Ouyang Hongfu

01 · Lineage & Regional School

He is the fourth-generation transmitter of the dragon dance of Jucun village in Zhixi. Within the regional tradition and school record of Dragon Dance in Jintan, Jiangsu: The Zhixi giant dragon takes Jucun Village of Zhixi Town, Jintan City, as its birthplace and core transmission area, and circulates among the townships at the junction of Jintan, Danyang and Liyang. Dragon dancing is generally organised jointly by the village clans and the villager groups; each household supplies both people and labour, rehearsals are held in the slack farming season, and the lanterns are sent out at New Year. Before the lanterns go out, incense is burned to offer sacrifice to the dragon in the ancestral hall or the local earth god temple and the dragon is invited out of the temple; after touring village by village for several days the lanterns are put away and the dragon is sent off. It is a landmark annual rite of village cooperation and clan identification in the locality. In Jucun the dragon-lantern association assigns the role of head household in rotation among the households and apportions the lamp oil and the cost of making the dragon, forming an endogenous organisational mechanism that does not rely on outside funding. The giant dragon is a form of dragon dancing transmitted around Jucun Village of Zhixi Town. It originated in Jucun, and because the dragon's body is especially long it is enormously large, hence the name "giant dragon". The giant dragon began in the Ming dynasty and has a history of more than six hundred years to the present.

02 · Mastery & Signature Works

Male, of Han ethnicity, born in November 1942 in Jintan County, Jiangsu Province. Born into a dragon-dancing family in Jucun village, Zhixi, Jintan, he has loved the dragon dance since childhood. Since dragon dancing was revived in Jucun in 1978 he has been a mainstay of the village dragon dance team. Under his influence more than three hundred villagers of Jucun, Zhixi, have taken part in dragon dance performances, making the village a veritable dragon-dancing village. Within the documented technical tradition of Dragon Dance in Jintan, Jiangsu: In its earliest form it was made of straw, about 15 to 30 metres in length, and was danced by seven or eight people or by close to twenty people. Over the following several centuries the making technique improved, and around the early years of the Republic it gradually began to be made of woven bamboo strips, with the frame sheathed in scale-patterned cloth skin and fitted with lanterns and the like. The body also grew steadily longer: each section of the giant dragon danced today measures 2 metres, the longest body has 100 sections, the whole length exceeds two hundred metres, and more than one hundred people are needed to perform it in coordination. The performance transitions of the giant dragon are ingenious, and the linkage and progression of its routines are extremely tight; there are dozens of traditional routines. Danced with life, danced in a circle, with truthful expression, many routines and fast speed, these are the principal artistic characteristics of the giant dragon. The sections of the Zhixi giant dragon are made into tubular frames of woven bamboo strips, sheathed outside in cloth skin painted with scales and threaded through the joints with cords, so that in performance the dragon has both an overall continuous course and a rising and falling motion section by section. The dancers take up the sections and hand them on in turn; when the formation turns, front and back answer each other and fast and slow balance one another, and only in this way can the form of the dragon remain complete and round even while it races along at high speed. Representative repertoire, works and technical entries recorded for the project include: "A two-hundred-metre dragon in one hundred sections": Once a straw dragon of fifteen to thirty metres, it was rebuilt in bamboo splints from the early Republic with scaled cloth skin and lights, now up to one hundred two-metre sections requiring over a hundred performers. "Five hallmarks of the great dragon": The principal artistic traits of the Zhixi great dragon, its transitions deft and its dozens of traditional routines tightly linked. "Raising, inviting and sending off the dragon": The fixed protocol around Jucun: incense and invocation before the lantern is raised, several days of village rounds, and a sending-off rite when it is put away.

03 · Transmission & Safeguarding Status

Representative bearer of Dragon Dance (Zhixi Giant Dragon), a fifth-batch national intangible cultural heritage project. He has led his team in performances at many historic occasions; on the eve of Hong Kong's return in 1997 the Jucun dragon dance took part in a dragon dance gathering in Tiananmen Square in Beijing and won a national silver award. It subsequently entered the National Dragon Dance Competition and received the China Folk Literature and Art Shanhua Award. From 2002 he has served as leader of the dragon dance team and has dedicated himself to training successors for the Jucun dragon dance.

04 · Associated Heritage Item Dossier

05 · Fellow National Bearers Lineage

National representative bearers recorded under the same item code, ordered from the first to the sixth batch. Batch order is not a teacher–student relationship.

06 · Archival Sources & Bibliography

1. Ouyang Hongfu · National Representative Bearer Archive