Timesledge.com: Forest Hills Teen Dances in NYC Holiday Show

By Stephen Stirling

(Clearwisdom.net) Alina Wang is a relative newcomer to Queens, but her experience as a young globetrotter dovetails with the ethnic patchwork that makes up the borough.

Born in Peru to Chinese parents, the 16-year-old Wang moved to Forest Hills in 2004, but she has not had much time to dwell on it. Since then, she has traveled across the globe, performing traditional Chinese dance in 32 cities in 2007 alone.

Wang is a member of the Fei Tian Academy of the Arts in Cuddebackville, NY, a dancing school in Orange County that has allowed her to get in touch with her Chinese roots and fulfill her love of traveling and learning about other people's cultures while she expresses her own.

"There's such a vast number of groups, of cultures that are so different that we get to learn about when we dance. It's amazing," Wang said. "It's been such a wonderful experience to be able to bring out to all of these people around the world this kind of dancing, this kind of show."

Wang tours the world as a member of Fei Tian's "Holiday Wonders" and "Global Chinese New Year Spectacular" shows, which showcase traditional Chinese dances. Wang will be starring in "Holiday Wonders" from December 18-26 at the Beacon Theatre in Manhattan.

Fei Tan Academy of the Arts stresses traditional Chinese values, such as honesty, piety, and compassion in their course load. These are things Wang's mother, Mei Jiang, said are crucial to a child's development but lacking in most institutions.

"For my daughter to be in touch with such great Chinese traditional culture and traditional values, I feel like she's changed and become a better kid," Jiang said. "It's not just the changes I see in my own daughter, but also I see that because of her own experiences she can bring this out to the audience and have more kids and more people around the world benefit from it as well."

Wang said she has always had an interest in her cultural roots and that her parents instilled Chinese values in her from a young age.

"I owe a lot to my parents because they taught me to be the kind of person that I am," she said.

She said that being able to travel and experience other cultures, from Japan to China to France to Germany, has opened her eyes "to many wonders of the world." Wang said she believes knowing and understanding each other's cultures is necessary for society to move forward.

"I feel like, little by little, by placing each grain of sand and each piece of effort, in the end, if everybody had higher expectations of themselves, then society would become much better," she said.

For more information on the Holiday Wonders show visit http://www.HolidayWonders.net.

12/06/2007

http://www.timesledger.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=19090974&BRD=2676&PAG=461&dept_id=551069&rfi=6

 Yearly Archive   Printer Version