Levin Ballroom, overflowing with students was teeming with excitement and laughter for the "Brandeis 2012 Greater Chinese Mid-Autumn Gala" Saturday, Sept. 30th. The gala lasted four hours and featured 17 performances, each with distinct personalities. The acts ranged from solo vocal to Tai Chi to hip-hop dance. The performances combined traditional and modern aspects of Chinese culture and the snacks were in keeping with the theme. There were traditional moon cakes (soft, very sweet Chinese pastries filled with cooked egg yokes), as well as more modern snacks such as Doritos and York Peppermint Patties on every table for viewers to enjoy.

The event opened with an upbeat student rock band, fronted by Yiping Tang '15 with Shuping Zhang '15 on vocals, Mishi Shi '15 on drums, Yizhou Shen '15 on guitar and Xiaoyu Yang '15 on electric piano. The performance got the crowd moving in their seats and excited for more. In a particularly sweet performance near the beginning of the show, entitled "My Song, My Heart." Chengyu Li MA'13 and Ran Gao MA '14 sang a ballad while walking towards each other, from opposite ends of the ballroom. They then met in the middle of the ballroom in a dramatic, romantic moment. The melodramatic tone of the performance caused the crowd to wave their arms over their heads in time with the song. After the performance, students shouted the Chinese equivalent of "encore." However, to the crowd's disappointment, the couple yielded the stage to the next act.  

One of the more traditional performances was a Chinese crosstalk, performed completely in Mandarin. A crosstalk, Xiangsheng in Mandarin, is a satirical oral performance, which is used to make fun of people, often political figures. Two students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Zijiao Zhao and Binghong Han, who were dressed in traditional Chinese robes, performed a long dialogue in Mandarin about a bored Ph.D. student who experiences time travel due to various injuries. From a non-mandarin speaker's perspective, the crosstalk was obviously incomprehensible and thus made the fairly long performance rather boring. It also seemed like the Mandarin speakers weren't completely enthralled either. There was a copious amount of background noise as the audience chatted amongst themselves. Wenxi Zhao '16 explained to me that since the crosstalk is such a traditional comedy act, the Mandarin speakers had heard the same kinds of crosstalk humor many times. Because of this, the audience was not very amused.

A group jazz dance was very popular and excited the crowd. First, female dancers performed Ellie Golding's "Starry Eyed" and were then joined by male dancers when they came out to the song "Boys" by Britney Spears. Wenxi was one of the female dancers in this dance and commented on the recruitment of the male dancers. "We tried very hard to get boys into this dance because Chinese boys are shy, much more shy than girls. It's different from the United States' culture," she said. Wenxi also talked about her experience putting on a show after so few rehearsals, saying "we practiced three or four times, each time for two hours," but she said, "in the end we had a great time. I don't know how the audience reacted but at least we had a good time." On a personal level, Wenxi described what she learned: "no matter what kind of girl you are, when you are on the stage you must maintain your confidence. We had to do the right movements, but also make them sexy."

 Toward the end of the gala, seven students, Linli Xu MA '14, Hao Zhang MA '13, Changyue Hong, Wentao Zhu MA '13, Xiaoyun Hu, Jingyu Xu MA '14, and Lixuan Zheng MA '13 put on a Chinese dramatic comedy; "Ms. Bai at Brandeis", performed completely in Mandarin. In the skit, an engaged couple added to the humor by cross-dressing. The man wore a bridal dress complete with a veil and heavy makeup, while the woman wore skinny jeans and a masculine top.

According to Wenxi, cross-dressing is a large part of Chinese humor. By the Mandarin speakers, at least, the performance was very well received and the crowd cheered and laughed along with the cast. For the non-Mandarin speakers, however, it was not as entertaining. At the beginning of each act, an announcer gave a one or two line summary in English, but the summary was not very helpful especially since it was very hard to hear.

The event culminated in a lively rendition of PSY's "Gangnam Style" complete with singing and its infamous "horse-riding" dance. A bountiful Chinese feast followed the performances. The food was very popular, and the line extended across the whole ballroom. Nearly breaking the paper plates, students loaded up on the innumerable dishes. The gala was a joyous celebration of fall and taught the whole Brandeis community about the annual event in a very fun way. As Wenxi told me, it is traditional in Chinese culture to do a gala as a celebration, in this case, a celebration of autumn. There will be another gala at Brandeis in the springtime.