What is the primitive and simple Tujia Maogusi dance?

Maogusi dance is an ancient and primitive dance of Tujia nationality in western Hunan. Tujia language is called "Guspupu", which means "the hunter who hunts with long hair", and Chinese is often called "Maogusu". It is the farthest source and living fossil of China's dance and drama.

From its costumes, props, performance forms and contents, Maogusi Dance truly reproduces the fishing, hunting, farming, production, life and marriage customs of Tujia people from patriarchal society to the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period.

Maogusi dance is mainly performed in Tujia waving dance at the beginning of each year, and it will also be performed separately on specific occasions.

Using freehand brushwork, virtual and hypothetical techniques similar to traditional operas to express the fishing, hunting, farming and life of Tujia ancestors, there are both the embryonic form of dance and the performance of drama, and the two are intertwined to form a seamless sacrificial dance.

According to legend, in ancient times, there were vast forests, thorns and few people in Tujia areas in western Hunan. Tujia ancestors hunted in the mountains or fished in the river for food.

Later, they turned from fishing and hunting to farming.

There was a Tujia youth who went down the mountain alone to learn farming techniques, and then rushed back to the cottage to teach them skills. On the way, he slept in the wind and his clothes were torn to pieces by thorns in the mountains. When he returned to the hut, it was already night, which coincided with Tujia people's "adjusting the year", that is, the Spring Festival, holding swing dances and other activities.

The young man didn't wear clothes, so he couldn't show up easily, so he hid in the weeds next to Niandiaochang to watch Niandiao activities. Unexpectedly, several young men who participated in the New Year's Eve activities found him in the grass, so he had to come out and hastily covered himself with some thatch to participate in the New Year's Eve activities.

So, the young man taught the villagers the farming techniques he had learned in the form of dance. Since then, in order to commemorate this ancestor who taught farming techniques, Tujia people have to perform Maogusi dance every time they make a wish or worship their ancestors, and sometimes they will perform it alone.

Maogusi was also handed down as the name of Tujia ancestors in the era of eating animals and drinking blood, and later called the dance they created "Maogusi". It is a primitive drama form formed by Tujia people to commemorate their ancestors' creative achievements in fishing and hunting, and it is popular in Tujia areas such as Yongshun, Longshan and Guzhang in western Hunan.

Maogusi dance is the most primitive classical dance of Tujia nationality. Although it is not a mature form of drama, it has a story that simulates the working life of ancient ancestors, and expresses its content through dancing and pouring white.

In the first month, Tujia villagers dressed in straw played stories about primitive people's fishing, hunting and farming, offering sacrifices to their ancestors' entrepreneurial merits and praying for the prosperity of people and animals and a bumper harvest of crops.

The number of people performing Maugus varies from one to twenty. One is dressed in Tujia costume, decorated with old Maugus. In Tujia language, he is called "Bapu", representing the ancestors of Tujia people. He presides over ancestor worship and performance activities. The rest are little Maugus, representing future generations.

They are all dressed in straw clothes, barefoot, with straw hats on their faces, and their heads are braided with straw and palm leaves in a towering and vertical odd-numbered straw braid.

The performances of Maogusi dance mainly reflect the production and life of ancient Tujia ancestors, such as "sweeping the hall", "offering sacrifices to the gods", "hunting", "digging" and "fishing". The first is "sweeping the hall", which means sweeping away all plagues and ghosts and making future generations safe.

Followed by "ancestor worship", "god of five grains" and "showing the male", showing the survival and reproduction of the whole family, followed by "praying for all the best" and other major paragraphs. There are many details in each paragraph, for example, in the performance of wishing everything the best, there are dew breaking, mountain repairing, while the iron is hot, ploughing, sowing, harvesting, Baba, welcoming new mothers and so on.

Maugus dance performance has characters, dialogues, simple story lines and certain performance procedures. It is held in turn by village or surname and lasts for 5 to 9 days.

Maogusi dance has unique action characteristics. During the performance, you bend your knees and shake your body, shaking all over. The thatch "brushes" all over your body, and the five big braid on your head keep swinging from side to side. Step forward and backward, jump left and right, shake your head and shoulders.

From the action content of the performance, it can be seen at a glance, such as "exposure", "sweeping in and out", "hunting around" and "winning the game".

The singing part of Maogusi Dance is all sung in the ancient Tujia language, so that some Tujia languages cannot be translated. Its movements are primitive, rough, funny and interesting, which outlines the step-by-step development history of unearthed families from ancient times to the present.

Plays include spring cooking, catching meat, fishing, robbing parents and throwing torches.

For example, when "chasing meat", in order to reflect fair distribution and prevent selection, each piece of meat is decorated with palm leaves, and each piece of meat is pulled with a palm leaf. Put all the meat in a dustpan and cover it with a dustpan, but no meat was found.

Then turn the dustpan over a few times by hand, and everyone will take the meat away, whether it is good or bad.

The most prominent feature of dance is that the costumes are primitive, wearing grass clothes and bark, simple and generous, quite primitive; The performer's movements are simple and healthy, and the dialogue needs a strange tune, so that the viewer can't identify and monitor who the performer is, which is the greatest success of the dancer.

When Tujia people danced hand-waving dance, the actors of Maogus dressed up in advance and waited in the Woods not far from the hand-waving dance field. When the waving dance jumped to a certain extent, they came crashing to the stadium, and the waving dance immediately stopped to make way for it, saying it was "ancestor".

The performance of the whole Maugus dance has story content such as plot, characters and language, and basically has the embryonic form of drama, so it is said to be primitive drama; But it has no basic norms of drama.

Maogusi's dance performance is rough and bold, vigorous and passionate, which makes people appreciate the beauty of primitive art in the Five Wastes era. Although Tujia people have no writing, Maogusi has been passed down from generation to generation, and has been constantly improved in the inheritance, becoming a bright pearl in the treasure house of Tujia culture and art.