Sometimes I look for behind the scenes or video clips from the Chinese dramas I’ve been watching and that leads me down a rabbit hole of video recommendations. That’s how I first came across this cool dance that is inspired by traditional Chinese dance elements. It was fascinating to watch for so many reasons:

• great choreography matching the music
• amazing gracefulness combined with powerful moves from these guys
• incredible wrist and fan work
• beautiful costumes
• omg the facial expressions of Bai Xiao Bai 白小白 on the left!

At first I took it as a wonderful piece of entertainment and moved on. Days later, I was looking some other things when I came across more of the work from Bai Xiao Bai and his TranScend studio. [Side note: I was trying to find a website for them but came across this fascinating breakdown of their branding/logo instead!]

That’s when I started to realize the first video wasn’t just two random dudes who did a cool thing, but that Bai Xiao Bai is a choreographer and dancer who is quite prolific! From then on, I started to watch of a ton of his productions, which then led me to a bunch of covers that other groups have done of his pieces. These two are probably the most popular:

Here’s one of my favorite compilations of the 燕无歇 dance challenge:

And this is probably one of the more high-profile performances of 芒种, by an actress so seems to pretty popular in China. I love that she actually plays the guzheng/zither part of the song in this performance.

And finally, I wanted to end by highlighting a really cute one that Bai Xiao Bai did with this kid. It’s playful and fun! I hope you like him and TranScend as much as I do and I hope you enjoyed watching all these videos that I absolutely adore.

Update: omg I just saw this remix! Love it. Had to add it in.