Not sure if everyone remembers, but we could not forget. In fact, we have been planning a revisit to the famous acrobatic show in Beijing for a while now, which finally became true. The reason for this particular visit, was that we heard that the show has undergone a transformation of some kind. While being totally clueless about what that could mean, we knew that with Chinese theatre it could mean absolutely anything!
Luckily for us, the Chaoyang Theatre is not far from where we are staying and the tickets are really cheap too. Just the area of the Chaoyang district is not a kind of a place where we would normally go to. It's fully office buildings and everything is pretty tall. Not a really interesting part of the city if you ask me! Then we decided to go forward and book the discount tickets. Which are non-refunable btw, something that doesn't make us think twice about not going. And there we went and saw the familiar theatre building that we had missed all this time.
As for the theatre, it felt like time had stood still and nothing had changed. But as soon as the performance started, we noticed something different. The performance was more loud, more colorful and more flashy. I would say, it had become more western. But then, we noticed something very Chinese. It had become chaotic and non-organised. Obviously they had set out to copy some western productions and could not handle the organisation. This is something very common in China and the reason why quite a large portion of business management is handled by foreigners. Something that the Chinese are not proud of.
But luckily the essence of the acrobats was there, in all it's glory. If you ignored the make shift to a acrobatic fantastic.. you saw extreme talent that just had lost some of it's original style. We wished that the flying acrobatics show would have just stayed the same. But obviously, things just change and there is nothing you can do about it.
We are confident that the Chaoyang Acrobatic Show will continue to improve and incorporate the western style in all it's glory. And for that, they will need western guidance!
