Energetic beat of creativity

In a classic cyberpunk metropolis, high rises stand in the background. In the front, young people are abandoning themselves to passionate dance in the streets. Their youthful power breaks through the limit of time and space, directly into the future.

A new season of Street Dance of China, a popular variety show, has injected a wave of vitality into the sweltering summer since it premiered on Aug 13. Streamed on the online platform Youku every Saturday, the show will run through October.

First produced and launched in 2018, Street Dance of China, a dance competition, has become one of the most popular variety shows not only in China but also in some Southeast Asian countries.

Since the third season in 2020, it has been broadcast with translated subtitles in more than 10 countries and regions online or on TV channels. Apart from Chinese, audiences can watch the latest show with subtitles in English, Thai, Indonesian, Vietnamese and Spanish on the international version of Youku's app and YouTube.

By Thursday, the first two episodes of the new season had been watched 6 million times on You-Tube. Subtitles in Russian, Portuguese, Persian, Korean, Turkish, Burmese and Italian will soon be released.

After themes like "battle for love "and "battle for peace" in the previous years, the fifth season will see street dancers from China and six other countries in Africa, Asia and Europe "battle for hope", including dancers Zhou Yuxiang from China, Kyoka from Japan and Jordan Likiyo from France.

In total, the new show has 20 foreign dancers－12 from Japan, Laos and other Asian countries, five from France, and one each from Zimbabwe, Belgium and the Netherlands. Having arrived in China in April, the foreign participants will stay for the show until October.

This year, to better inspire participants, the show has changed its rules. Over three months since August, dancers can compete in one round after another to finally form an international youth team.

Compared with the past years, the new season will present mainly contestants under 30 years old, with more than 90 percent born after 1995 and 50 percent after 2000.

Inspired by a line of a poem by Li Bai from the Tang Dynasty (618-907), "Keeping an ambition in mind, young people will have their time to shine", the director of the show Lu Wei says the production team wants the audience to see "young dancers carry forward the popular street dance culture in China".

"With vibrant young dancers, the core of the show is to cheer people up amid economic pressure, so that they can be optimistic about the future," Lu says.

One of special things about this season is the form that combines live and animated dance. Another is the design of the competition rules, which gives dancers more freedom to perform with imagination and express themselves, Lu says.

The young dancers are imaginative but lack enough experience in large-scale events, Lu says. After training for some time, they will receive assessments from master dancers of previous seasons on whether their works will meet audience expectation. Throughout the season, the camera will record their growth.

In the space of more than 10,000 square meters that the production team built, at different stages of the show, dancers will be able to play basketball, eat hotpot, make friends and get trained and assessed for the competition.

"We will see how young people make friends, and form teams and get them trained. ... This part of the show is new for this season," Lu says.

Unlike previous seasons, the new show will give the audience more opportunities to know about the dancers. For example, during auditions this time, rather than a single dancer's performance like before, contestants were required to form a three- to five-people team three days before, so audiences could see how they make friends.

"It's because unlike older dancers, these young people usually practice on their own and their biggest wish is to dance together with friends. Now young people rely more on social network to make friends. Many of them come to participate in our show, not for the championship but simply to bond with one another," Lu says.

As in the previous seasons, the audience will get to watch a variety of styles in street dance, such as popping, breaking, locking and freestyle. Compared with the past four years, the new season has more break dancers, who account for 26 percent of the participants, because break dancing has been included as a competition item in the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris.