Gundeng

01 · Historical Records

The custom of the Fengxian rolling lantern formed in the salt-field villages around Zhelin and Huqiao; the earliest dancers to perform with lanterns mostly wore masks of the Erlang Shen, accompanying the local rites of praying for the sea and sacrificing to the tide. By the Qing dynasty the rolling lantern had entered the temple fair and lantern fair processions, becoming the vanguard of the "lantern-out" teams in god-welcoming rites. The lantern-out was mostly held in the first lunar month, hosted by elders of the village; the lantern teams set off from in front of the temple and toured the lanes and alleys of the village, and after the gathering dispersed the props were put away in the ancestral hall or in the home of the head of the association, and new lanterns were made the following year.

02 · Core Techniques & Process

The rolling lantern is a widely transmitted form of folk dance performance; the forms of performance differ from place to place, and classified by the region of transmission they chiefly include the Zhejiang rolling lantern, the Fengxian rolling lantern, the Qinghai rolling lantern, the Songzi rolling lantern and the Haiyan rolling lantern. The lanterns used in rolling lantern performance are generally made of bamboo, wood, paper and cloth, with diameters ranging from tens of centimetres to one hundred centimetres. They consist of an inner and an outer part, are mostly spherical in appearance, and contain a light inside. Rolling lanterns are mostly performed by young men or children. In performance they generally execute movements such as holding and twirling, tossing and pushing, shouldering and dancing, and spinning and flinging on a rope; some also use globe lanterns or ornate lanterns for displays of technique and song-and-dance. Performance is accompanied by gongs and drums, and is highly technical. It is transmitted in the western part of Fengxian District of Shanghai, and has a history of more than seven hundred years. Fengxian stands at the mouth of Hangzhou Bay and was historically beset by frequent floods, so a ritual arose among the folk in which dancers wearing masks of the Erlang Shen performed the rolling lantern in the hope of subduing the demon of water. Over its long course of development, the Fengxian rolling lantern moved from the worship of gods to the entertainment of gods, and thence to the entertainment of people. Whenever the towns of Fengxian held a lantern fair or a festival, or celebrated a good harvest or a promotion in rank, the celebrations took pride in dancing the rolling lantern. The rolling lantern is large in volume; in a crowded place, as soon as the lantern begins to move the onlookers immediately part to the two sides, opening an unobstructed road for the lantern-out team behind it, and so the rolling lantern is called by the folk "the first of a hundred lanterns" and "the king of lanterns". The Fengxian rolling lantern is made of twelve strips of moso bamboo, and comes in three specifications — large, medium and small. The lantern body consists chiefly of an outer ball and an inner ball, with the inner ball fixed at the centre of the outer ball and a candle placed inside it; the large ball also carries an iron pivot pin. A lantern whose inner ball is wrapped in red cloth is called a "civilian lantern", while one whose inner ball is wrapped in black cloth is called a "martial lantern". The various movement sequences of the Fengxian rolling lantern have, through the creative development of several generations, formed its own distinctive performance style. The traditional large lantern includes movements such as "entwining the waist", "the white crane hatching an egg" and "the carp rolling the water grass", concentrating multiple bodily languages such as jumping, climbing, darting, turning, spinning, soaring, leaping and flinging. The medium rolling lantern and the small rolling lantern each have their own representative movements, and combinations of the various sequences form the rolling lantern dance in its many forms. Among them, more than ten sets of large lantern movements such as "entwining the waist" and "the spider spinning silk" combine spinning, leaping and other techniques in one and are full of their own distinctive brilliance; medium lantern movements such as "colored clouds arching the moon" and "Chang'e coiling her hair", matched with small rolling lantern movements such as "the little flower" and "flinging the hand", make the rolling lantern performance present a varied and moving spectacle. Rolling lantern performance is accompanied by gongs and drums; the costume is mainly ordinary folk theatrical dress, and those playing the part of soldiers wear short fighting garments. The traditional performance manner of the Fengxian rolling lantern is both an embodiment of artistic image and a symbolic expression of the wish for a better life cherished by the labouring people through the ages, and it embodies a simple and unadorned national spirit. When several kinds of lantern are performed by men and women together on the same stage, with gong and drum accompaniment further enhanced by music, this is a perfect union of innovation and tradition.

03 · Regional Records & Related Items

The Fengxian rolling lantern is transmitted mainly in the western part of Fengxian District of Shanghai, flourishing in the villages around Zhelin, Huqiao and Xinsi; the protecting unit is the Community Party-Mass Service Centre of Zhelin Town, Fengxian District. Whereas rolling lanterns in various places share the common feature of a fixed inner ball wrapped in an outer ball, the Fengxian rolling lantern is divided into three specifications — large, medium and small; a large lantern whose inner ball is wrapped in red cloth is called a "civilian lantern" and one wrapped in black cloth a "martial lantern", and when several kinds of lantern appear on the same stage the large lantern leads the team while the medium and small lanterns interleave in support.

Other submitting regions for the same item: Yuhanggundeng · Gundeng.

04 · Cultural Value & Contemporary Safeguarding

At present, under the impact of outside culture, the survival and development of the rolling lantern faces great difficulties; a number of veteran artists have passed away one after another, and certain high-difficulty techniques are on the verge of being lost, so urgent rescue and support is needed. Xu Siyan (official archival record of the associated representative inheritor): Male, Han nationality, born in May 1950, native of Shanghai. From the beginning of the 1980s he learned the rolling lantern performance technique from the veteran rolling lantern artists Chen Bomin and Shen Yinzhang, mastering eleven sets of movements of the traditional Fengxian rolling lantern and taking part in performance. In the 1990s, on the basis of the excavation and organization of the Fengxian rolling lantern culture and in response to the demands of the times, he improved the dance movements of the rolling lantern, developing performance techniques for the medium and small rolling lanterns on the basis of the traditional techniques of the large rolling lantern, and expanding the performance function of the Fengxian rolling lantern. At the same time he organized and composed rolling lantern music and improved the rolling lantern props. The Fengxian rolling lantern dance that he choreographed has been performed on the stages of the district, the city and places outside, making a fresh and striking impression. Representative inheritor of Rolling Lantern (Fengxian Rolling Lantern), a national-level intangible cultural heritage project in the fifth national-level batch.

05 · Associated Representative Bearers

Representative bearers recorded under this item, organized by national nomination batch:

• Wang Miaolin 04-1563
• Xu Siyan 05-2222

06 · Authoritative Sources & Bibliography

1. Gundeng (Fengxian, Shanghai) · China ICH Official Project Archive
2. Xu Siyan · National Representative Bearer Archive

Sources

China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network (ihchina.cn)

Read the official ihchina.cn record ↗