Chinese catch Riverdance fever

With sequins and thundering steps, the flashy Irish sensation Riverdance arrives in China this week for what organisers say will be the biggest foreign production to come to a land where Western entertainment used to be denounced as subversive.

That is not all: It will be held on a massive stage in the Great Hall of the People – Beijing’s hulking communist meeting building where Mao Zedong once presided.

The sold-out run, which coincides with a visit by President Mary McAleese, has been a unique experience for the show’s crew, dancers and musicians, said director John McColgan.

“This visit to China is the fulfilment of a dream,” McColgan said in the Chinese capital.

The performance shows how far China’s commercial market for foreign entertainment has come.

Though acts ranging from opera’s Three Tenors to quirky Icelandic pop singer Bjork have performed here, few have been major successes or made much money.

Riverdance seems to be bucking that trend. Two performances have been added due to demand and more than 50,000 tickets have been sold, promoters said.

“This is one of our best box office records ever,” said Zhang Yu, president of local promoter China Performing Art Agents, the commercial division of China’s Culture Ministry.

Riverdance opens today in Tiananmen Square’s Great Hall of the People, which is the seat of

China’s nominal legislature and the venue for major Communist Party meetings. It moves to Shanghai for five performances before moving on to Japan.

The show almost did not happen. Organisers delayed it indefinitely earlier this year due to the outbreak of SARS in China, which also caused the cancellation of the first-ever concert by the Rolling Stones.

Beijing will be the 206th city played by Riverdance in eight years of touring.

With two companies now touring, an estimated 12 million people have now seen the live performance – three times Ireland’s population. That’s not bad for a show that began as a six-minute interval act during the 1994 Eurovision Song Contest in Dublin.

“None of us would have imagined,” said long-time producer Moya Doherty, “that it would have become the global success that it now is.”