TranScend dancing (my new obsession)

laelene Post in general blog，

21 May 2021

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:

I loooooove the move at 0:39. There’s something so fun and graceful about it.

There are a TON of videos out there with people doing this dance as part of some Douyin (aka Chinese TikTok) dance challenge.

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.