Standing with her legs stretched out, Mrs. Hu flexes her torso until her fingers touch the toes of her slippers.
Then, on the floor, he does a perfect
split
almost effortlessly, managing to stretch his legs in the opposite direction to create a 180-degree angle.
The
woman is 63 years old
, but she still retains some of the flexibility she gained after two decades competing in artistic gymnastics.
It is a closed night in Beijing and the temperatures have dropped to 3 degrees.
Despite the cold, Ms. Hu, who was also a gym teacher for five years at a high-performance academy in New York, does her stretches dressed in a thin long-sleeved blouse and black leggings.
It is their warm-up before starting the dance on a small esplanade at the exit of a block of flats in Dongzhimen, within the second ring of the capital of China.
There are
19 women
and three men, the vast majority already retired, who start dancing, like every day of the week, at 8.30 pm, doing aerobic movements to the rhythm of Chinese folk music at full volume.
- Aren't
the neighbors
complaining
?
- (Mrs. Hu answers) Once a man came and
said that he was going to call the police because his son was studying
for an exam and with loud music he was not concentrating.
- Now a lot of news has come out about a fashionable device that is an inhibitor that turns off music from a distance.
Many people say on social media that they are using it to stop the dancing grandmothers from bothering.
- It's stupid.
We don't do anything wrong, we just dance
, we have a good time.
But if they don't let us dance, we'll have to invent another activity.
Groups of retirees dancing and doing gymnastics in the street are counes in Chiina.
Many neighbors complain about the noises caused by the loudspeakers with which they play music.
Any paved corner that is more than 20 square meters is worth the dancing grandmothers - nickname 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, parking lots and even on narrow sidewalks.
The ladies arrive, plant the loudspeaker with the music blasting, and begin to do their choreography.
The so-called square dance, which has its roots in the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, is one of the most popular pastimes for China's growing population of older people,
especially among retirees
, mostly women.
But trouble came years ago when neighbors began to complain about the noisy activity.
There have been famous episodes such as that of a Wuhan man who
threw feces from the window of his house at the ladies who were dancing in the street because they would not let him sleep
.
In the southern city of Guilin, a guy came out of his house with a BB gun and started shooting at the dancing women.
In Shijiazhuang City, neighbors began to spread stinky tofu, paint and motor oil while the ladies danced.
In China it is common to find retirees exercising outdoors.
Chinese authorities have spent years studying regulating the activity, including fines and penalties in a series of amendments to the law aimed at curbing noise pollution. Communities in some cities, such as
Shanghai
, have already installed a noise detection system that issues warnings when the music is too loud.
Since late September, to deal with grandmother's dances, a more technological solution has gone viral.
It all started with a video broadcast live by a man presenting what he called the "anti-square dance device."
From the window of his house, on the second floor of a block of flats, the man saw in front of a square full of dancing grandmothers.
She pulled out some kind of flashlight,
flipped a switch, and turned off the speaker the women were listening to
.
On Taobao, the electronic commerce platform of the Alibaba group, comparable to the Chinese version of eBay, you can find the device,
capable of deactivating a speaker 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 a smart chip to interfere with the 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.
Advertisement for the remote control in the shape of a flashlight that has become popular for sale to turn off the speakers of groups of retirees who dance and do gymnastics.
Vice News, in a recent report, interviewed a man identified as Han Lei, a resident of the central province of Henan, who confessed to wearing the device since March.
He said that one night he managed to
turn off the music of 36 groups of dancing grandmothers
.
"
I have successfully repelled most dance groups in my neighborhood
. Calling the police for the noise is useless. They only stop when they think their speakers are not working. And best of all, no one has ever been there. I realized that I was the one who was turning them off, "said Han, the owner of an electronics store where he included in the product catalog the device that turns off the speakers of the dancing grandmothers.
He assures that he has already sold more than 20,000 devices.
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