Today we started the day with a trip to Yuan Garden, which was also a home to a Chinese Emperor. The contrast between old and new was amazing! The section of the city where the Yuan Gardens were located was situated just across the river from the Financial District of Shanghai, which is full of newly-built futuristic looking buildings. This made for some great photo-ops with old China in the foreground and new China in the background.
In the parking lot, the students thoughtfully surrounded on of our travelling party, a young lady who was turning 12 years old that day and joined together in a chorus of "Happy Birthday." This was so thoughtful, but a mixed blessing as it attracted pan-handlers to the area. But it was well worth it!
It was fairly striking to notice the number of people, poor and handicapped both, that were begging near the areas where the buses parked and along the streets leading to and from the Yuan Garden. In addition, there were many street vendors hawking postcards and counterfeit watches. In spite of warnings, several students purchased counterfeit iPods for about $40 each. Two of the students who fell for the counterfeits were lucky enough to get their money back when they challenged the vendors in regards to the authenticity of the product.
After touring the gardens, we spent about 45 minutes shopping at many of the side street markets. This was one of my favorite parts of China. The streets leading back to the gardens were a labyrinth of unique and colorful shops selling everything from musical instruments to specialty fans and chopsticks.A popular scam throughout the gardens is to engage tourists in conversation by asking where they are from and then to convince the tourists that the vendors are a part of a University Art class who is staging a showing class. They will then escort the tourists to the back room of a nearby calligraphy shop and try to sell tourists pieces of massed produced art.
One of my purchases at the gardens was a Mah-Jong set for my wife that was antiqued in order to look authentic.
We then traveled by bus to a location about 5-10 minutes away for a pleasant lunch at a restaurant on the river bank of the river which separates the new section (Pu Dong) and old section of Shanghai. This was this the first time we were exposed to the Chinese tradition of a bowl of noodle soup that is traditionally served as a birthday entree. The individual celebrating a birthday is to reach into the bowl with their chopsticks and grab a noodle. The length of the noodle is said to predict the length of life of the individual, for instance, a long noodle predicts a long life.
Following lunch we traveled through a tunnel beneath the river to cross over to PuDong (new Shanghai) where the Oriental Art Center Performance Hall is located. The Art Center is an impressive piece of architecture that looks like four or five glass bowls in a grouping, but when viewed from above take on the outline of a glass butterfly. This was the facility where we were to rehearse and perform!
Upon arriving at the Art Center, we were informed of some rather unpleasant news. Three of the choirs that were participating in the festival would not be allowed to perform their repertoire as individual choirs as it had not been approved far enough in advance by the Chinese authorities. Fortunately, we had supplied the company with a list of repertoire far enough in advance that our music had been approved.According to our guide and the festival organizer, the crack-down took place as a result of a Bjork concert earlier in the month where she included a song and a participatory chant about freeing Tibet. This was complicated by a March 14th Tibetan protest in China that resulted in several protesters being shot.
As a result of the Bjork concert, our concert had nearly been cancelled, but the negotiated settlement was to use only music that had been approved by the authorities prior to the Bjork concert. Apparently three of the choirs that were part of our festival had not met that deadline.
We rehearsed our festival music throughout the afternoon and then had a box dinner at the performance location before the performance. One of our students, Danielle Driskill, was selected to perform the soprano solo in the Moses Hogan "Elijah Rock" and another of our students, Richelle Goree was selected to sing in a small feature ensemble.
The concert was presented for a sold-out audience of over 1800 people. It was attended primarily by party officials, members of the Musician's Association and businessman. The concert was presented in two parts: the first half was individual choirs and the second half was the massed festival chorus.
The concert opened with Counsel Rock, Pennsylvania's 130-voice choir. They were a very good choir and clearly came from a community with lots of resources. They had a large staff traveling with them as well as many parents. Their opening piece was a piece dedicated to the event that they had commissioned for the tour. They were followed by the choir from Springboro, OH, who became traveling companions for us throughout the event as we were both fairly small ensembles. Then the Winton Woods HS choir concluded the first half of the concert.
As we prepared to go onto stage, it was clear that the students were very tired. They were noticeably lacking in the positive energy they normally bring to performance opportunities. I was honestly a bit taken-aback as this was the pinnacle moment of our efforts of the last year and our trip half-way around the world. Frankly, many were a bit overwhelmed by the time adjustment and all of the new adjustments as well as the full day of touring and rehearsal. As always, we shared a moment of silence before we went onstage to find our place of inner-strength. My silent request was answered eloquently.
The WWHS choir sang two songs. The first was "Prayer of the Children" and was written for the children of Bosnia. With the help of the Chinese teacher from our school district, we had translated the phrase, "Can you hear the prayer of the children?" into Mandarin for this occasion. In spite of the fact that the kids were bone-tired, they sang so beautifully that there was a audible gasp from a party member seated directly behind me at their final cut-off and the audience was afraid to break the moment of fragile silence with applause. We also sang the song "Homeland" by Z. Randall Stroope, which I had suggested to the students would take on a new meaning each time we performed it during the trip.
Many of the members of other festival choirs were in tears at the end of our performance because they were so touched by the message of the music and the performance of the pieces. The other choir members and their directors were very generous in the positive things they shared with our kids and it meant the world as our kids had emotionally dragged themselves across those "last ten yards" and our kids and their families had sacrificed so much to make this trip happen.
Upon our arrival back at the hotel, we had to turn our attention to packing to make the trip to Beijing, the next chapter in our amazing journey.
That night we also received welcome news that Congressman Chabot's office had been helping our family that was denied entrance to China due to lost passports to acquire new passports on a one day turn-around. This was remarkable as it had taken us quite a while to get passports for everyone. We also received word that the State Department had been engaged in the process, thanks to Congressman Chabot's office and was trying to help arrange for a re-issued Chinese Visa so that we could all be reunited in Beijing.
It was the end of a "fairy tale" day!
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