Standing, with the legs stretched, Mrs. Hu flexes the trunk to touch the tip of the sneakers with your fingers.
Afterwards, on the ground, she makes a perfect split almost effortlessly, managing it to stretch her legs in the opposite direction until you create an angle of 180 degrees.
The woman is 63 years old, but she still retains part of the flexibility she won after two decades competing in artistic gymnastics.
It makes a night closed in Beijing and temperatures have dropped to 3 degrees.
Despite the cold, Mrs. Hu, who was also a gymnastics professor for five years at a high performance academy in New York, makes her stretching from her dressed in a thin long-sleeved blouse and black meshes.
She is the warming of her before starting the dance on a small esplanade that is at the exit of a block of dongzhimen housing, within the second ring of the capital of China.
There are 19 women and three men, the vast majority already retired, those who begin to dance, as every day of the week, at 8:30 pm, making aerobic movements at the rate of Chinese folk music at full volume.
– Do not the neighbors complain?
– (Mesh Hu responds) once a man came and said he was going to call the police because his son was studying for an exam and with high music did not concentrate.
– Now many news have come out about a fashionable apparatus that is an inhibitor that turns off music from a distance.
Many people say in social networks that is using it so that the dancers dancers stop disturbing.
– It’s a stupidity.
We do not do anything wrong, we only dance, we had a good time.
But if they do not let us dance, we will have to invent another activity.
Any asphalted corner that has more than 20 square meters is worth the ballerinas grandmothers – effortlessly coined in the 90s – to have a good time doing some exercise with background music.
At dawn and at night they appear everywhere.
In parks, squares, parquisines and even narrow sidewalks.
The ladies arrive, they plant the speaker with music at full volume and put their choreographies.
The so-called Square Dancing, which has its roots in the cultural revolution of the 1960s, is one of the most popular pastimes for the growing population of China’s elderly people, especially the retirees, mostly women.
But years ago the problems came when the neighbors began to complain about the noisy activity.
There has been famous episodes like that of a man from Wuhan who threw from the window of his house, the ladies who were dancing on the street because they did not let him sleep.
In the southern city of Guilin, a guy left his house with a balligan pistol and began to shoot the women who danced.
In the city of Shijiazhuang, neighbors began to spread stinky tofu, painting and engine oil while dancing ladies.
Chinese authorities have been studying the activity for years, including fines and penalties in a series of amendments to legislation aimed at curbing acoustic contamination.
Communities of some cities, such as Shanghai, have already installed up to a noise detection system that issues warnings when the music is too high.
Since the end of September, to deal with the dances of the grandmothers, a more technological solution has become viral.
It all started by a video that transmitted live a man who presented what he called the “ARTEFACT Anti Square Dances”.
From the window of the house of it, on a second floor of a block of housing, the man saw opposite a square full of ballerinas grandmothers.
He took out a kind of flashlight, pressed a switch and turned off the speaker that women were listening.
In Taobao, the electronic commerce platform of the Alibaba Group, comparable to the Chinese version of EBAY, can be found by the device, capable of deactivating a loudspeaker remotely, for prices ranging from 12 euros to 40.
“It is an infrared decoder, which weighs 128 grams and has a built-in lithium battery. It has an intelligent chip to interfere with audio in speakers with remote control and Bluetooth at a distance of 50 to 80 meters,” explained one of the
Manufacturers to the Chinese newspaper The Paper.
Vice News, in a recent report, interviewed a man identified as Han Lei, a resident of the central province of Henan, who confessed to carry from March using the device.
He told that one night he managed to turn off the music of 36 groups of dancer grandmothers.
“I have successfully repelled the majority of my neighbor’s dance groups. Calling the police for noise is useless, they only stop when they think their speakers do not work. And the best thing is that nobody has ever been
He realized that it was the one who was turning off, “Han said, owner of an electronics store where he included the product catalog that turns off the ballerina grandmothers’ speakers.
He says he has already sold more than 20,000 devices.
