Northeast culture, colorful art world, Manchu banquet dance and sacrificial dance

Northeast culture, colorful art world, Manchu banquet dance and sacrificial dance

Manchu and their ancestors lived in mountains, forests, rivers and lakes in the northeast. The harsh living environment and desperate hunting life in the north have created their rough, optimistic, brave and fierce national character. Like other ethnic minorities in Northeast China, Manchu and its ancestors are good at singing and dancing. Buji and Xiong Min's dance twists and turns during the banquet show that their dance directly comes from life and is an artistic reflection of their frequent hunting and tribal wars. During the Bohai period, the traditional music and dance that people often danced was "step hammer dance". It is recorded in the Records of the Bohai Sea that they "gather for fun when they are old, and shillings, good singers and good dancers move forward from generation to generation, and scholars and women follow each other, singing harmoniously and ringing around for drums and hammers". This is a kind of group dance with singing and dancing, which has been circulated among the people for a long time and was inherited by the later Jurchen and Manchu. At the end of Ming Dynasty, Manchus in Northeast China rose, and Manchu traditional songs and dances flourished again. Every New Year or major event, they will enjoy singing and dancing. Nurhachi himself also "plays the pipa to stir himself up", and everyone stood around clapping and singing to entertain. After the Qing Dynasty unified the whole country, these folk dances were incorporated into the court, and on the basis of Manchu traditional folk dances "mangshi Dance" and "Yang Lie Dance", they developed into court ceremony banquet dances "Qinglong Dance" and "Happy Dance". But in the northeast, this kind of self-entertaining dance continues to spread among Manchu people. According to Vencent Yang's "A Brief History of Liu Bian" (Volume 3), "There is a big banquet in Manchuria, and men and women in the host family will change and dance. Raise your forehead with one sleeve, turn your back with the other, hover and put on airs, saying' recklessly'. China's song, summed up by the word' empty qi', is' empty qi' and is also a song and dance of the Han people in Judah. " Wu also said in "Ninggutalue": "Manchu folk songs and dances are called foolhardy. There are two styles of men and women, the two dance opposite each other, others clap their hands and sing, and every line is during the New Year or celebration. " The word "recklessness" is the transliteration of Manchu "Ma Keqin", which means singing and dancing. When you dance unscrupulously, a person sings beside you, and everyone says the word "air dance" together, so it is called "unbridled air dance" and "air song", which are mostly divided into two or four beats, and the tunes are mostly composed of gong, top and corner, which are lively and powerful combined with dance. Bold air dance is still popular in some Manchu areas in northeast China.

When performing the Yang Lie dance, sixteen people wore yellow cloth covers and sixteen people wore black sheepskin covers, all wearing masks to imitate the action of wild animals rolling and jumping. Another eight people rode bamboo horses, put on armor and held bows and arrows, took the stage in two wings and knocked to the north. Then chasing wild animals in the paddock represents the Eight Banners of Manchu Dynasty. One of the beasts was shot by an arrow, and the rest of them were in awe. This is a folk dance originated from Manchu hunting life, which is used for court banquets and symbolizes the prosperity of the Eight Banners Wushu. Yao, a Qing Dynasty man, gave a more specific description of dance performance in Miscellanies of Bamboo Leaf Pavilion. "Yang Lie Dance" is decorated with bamboo as the horse's head and ponytail, such as the fake horse in the play. Are you alone? Riding a fake horse on stilts, one person painted his face, dressed as a beast in black leather, jumped hard, and the stilts bowed their heads and shot. There is a man with a red oil dustpan beside him, singing while scraping the dustpan. Stilts shot at the beast one by one, and the beast should be killed. People call it "shooting mother fox". "About the origin of Yang Lie dance, it is said that Manchu people came to the Heilongjiang River valley where Daur people lived in the early Qing Dynasty, walked on stilts, rode fake horses and shot a beast that harmed the local area. Daur people thought they were gods, so they surrendered to the Qing Dynasty. Yang Lie Dance is actually a kind of folk dance popular in Song and Jin Dynasties, which combines bamboo and horse dance with stilts. It artistically reproduces the hunting life of Manchu in order to praise the historical achievements of developing and consolidating the frontier and establishing a unified multi-ethnic and powerful empire in the early Qing Dynasty.

Manchu sacrificial music and dance is shaman sacrificial music and dance. Shamanism is a primitive religion widely believed by all ethnic groups in Altai language family in northern China. Manchu, their ancestors and Nuzhen all believe in Shamanism. Shamanism is characterized by animism and totem worship. Heaven, earth, sun, moon and ancestors are all worshipped. A remarkable feature of this religion is that the wizard "Shaman" is the messenger of communication between man and god. When offering sacrifices, the shaman prayed to God by singing and dancing. When God is attached to him, he becomes the spokesman of God and conveys the will of "God" to the sacrificial people. This kind of ceremony is commonly known as "jumping".

Shaman music and dance is produced in the dance performance of shaman wizards praying for gods, offering sacrifices and exorcising evil spirits and treating diseases. Shaman's prayer ceremony is generally divided into four parts: exorcism, prayer, possession and sending. Shaman dance is performed by means of prayer, incantation, singing and drumming, and its performance is full of mysterious colors. The shaman, who claimed to be between man and god, wore a streamer hat, colorful clothes, and a number of long waist bells tied around his waist, holding musical instruments such as HAMA Dao, Taiping drum, bronze bell and tied board, singing and dancing while knocking. Drum is the main musical instrument. Shamans beat the elastic drums with drums and whips in different postures, and at the same time kept swinging their waists, so that the waist bells sounded tight and slow, and combined with various drums, people heard the unique and magical shaman music effect. There are more than ten kinds of hymns sung by shaman, such as "Sacrificing Heaven", "Jumping Home God", "Dispelling God", "Receiving God" and "Sending God". The dance moves are vigorous and rough, and the rhythm is abrupt. There are various dances such as standing, sitting, bowing and bending, and various footwork such as advancing, retreating, moving and turning. In the smoky, mysterious prayers, spells and touching drums, the shaman keeps changing his posture, swinging, spinning and jumping. Shaman chanting wish * * *, "if you are crazy, if you think the future god is also. The more you get sick, the more you jump, the more anxious the tambourine is, and the drums collapse. " At this time, the shaman acted as if he was drunk and possessed by a god, and then the shaman simulated various forms of gods. When family gods (ancestors or heroes) are possessed, shamans perform different roles and dance steps, while when wild gods are possessed, they simulate images such as birds, bears and tigers. Shaman uses all kinds of rhythmic human movements to convey his feelings and understanding of worship of gods to the public in an abstract and virtual way. Manchu shaman can be divided into family shaman and professional shaman. The former presides over offering sacrifices to ancestors and gods, while the latter exorcises evil spirits and cures diseases. When the shaman worships his ancestors, the people play single drums, tie boards and play drums as accompaniment. Shaman dance originated from the fishing and hunting life in primitive society, and imitated the movements of bears, tigers and eagles in performances. In the early Qing Dynasty, every time Manchu people went hunting, went out to war and returned triumphantly, they held a shaman's ceremony of jumping into the gods. In addition to folk family sacrifices and clan sacrifices, there should also be shaman jumping off buildings in court sacrifices in Qing Dynasty. Shaman dance is one of the national arts preserved and handed down in shamanism ceremonies. Although it lags behind in propagating superstition and playing tricks, it is closely combined with people's lives, which has had a certain impact on the form and development of folk dance, and gradually developed into a self-entertaining Manchu folk Taiping drum and waist bell dance.