cool, but there was no structure to our visit and it was a bit boring for most of the students in the room.  Grace did give a rousing call-to-arms about the importance of learning English in today’s society—and suggested some helpful strategies for doing so.  The students who were listening seem to have something useful.  There’s a weird thing in some of these schools:  Sometimes the boys will sit in the back of the room and pretend to be extremely bored.  In itself, that isn’t that odd, but I sometimes hear that these boys are the best students in the class and that they (almost secretly from the looks of it) get very high scores on their work.  Interesting.

The videos will be put into future post.  My files are too large for wordpress and I’m sitting in the Hong Kong airport, so I can’t modify them just now.

Bonus Link:  (Pole Dancing.)

Tags: China, drums, fenghuang, riq, traditional music

This entry was posted on Monday, July 26th, 2010 at 2:31 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.