Teen Dancer Turning in Circles for 4 Hours Steals the Show at the CCTV 2014 Lunar New Year Gala

The C-netizens have spoken and the most buzzed about performance during the entire 4 hour long CCTV Lunar New Year Gala is by a fifteen year old girl who said not a word. She beat out Lee Min Ho by a huge margin and this time I totally get why. This year’s Gala was directed by movie director Feng Xiaogang, clearly an effort by CCTV to bring some pizzazz and buzz to their increasingly staid and stolid festivities with year after year of manufactured cheer and cheese. The result is a mixed bag despite the ratings remaining high. The scene stealer of the night is a teenager with the nickname Xiao Cai Qi (小彩旗 which means Little Rainbow Flag), a performer who is the niece of a famous Chinese dancer. Her role during the Gala was to be “The Emissary of Time” – she stood off to the side of the main stage and from the moment the show began at 8 pm she started turning and stopped after midnight. When I say turning, she literally stood in place and spun in circles. She spun and spun for the entirety of the Gala program which lasted 4 hours, never stopping for a rest, break, water, anything. She was Director Feng’s “brilliant” idea to be a physical embodiment of time which stops for no one. Errrr, okay, I guess. Her turning was exquisite though because she literally did not wobble, shake or actually lose her center of spin for the entirety of the 4 hours. It looked like she was standing on a spinning stage rather than the stage being stationary and she was the one turning. Netizens are both appalled and fascinating with this girl who can turn for 4 hours, and one netizen calculated her turns to be one turn every 0.76 seconds times 4 hours which meant she spun 19,000 times during the course of the night. That is C.R.A.Z.Y. Folks are calling child cruelty on Director Feng who defended himself by saying turning in place was Xiao Cai Qi’s special talent, which is actually true. She does the same trick on a stage performance program that her dancer aunt choreographed, though her performances there is limited to a measly two hours of turning which is the duration of the show. Xiao Cai Qi has given her own interview after the Gala spinning which confirmed she loved her skill and treats turning like she’s meditating as well as a feat of endurance. She did admit loathing the training when she was a kid and being by forced her aunt to learn it and always crying and running away, but her aunt persisted and now she’s clearly rocketed to super stardom with what amounts a really odd and incredible parlor trick. Check it out for yourself below.

Xiao Cai Qi turning non-stop for 4 hours straight at the Gala: