Скачать или смотреть Beginning of Spring

February 4th, the opening ceremony of the Beijing Winter Olympics, is also the “立春”(lìchūn, lit. “the beginning of spring”) in Chinese traditional solar terms, which is generally regarded as the “beginning of spring”. The ceremony began with a 24-second countdown, which represented the 24th Winter Olympics as well as the 24 solar terms in the Chinese calendar. After the countdown, 393 dancers carried tall and flexible glowing green stalks, echoing the images of spring on the ground screen: flowers, windmills, swallows, moons, wickers and butterflies. It was green at first, representing “spring returns to the earth, all things wake up”, and gradually the dancers in the center of the venue waved their long stalks to form a white dandelion. Little girls on the ground screen blew dandelions, and the white seeds floated up the long vertical screen into the sky, following Cai Guoqiang’s(蔡国强) white fireworks, as if countless dandelion seeds blooming over the Bird’s Nest，displaying the words “立春” and “SPRING” to celebrate the start of spring.