SHANGHAI - The Shanghai Expo is about inviting the world to China to communicate and share, the opening ceremony's artistic director, Ignatius Jones, believes.
"Being able to host an expo means Shanghai has a certain level of infrastructure. And hosting the expo is a symbol of being a global city. But the expo is about more than just showcasing. It is a chance to invite the world to China for communicating and sharing," said Jones, sporting a pink t-shirt.
Jones directed the fireworks show at the expo's opening ceremony on April 30.
"It should be obviously Chinese but also international," he said.
Jones's team started studying Chinese culture before it bid for the project. "It should be China's show, not our show," he said.
Jones said his team did much research on Chinese culture, expos, on modern China and Western conceptions of China. Then they worked very closely with their client to decide the messages they wanted to convey.
China wanted to deliver three messages, Jones explained.
"First, they wanted to invite the world to China. Second, it was to be a cooperative event, something done together. And the final message was that they wanted to celebrate in a way that was quite obviously Chinese but at an international standard."
The show started with a quotation from Confucius: "When friends come from far away, what a great joy."
Then it canvassed expo history, starting with the one in 1851. In many ways, the show presented the Shanghai Expo in terms of previous expos, contextualizing it in reference to the world's other great expo cities.
"That's a small example of how we brought the outside world and combined it with something very Chinese," Jones said.
Jones said his international team, which included four Chinese companies and one Australian-Italian company, helped him to develop a special ending for the show.
Jones has been influenced by the way different countries appreciate fireworks. For instance, the Italians always finish very loud, while the Chinese tend to finish big but beautiful and the Spanish are colorful.
"We tried to integrate them together in new way."
"So it turned out to be a foot in the Chinese camp, a foot in Italy with something Australian as well."
Jones believes the major difference between the Shanghai Expo fireworks show and the Beijing Olympic was that the expo fireworks were on a 3.5-kilometer-long section of the Huangpu River.
"In terms of geography, it was quite different. The scale of what we could do was much greater," he said.
During the last three seconds of the show, 3,080 shots of fireworks were shot -- the largest firing at a single time.
"It was one of those amazing moments. Anyone who saw it said, 'Oh my God,' that was just...that was just...mind blowing."
Besides the traditional fireworks, the show also adopted high technology for a giant screen and for fireworks timing controls, he said.
"What we always tried to do was not let technology take over the show. It should serve the art," he grinned.
The technology was used to create shapes like the Chinese symbols for luck and prosperity: fish, bat, crab, lotus flower and jasmine.
"China is a unique country and a continuous civilization for more than 5,000 years, both physically and culturally. It is amazing," said the artist whose father's grandfather was a Chinese man from eastern China's Fujian Province.
Jones has had many introductions to Chinese culture as he was born in the Philippines and his aunt was a painter interested in Chinese traditional painting.
Jones himself started to learn Chinese painting when he was five and he can still remember how to paint bamboo.
"I knew Confucius before. Actually, there is another Confucius saying, different from the one we used in show: 'Many rivers going to the sea and the person with the big heart is the master.'"
Jones, previously a classical ballet dancer, journalist, editor, and hip-hop book writer, was the artistic director for the Sydney Olympic Games in 2000. Before that he worked in entertainment in Sydney.
"I did the biggest fireworks show here in Shanghai. I'm on top of myself."
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