Dou Dou Huang Soars up the Beijing 2008 Banner

I happened to be in China exactly one year before the Olympics and the entire country is in an excited maelstrom over the upcoming Olympics in Beijing.

I also was very lucky to meet and talk to Dou Dou Huang ( www.butterflylovers.fi/ENG/doudou.html ) who is a world renowned dancer and one of China's shining stars. He was part of a dance troupe that was doing some choreography and preparing for a big ceremony tonight that will take place at the Oriental Pearl tower in Shanghai.

I was taking a lot of shots of the performance, moving around from spot to spot. The big finale of the performance is when Dou Dou Huang breaks out of the other dancers, grabs ahold of a cable hanging from high above, and does this death-defying jump about 20 feet into the air, riding up the Beijing 2008 banner in a Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon move.

Dou Dou and his wife dolly were very nice and spoke perfect English. He told me that he was just in New York where he was in charge of choreography at the Met. I told him that was no big deal because I did the same thing 10 times last week. His wife was really cool too. Her name was Dolly. She gave me "their" card and it said "Dolly and Dou Dou" with their email address.

Since he was such a great performer, I tried to impress him by singing a song that I learned about China on one of my favorite shows, When the Whistle Blows. I had the chocolate cake and everything.

You can see below if you zoom in that his silhouette is the exact same shape as the Beijing 2008 logo. I don't know if he held his body like that on purpose or if I caught it just right... but amazing nonetheless!