From 15 to 17 October, the Award Selection Performance of the 12th Chinese Dance Lotus Award for Chinese Classical Dance was held in the ancient city of Luoyang. “Fragrant Jasmine”, the dance work from the College of Dance of the Shanghai Theatre Academy (STA), stood out from 174 selected works after going through the first and second rounds of video assessment, and enter the finals together with other 16 works from across the country.
The Party and administrative leadership teams of the STA College of Dance attached great importance to the competition as always. The relevant teachersdevoted themselves to the intense modification and rehearsal process. The performers of the dancewere also full of enthusiasm, and actively cooperated with the director and rehearsal teachers to further polish and refine the dance, especially the performers of the Youth Dance Company who made themselves a good example and contributed greatly to the high-quality presentation of the dance.
On the evening of 15 October, the performance for the judges began, which was the most important performance of the competition. The excellent performance of the dancers of the STA College of Dance won the high recognition of the judges and the warm applause of the audience. On the evening of the 16th, the dances still did not slack off and prepared carefully for the perfect presentation of the second performance of the competition. Moreover, the live webcast set up by the organizing committee enabled this excellent dance and this excellent team to win the recognition and praise of over ten 10,000 audiences countrywide, and enabled the highlight moments of STA’s dance to spread around via the Internet.
In his speech at the National Forum on Literature and art, General Secretary Xi Jinping mentioned three criteria for excellent literary and artistic works: profound thought, exquisite art and excellent production. Since the project of "Fragrant Jasmine" was approved, these three criteria had been appliedin the efforts to constantly revise and polish the dance. What the director and dancers had shownwas the spiritof pursuing artistic excellence, and was the affectionate praise of today’s dance artists for the great motherland, great history and great journey when standing at the starting point of the new era.
