Homies, a Chinese street dance team, secured third place at the VIBE Dance Competition on March 2 with their performance, "Sword and Qi in Sichuan," featuring Chinese culture such as face-changing and Tai Chi.

This marked the first time in the competition's 30-year history that a Chinese team won an award.

After their 4-minute-and-17-second performance concluded on a stage in Los Angeles, the United States, the dancers were given a full minute of applause and cheers.

"The audience cheered for over a minute after the performance. During rehearsal, the organizers told us we’d leave the stage after the final pose. They said the lights would go dark, the audience might give a brief cheer, and we’d leave the stage after the cheer. However, after we struck our ending pose, the audience's cheers simply never stopped, coming in wave after wave, until the stage manager turned the lights back on," said Fang Zhenghua, the piece's director.

The opening 40 seconds of the "Sword and Qi in Sichuan," featuring fluent street dance infused with eight rapid face changes and Chinese martial arts, elicited continuous cheers from the audience.

Fang said the concept of incorporating Chinese elements into street dance has unexpectedly garnered significant attention for the entire team, ultimately leading them to stand out from the 27 participating teams at the stage of VIBE, a globally recognized competition within professional circles.

The Sichuan Opera face-changing has indeed captivated the foreign audience, but having 27 street dancers simultaneously perform face-changing on stage was no easy feat.

To achieve this cross-disciplinary breakthrough, Fang sought out local Sichuan professional face-changing actors to learn the art, and then integrated it into street dance. The entire team spent nearly a year gradually exploring and refining the performance.

Fang said each rehearsal felt like dancing on a knife's edge - one missed beat could collapse the entire performance.

"The difficulty of the dance, for example, was originally at 20 percent, but with the addition of face-changing, it increased to approximately 80 percent. Consequently, a performer’s slight misstep could potentially trigger another performer's face-changing mechanism too early, or even cause their own mechanism to suddenly break. We aim to avoid taking the stage with that kind of stress. The solution lies in extensive practice. For instance, each team member must successfully perform the routine ten consecutive times before being allowed to leave for the day. I maintain a strict approach to rehearsals, and on one occasion, I kept a member of our team until 07:00 to 08:00 in the morning," he said.

Following the competition, Homies quickly gained attention from U.S. media, expanding the influence of their work beyond the street dance community to a broader global audience.