Martial artists add spring to Winter Games ceremony

After more than four months of training for about seven hours a day, with thick calluses forming on their hands, 393 martial arts students staged a visual feast of blooming flowers and waves of green grass, signaling the start of spring, at the National Stadium to kick off the opening ceremony of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics on Friday.

The program, titled Li Chun－the beginning of spring, the first of the 24 Chinese solar terms－was performed by students from two martial arts schools in Shandong province. Aged from 14 to 18, they wielded 9.5-meter-long flexible poles that emitted multiple colors.

"This kind of matrix performance used to be presented with banners and flags, but this time we used a new material whose flexibility and intensity can present an effect of rising and falling, such as wind blowing grass low and dandelions whirling in the wind," said Gao Zhiyi, a director of the program, who is deputy head of the music school at Shandong Normal University.

It was not easy to present the matrix with long, flexible poles, Gao said.

"It's like using pens to portray the effects made by brushes," he said. "The program, lasting around three minutes, had 200,800 moves."

The students needed to memorize complex movements for the routine, and their movements were individually choreographed, said Zang Hua, deputy principal of the Zhonghua Martial Arts School in Laizhou, Yantai, Shandong.

"The biggest challenge was to control the poles, which weigh 5 kilograms each," he said.

For the first two months of training, the students used hard sticks to practice.

"When they started to use flexible poles for the first time on Dec 15, they were all shocked by the longer, lighter and softer props, which have different strength points and angles than the sticks," Zang said.

To prevent the poles from breaking, the students spent long hours of practice by the seaside in Yantai, where they learned to overcome wind and improve stability.

"Another difficulty is to turn the switch that controls the color change on and off," said Yang Shengjie, director of the martial arts office at Yuncheng Songjiang Martial Arts School in Heze.

The students needed to switch manually from the green color of grass to the white color of dandelions in a coordinated fashion, Yang said.

Sun Xingzhe, a 17-year-old Zhonghua Martial Arts School student, said, "Although I didn't make it home to stay with my family for Spring Festival because of the rehearsals, I feel honored to have attended the Beijing Olympic Games."