Rose Festival Performance – June 10, 2017
This was the seventh year we were performing in the Portland Rose Festival Grand Floral Parade. We are very honored to represent the Chinese Community to broaden public awareness and appreciations of traditional Chinese arts and culture with a potential audience of 500,000 along the Portland streets, and more on live TV.
We participated with another strong team of 36 dancers. This year’s team was directed by our Artistic Director, Ms. Zhang Li, with Ms. Julie Zhu and Ms. Xiaohong Lu serving as Performance Directors. Ms. Lisa Hu and Ms. Iris Zhao coordinated the logistics of getting the team ready for the performance.
Our dance is titled “Ladies in Rainy City”. This dance shows that on a rainy day, at a place in Southern China, the raindrops are rhythmically pitter-pattering on banana leaves, a group of ladies are holding umbrellas, walking lithely and gracefully, dancing lightly and ripplingly, playing happily and joyfully in the rain. Their shoes are beating briskly on the beats of the music, and the silky umbrellas are dancing and flying over their heads. It is such a graceful and lovely dance, perfectly suited for the rainy City of Portland.
Our performance team consisted of representatives from the Chinese Friendship Association of Portland’s Fitness Team, the Portland Chinese Dance Troupe, and members from the local Chinese Community. Our volunteer dancers have very strong interests to showcase Chinese arts and culture to the global community through participations in the Grand Floral Parade. Many are busy moms as well as professionals in arts, business, technology, accounting, legal, teaching, real estate, etc. Many are small business owners or work in Fortune 500 companies such as Intel, Nike, and area businesses, etc.
Celebration Dinner – Saturday, June 17, 2017, 6pm at Wong’s King Restaurant
The 2017 Celebration Dinner was very well attended and supported by our sponsors and community members. During the evening, we recognized our dinner sponsors for their support:
Gold Sponsor – IBM Corporation
Silver Sponsors – Suey Sing Association, Excelinet
Bronze Sponsors – Chinese Friendship Association of Portland
We very much enjoyed the special talk, “Chinese History in Portland and Oregon”, by Dr. Jackie Peterson-Loomis, Executive Director of the Portland Chinatown History and Museum Foundation. It was very informative and interesting presentation on past history of local Chinese immigrants and the current efforts to build the Portland Chinatown Museum, scheduled to open in 2018, to remember and honor our heritage.
This was our special event to thank our all-volunteer dancing team for their talents, time and commitment to bring another wonderful dance to the Grand Floral Parade. We were also grateful to our 2017 leadership team for their leadership and management:
Artistic Director – Zhang Li
Performance Directors – Xiaohong Lu and Julie Zhu
Operations Directors – Iris Zhao and Lisa Hu
Special recognition was given to Jennifer Li of the Portland Chinese Dance Troupe. The Northwest Chinese Alliance is very thankful to her partitions in all seven years of our Grand Floral Parade performances.
Thank you, everyone. We could not have done it without the community support.
