Edited by| HUXINA

5-JAN.-2023

   In the previous essay, we mention types of Chinese dancing across history that created special and characteristic features and common traditions in the country...in this essay we are going to speak about the dancing kinds and sorts across china provinces...

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Dances of ethnic minorities in China

There are 56 ethnic groups in China, and each ethnic group has its own dance with ethnic characteristics, thus interpreting their local culture, lifestyle, and ethnic customs in the dance. In addition to daily life, every ethnic group like to express their inner feeling the most by dancing. Every festival comes, people will gather together to deduce the joy in everyone's heart in the form of dance. Therefore, dance can perfectly convey the inner emotions of every nation and people.

A few examples of their dances:

• Baishou Dance - a dance of the Tujia people
• Mongolian Bowl Dance (頂碗舞) - a dance where female dancers balance several bowls on their heads while dancing.
• Long Drum Dance (長鼓舞) - a dance of the Yao people which inspired the orchestral composition Dance of the Yao People.
• Sanam - a Uyghur dance.
• Lhamo - a Tibetan opera with dancing and singing

Ritual dance

Most early records of dances in China were ritual or ceremonial dances, and these dances formed the yayue which were considered to be of great importance in the court. These dances have largely disappeared from modern Han Chinese culture, although ritual dances are still found in some folk traditions and the cultures of ethnic minorities in China.

• Yi Dance (佾舞, literally "row dance") was originally a court dance but was adopted to form part of a Confucian ceremony. This ancient dance may be performed with rows of dancers holding pheasant feathers and red flutes in a square formation (Civil dance) or they may hold a shield and a battleaxe (Military Dance). The tradition of dancing and holding items such as feather plumes dated back to the Shang Dynasty. The most important ceremony is performed with 8 rows of 8 dancers (the Eight Yi Dance, 64 dancers in all). Originally dances were only performed in 6 rows of dancers (36 dancers in all) in Confucian temples as 8 rows were restricted to the Imperial court, but permission was later granted to perform the 8-row dance as well on the basis that he was given the title of a king by an emperor. A modernized version of such performances is presented for tourists at the Confucian temple in Qufu. This Confucian dance is also performed in Taiwan and Korea.
• Nuo Dances (儺舞) - a dance with masks that may be performed in Nuo opera or as rituals during festivals to drive away evil spirits.
• Cham dance - a Tibetan Buddhist dance

 

Dance in theatre

In the entertainment centers called wazi during the Song Dynasty, various theatrical forms flourished and Chinese opera began to take shape, and dance started to become merged into opera. Dances such as "Dance Judgement" (舞判, also called the Dance of Zhong Kui, 跳鐘馗) became opera pieces in the Ming Dynasty, and dances of the Song Dynasty such as Flapping the Flag (撲旗子). Other dances found in opera include the Sword Dance. Chinese opera became very popular by the Yuan Dynasty, and dances became absorbed into opera over the following centuries.

 

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More Articles; HISTORY AND TRADITION OF THE CHINESE DANCING

 

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Exercise dance

 

According to Lüshi Chunqiu, during the time of Emperor Yao, a dance was created as an exercise for the people to keep healthy after a prolonged spell of wet weather. Traditionally some Chinese dances may also have a connection with the martial arts that were used to train fighting skills as well as for fitness, and some martial art exercises such as Tai chi or Qigong are similar to a choreographed dance. In modern China, it is common to find people using dance as a form of exercise in parks.

 

Square dancing (China)

 

In the People's Republic of China, square dancing or plaza dancing (simplified Chinese: 广场舞; traditional Chinese: 廣場舞; pinyin: guǎngchǎng wǔ; lit. 'public square dance'), is an exercise routine performed to music in squares, plazas or parks of the nation's cities. It is popular with middle-aged and retired women who have been referred to as "dancing grannies" in the English-language media. Due to its low cost and ease of participation, it has been estimated to have over 100 million practitioners, according to CCTV, the country's official television network.

The practice has roots in both ancient and modern Chinese history. Dancing for exercise has been recorded as developed millennia ago in Emperor Yao's China, and during the Song Dynasty, the public spaces of cities were noted for their use in performance. Most of the women who square dance came of age during the Cultural Revolution, when folk dances such as yangge were widely performed, often as propaganda. Some have confirmed that this nostalgia is one of their reasons for taking part, although the benefits of exercise and socialization opportunities also play a role.

Square dancers dance to a variety of music, mostly Chinese popular songs, both contemporary and historic. The hobby began in the mid-1990s, as middle-aged women who had been forced into retirement began doing it to keep themselves occupied. Its popularity notwithstanding, square dancing has been the subject of considerable controversy in 2010s China due to complaints of noise pollution in the evening or morning hours. Dancers in China's increasingly populous cities congregate in public areas because there are few dedicated facilities where they could go. Residents of nearby apartment complexes who have been disturbed by the high volume of multiple dance groups' musical accompaniment, especially late in the evening and early in the morning when they are trying to sleep, have sometimes reacted violently.

In 2015 the Chinese government reacted to these complaints and incidents by prescribing a set of standardized routines for all dancers to follow, claiming they would be culturally unifying and healthier. The move was met with widespread criticism. Some Chinese complained that it did nothing to address the noise issues; others said the dancers should be free to choose their own routines. The real problem, yet others said, was not only the lack of better places for dancing but the lack of other social opportunities for women. The government soon clarified that the routines it created and promoted were only meant to be healthy alternatives to existing ones and were not required.

 

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^{More Articles; HISTORY AND TRADITION OF THE CHINESE DANCING}

 

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Dance as a form of exercise has a long history in China. The Lüshi Chunqiu, an encyclopedia compiled in the third century B.C.E., during the Spring and Autumn period, describes how, two millennia earlier in the time of Emperor Yao, people began to dance slowly in order to reinvigorate their muscles after lengthy rains had kept them indoors, sometimes leading to joint diseases. Eventually, they began dressing up in costumes and using props. "As time passed, they discovered that some activities could promote appetite, strengthen muscles and bones, and get rid of fatigue," writes one historian of Chinese traditional medicine. "Over a longer period of time, these activities became arranged in rhythms and movements which were harmonious and graceful—now they had dancing." While these may have eventually evolved into modern breathing exercises, other commentators suggest a public aspect to such dancing analogous to modern square dancing may have been refined in later eras, such as the religious dances of the Warring States period that preceded the rise of Imperial China. A writer in Youth Times sees it as similar to public dancing in the Song Dynasty of the late first millennium C.E.

 

 

The origins of modern square dancing have been traced to the Cultural Revolution that swept China during the 1960s and early '70s, in the broader context of the country's urbanization. In 1949, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) won the Chinese Civil War and established the People's Republic of China. A decade later, CCP chairman Mao Zedong began the Great Leap Forward economic development initiative to accelerate the industrialization of the Chinese economy. At the time most Chinese still lived in rural areas, as they had for centuries. Some had already moved to cities to take industrial jobs, but to better realize the aspirations of the Great Leap Forward, many of them moved or were forcibly relocated.

In cities during the Great Leap, there was an emphasis on the collective use of public space even for activities that had usually taken place in the home. For example, entire neighborhoods were required to eat their dinner in public dining halls. Ultimately, the Great Leap Forward proved disastrous, failing to industrialize effectively and causing famine due to labor shortages on farms. In 1962, the government began allowing people to move back to farms.

Soon afterward, the Cultural Revolution began. Organized youth styling themselves the Red Guards revolted against both Chinese traditions and official Chinese communism, preferring the purity of Maoism. Since urban intellectuals' thought was believed to have been tainted by awareness or memory of capitalism, many were sent to rural areas to live, work, and be properly re-educated through a review of Mao's writings. This too caused great hardship and economic disruption.

 

In the rural areas they were relocated to, the urbanites first encountered the yangge folk dance, very popular in rural areas, particularly in northern China. Originally performed to mark important agricultural occasions, yangge had been adopted by the CCP for its own uses as a propaganda tool. Performances often helped relieve tensions between the party and the peasantry during times when food was scarce, although, during the more repressive period of the Cultural Revolution, yangge was itself banned along with many other traditional forms of expression.

The Cultural Revolution ended with Mao's death in 1976. Following the arrest and trial of the Gang of Four, including Mao's widow for perpetrating it, Deng Xiaoping took over as CCP chairman and instituted a program of economic reform that continues as "socialism with Chinese characteristics". The pace of urbanization picked up again afterward. As younger Chinese moved from farms to cities, found jobs, and started families, their parents often moved in with them to better supervise their grandchildren.

 

 

Foreign dance trends, such as ballroom, which had been suppressed during the Cultural Revolution, returned. Women who had experienced the brunt of the Cultural Revolution and its dislocations in their teens and young adulthood, including the exposure to and participation in yangge performances, began to reach mandatory retirement age in the mid-1990s or were laid off from state-run enterprises following privatization. Some also began experiencing marital stress as husbands began having extramarital affairs with younger women, left home for long periods of time to work elsewhere, or both. They returned to dance as a way to stay fit, relieve boredom, and socialize.

Some dancers themselves make this historical connection. "When I do the dances, it reminds me of my younger years when I was doing similar dances during the Cultural Revolution," a retired driver in her mid-60s told the Los Angeles Times in 2014. "I feel the same kind of spirit and emotions." Another woman, whose troupe used the "red songs" written during that era, was more political. "They can always remind us what the Chinese leaders did for us to have a good life today and how they fought hard for the ordinary people in China.

The cities they were living in, however, lacked sufficient space for such activities. Chinese urban planners had prioritized commerce and industry, often demolishing older neighborhoods with small houses and replacing them with large high-rise apartment complexes, increasing population density. Streets were widened to accommodate automobile traffic, driving many activities that had once taken place there elsewhere. Although there were parks, there were severe shortages of urban open space, especially in rapidly growing cities. The small city of Xuanhua northwest of Beijing had, as of 2013, a mere 1.2 square meters (13 sq ft) of open space per resident, far below the 9-square-meter (97 sq ft) suggested by the World Health Organization, as compared with 11.2 square meters (121 sq ft) per resident in Beijing and 20 square meters (220 sq ft) in New York or 90 square meters (970 sq ft) in Warsaw.

At first, they joined older Chinese in practicing taiji, the slow martial arts school known in the West as tai chi, and the newer practices of Falun Gong.Tai chi's philosophy strongly encourages its practice in parks, closer to nature, and space there was scarce. Falun Gong was outlawed by the government in 1999, eliminating that option for exercise. So, the women, referred to as dàmās (simplified Chinese: 大妈; traditional Chinese: 大媽; lit. 'great mothers'), often rendered in the English press as "grannies", began finding their own spaces to dance in the way they had in their youth.

The Damas ranks continued to grow along with China's cities. By 2008 half of the country's population was living in an urban environment. That year they received unintentional official encouragement when the government promoted fitness all over the country in anticipation of that year's Olympics in Beijing.