Qilin Dance
01 · Historical Records
Lankao qilin dance is handed down through generations within a single family, and by the elder generation of the Song family it had already reached the sixteenth generation. In the early 1960s Lankao County was in severe economic difficulty and many people left to flee the famine; so as not to let qilin dance die out locally, Song Chang mobilized his clansmen to hold fast to their homes, engaging in production while practising, and taught movement techniques such as darting, turning, leaping and shifting to his students in batch after batch, so that this programme did not disband even in those hard years.
02 · Core Techniques & Process
Qilin dance is a traditional folk dance widely popular throughout the country, with a history of more than five hundred years to the present. It is a symbol of auspiciousness and peace, of favourable weather, of national prosperity and of popular well-being; in performance it is usually accompanied by gongs and drums together with the suona, integrating singing, dancing and music in one. Qilin dance is generally performed in the evenings of the slack farming season and on festivals or auspicious days, when wooden posts have to be planted around the performance ground with lanterns hung above them for lighting. The two dancers known as the "qilin head" and the "qilin tail" hide inside the qilin hide of the prop, take on the appearance of a qilin, and perform highly technical movements such as scratching an itch, shaking the fur, circling the table, circling the stool, circling the lantern, climbing high, tumbling and gazing at the moon, at the same time accompanied from the side by percussion instruments. Qilin dance is bold and lively, fierce and blazing, and full of awesome presence; set against grand, strongly rhythmic percussion, it gives a sense of magnificent scale that lifts the spirits of the spectators. Qilin dance in Lankao County, Henan Province retains its traditional performance form, content and artistic character, bearing distinct features of the Central Plains culture. In qilin dance in Haifeng County, Guangdong Province, one person moves the qilin head and one person leads the qilin tail; to the accompaniment of big gong, big drum and big suona they perform movements such as the qilin tumbling, licking the feet, washing the whiskers and biting the crotch, together with the emotions of joy, anger, sorrow and happiness. Immediately after the qilin dance comes a martial arts performance; this is the essence of Haifeng qilin dance, and it mainly includes boxing, staff play, broadsword play, dancing with pointed spears, pointed spears against iron rulers, rolling the rattan shield, and group staff-fighting bouts and so on.
Dodging, turning, springing and shifting
Song Chang, nicknamed the living qilin, taught generation after generation his dodging, turning, springing and shifting techniques.
Sixteen generations
Handed down within the clan for decades, the dance has reached its sixteenth generation, a rare family-based beast dance on the Yellow River plain.
Central-plain character
The Lankao dance keeps its traditional form, content and style, distinctly of the central plains and unlike the Hebei or Guangdong versions.
Drums, gongs and suona
Drums, gongs and suona accompany the dance, uniting song, movement and music in a grand wash of percussion.
Evening performances
Danced in the evening during the slack season and on festivals, the ground staked and lit with lanterns, especially around mid-autumn and the new year.
03 · Regional Records & Related Items
The qilin dance of Huanghua City, Hebei Province, with its extraordinary tall artistic form and its high-difficulty acrobatic movements that startle, endanger and amaze, conquers the audience, brings a strong artistic shock, and displays the impassioned local character of the Yanzhao region.
Other submitting regions for the same item: Qilin Dance · Qilin Dance · Qilin Dance · Qilin Dance · Qilin Dance · Qilin Dance · Qilin Dance · Qilin Dance.
04 · Cultural Value & Contemporary Safeguarding
Qilin dance is a precious piece of cultural heritage left by the ancestors of Huaxia to their descendants, and it has both a high value for artistic appreciation and research value in religious studies, folklore studies, historiography and other fields. Because building a qilin uses a great variety of materials, costs a good deal, takes much time and effort, and the performance movements are very difficult, the performance scale of qilin dance in various places is shrinking day by day, facing the danger of being lost, and urgently requires rescue and protection. Song Chang (official archive record of the associated inheritor): Male, Han, born in April 1949, from Lankao County, Henan Province. His performance skills are practised and mature, his movements clean and brisk, and he is known as the "living qilin". During the severe development difficulties in Lankao County in the early 1960s many people left to flee the famine; so as not to let qilin dance be lost, he mobilized his clansmen to hold fast to their homes, engaging in production while practising qilin dance, and he has insisted on transmission for decades, teaching the movement techniques such as darting, turning, leaping and shifting that he masters to one batch of students after another. It has now reached the sixteenth generation, keeping qilin dance passed down from generation to generation. Representative inheritor of the fifth-batch national-level intangible cultural heritage project qilin dance.
05 · Associated Representative Bearers
Representative bearers recorded under this item, organized by national nomination batch:
- Yang Yinhai 03-0928
- Zhang Xishan 05-2248
- Songzhang 05-2249
- Liu Jintang
- Hanzhiyong
- Xie Yuqiu
- Zhang Zhiming
- Liu Weituan
06 · Authoritative Sources & Bibliography
Sources
China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network (ihchina.cn)
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