Fireworks during the rehearsal of the opening ceremony Photo: VCG

As the dress rehearsal for the opening ceremony of the Beijing 2022  Olympic Winter Games was held at the National Stadium in China's capital city on Saturday night, a mass group of guangchang wu(plaze dancing) dancers lit up the atmosphere with their performance. 

Guangchang wu, often translated into the square dancing or plaza dancing, is a massexercise routine set to music and is a much-loved pastime of many elderly Chinese who are looking to stay in shape in their golden years. 

The opening ceremony will be held on February 4. Before its performance section, there will be a 30-minute pre-show, during which plaza dancing will be put on display, the Xinhua News Agency has reported. In the rehearsal on Saturday, performers aged from 5 to over 70 years old showed their plaza dancing skills to express Chinese people's longing for the Winter Olympics.

Instead of inviting stars or professionals to host the event, the opening ceremony will focus on ordinary Chinese people. 

"China is a country that is big on plaza dancing. You can see in any city that people will dance and sing when they are happy. So I think plaza dancing is very good," Zhang Yimou, general director of the gala, told media.

Zhang made it clear from the outset that he was not looking for professional actors, but instead planned to find ordinary people from all over the country.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the performers for the show mainly come from Beijing and North China's Hebei Province.

"The opening ceremony is on the fourth day of the Chinese New Year. I also hope that these ordinary people can show to the world the atmosphere of our Lunar New Year," Zhang told Xinhua.

They have been preparing for the show for around two and a half years, Zhang said, noting that various rehearsals are running for nearly 24 hours each day.

The opening ceremony will be held at the National Stadium and will make use of high technology. Zhang noted as an example that performers will be able to interact with a ground screen that captures their movements in real time.

"We talked about using this technology for the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, but couldn't achieve it at that time. Now, however, we can do it," Zhang added.

In contrast to the four-hour-long ceremony and 15,000 performers used in the 2008 ceremony, the opening ceremony for the 2022 Games will rely on high technology instead of using the previous "huge-crowd" strategy and will only last less than 100 minutes and feature about 3,000 actors, according to Zhang.