Senior male dancers bring fresh attitude to art and life

The passion of senior citizens for art and culture heated up in Minhang District's Hongqiao, in 1999, when Ni Xiaoyun, a retired female military art troupe member, moved to the town and became the dancing teacher at its community school.

"We had male shadow boxers on stage, but lacked male dancers then," Ni recalled. "Good male dancers were even more scarce."

The town held an annual seniors' gymnastics competition and grassroots talent show. When Ni recognized someone who might make a promising dancer, she would muster up her courage and boldly ask them to join.

Bian Zhengxian, 70, Sheng Yeli, 60, Chen Shenghong, 65, and Sheng Zhenxing, 67, were among the male dancers Ni recruited whose bright time in the limelight left a deep impression.

Bian was the first recruited. He was the cornerstone for the entire Hongqiao Dream Seniors Dancing Troupe and partly the reason the troupe was supported and funded till today.

"After China resumed its national college entrance exam in the late 1970s, I took and actually passed the exam, and received an admission letter from Shanghai Normal University for a dancing major," said Bian, a Minhang resident.

"I was the only bread-earner for the family then. Further, the future of a dancing major looked bleak at a time when the entire nation was aspiring toward scientific and technological advancement."

He therefore gave up his university opportunity.

Years later he chose Chinese as his major and, after graduation worked as a secretary at an industrial foundation, a foreign enterprise and a college pharmaceutical research center.

"But I didn't give up dancing," he said.

His favorite TV moments was any dancing by the Song and Dance Ensemble of the General Political Department of the PLA (Chinese People's Liberation Army) during holiday celebration galas.

His understanding of dance was more deeply enriched as time passed.

"Besides contemporary Chinese ballets, classic Western ballets have their repertoire, including 'Swan Lake' and 'Don Quixote,'" Bian said.

Bian first chose the road frequently taken but the road less taken was waiting for him after his retirement.

Dancing into age

"My old dancing friends resumed their hobby and they asked me out. Despite that I was my weightiest after 30 years of sitting in an office chair, I accepted their invitation in the end," he said.

The 13 gentlemen of Shanghai made up the first retired seniors male dance group in the city and called themselves laokele, or elderly Shanghai gentlemen who usually spend and savor their life with an attitude.

Bian met Ni during a citywide dance training course and joined the Hongqiao Dream Seniors Dancing Troupe as both a member and a coach.

They rehearsed a Mongolian "Gallop" dance and the performance of the six male dancers reaped vehement audience acclaim as well as media attention in 2017.

In 2019, "Still Dreaming at An Old Age," a group dance mixing male and female dancers, won an outstanding prize in the Shanghai grassroots art and culture horizon awards.

"Still Dreaming" is about someone in a nursing home awakened, calling up the rest of the senior residents to activate themselves, rather than waiting for death, Bian said.

"Certain body movements for young dancers are challenging for us, but we're good at performing our inner feelings. In 'Still Dreaming,' we were acting our future selves about 10 years later, with attachment and hope," he added.

The four Shanghai gentlemen – Bian, Sheng Yeli, Sheng Zhenxing and Chen – became more widely known after a recent dance postures challenge, launched by the post-80s generation photographer Shi Yingxi.

They were required to complete 10 dance postures within 10 minutes, this time along the downtown Yuyuan Road.

In front of trendy stores, in old alleys and yards, inside lane houses with traces of time, they wore T-shirts, beachwear, leisure suits, newsboy caps, fedoras and canes, and posed in different gestures.

The photographer was reassured: the four laokele, though gentle and polite in their daily life, sparked up immediately once on stage or in front of a camera.

The dance postures challenge proved a success for the men.

"Ten minutes ran quickly and the four of us had to act synchronously," said Sheng Zhenxing. "And luckily we had honed our team coordination during multiple dance rehearsals."

Years of performing, training and life experience paved the way for their spontaneous facial expressions and body postures.

"In one of the gestures, we leaped," said Sheng Yeli. "That was when we passed a little villa, the old residence of Qian Xuesen (1911-2009). Qian was the father of China's missiles. So we leaped to symbolize a rocket taking off."

Sheng said, "We are handsome, healthy and positive. We want to shake off the stereotypical image of a senile aged people."

The senior dancers also contribute to the rise of artistic awareness of seniors in Hongqiao.

"They set a model for the rest of the senior members," Ni praised. "The seniors in Hongqiao have come to appreciate beauty more through dance practice. They started to wear more beautiful clothes and minded the volume of their speaking."

The four gentlemen dancers influence people with their mild style of conversation and wise opinions gleaned from their rich lives.

"My interest in music and performing art budded at a young age," said Sheng. "We didn't even have a TV then. I nourished myself through a little radio from music programs it broadcast."

In 2020, he moved to Shanghai from neighboring Anhui Province to live with his child and kept on dancing. Dancing connected him with other people and offered him a sense of belonging to the city.

"I was an introverted person and liked instruments from a young age," Chen said. "After retirement, the community invited me to some performances and dance courses. I am grateful for them and my teachers. It was as if I gained a second youth."

Sheng Zhenxing used to be a military art troupe member. Later he was transferred to civilian work and stopped dancing. One day after retirement, he saw people performing Latin dance in the park and felt attracted. "I dance but I don't compare myself to the younger generation. I dance to show off the charm of my age," he said.

Talking about his understanding of a Shanghai laokele, Bian said it is "a male who sticks to dream and promise, and pursues self-respect and dignity within his limited materialistic condition."