Zheng Jiuru

01 · Lineage & Regional School

At fourteen Zheng Jiuru followed his father Zheng Guangfa in learning the flower-drum lantern and played the female role of lanhua under the stage name Xiao Bai Xie (Little White Shoes). Within the regional tradition and school record of Huagudeng in Bengbu, Anhui: The performing styles of huagudeng today fall mainly into three schools: the Yingshang area, whose tempo is relatively slow, with tightly structured dance and an archaic, plain style; the Fengtai area, which emphasises the portrayal of character emotion with delicate and graceful movement; and the Huaiyuan area, with light, brisk and vigorous movement and an easy, dashing bearing. Historical records show that the huagudeng originated no later than the Song dynasty. After developing through the Yuan, Ming, Qing and Republican periods, by the 1930s and 1940s it had formed a distribution area centred on Bengbu, Huainan and Fuyang in Anhui, radiating across more than twenty counties and cities in the four provinces of Henan, Anhui, Shandong and Jiangsu along the middle reaches of the Huai River.

02 · Mastery & Signature Works

Male, Han ethnicity, born in 1920 in Huaiyuan, Anhui. He was a good singer and dancer, and was also skilled in flower-drum lantern gong-and-drum playing and in the back-stage short plays. He excelled at portraying rural girls of firm and proud character. His movements were expansive and free, quick and neat, and he won the affection of audiences with his varied fan flourishes and his many forms of the wind-swaying willow. The lantern songs he sang were rich in mode, with melodies that were sweet, lingering and warmly affecting, and his lyrics observed strict rhyme. In 1958 Zheng Jiuru joined the Huaiyuan County Cultural Troupe as a dance teacher, setting his characteristic movements into a lanhua dance as a teaching combination, which was afterwards widely adopted. Within the documented technical tradition of Huagudeng in Bengbu, Anhui: Representative repertoire, works and technical entries recorded for the project include: "The great flower field": The collective mood dance of huagudeng, performed by a handful to a dozen or more dancers who weave changing floor patterns — the counterpart of the small flower field. "Snatching the towel and snatching the bench": The two most representative small flower field pieces, danced by drum-rack and orchid as a pair or trio, depicting young men and women flirting and playing, with simple plots and character dancing. "Pan gu (the coiled drum)": A form combining dance, martial arts and acrobatic skill with sculptural posing, standing alongside the great and small flower fields in the dance's three divisions. "The after-scene playlets": Short song-and-dance playlets that, with dancing, singing and percussion, complete the four parts of a huagudeng performance, usually on comic everyday themes.

03 · Transmission & Safeguarding Status

National representative bearer of Flower Drum Lantern (Bengbu Flower Drum Lantern), a second-batch national intangible cultural heritage project. He was invited to teach flower-drum lantern dance to a number of professional song-and-dance companies within and beyond the province.

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. Zheng Jiuru · National Representative Bearer Archive