What are the folk and traditional arts of the Dai people

The Dai people are good at singing and dancing, and have a rich collection of folk literature and art works, including narrative poems, fables, myths, legends and fairy tales. Many famous narrative poems, such as "Shao Shu Tun and the first wood Nona", "E and Sang Luo", "Alluan's story" and other well-known in China and abroad. "Zanha" in the Dai language is the meaning of folk singers, Zanha singing is a traditional form of Dai folk music and art, with a broad mass base. In addition to Zanha rapping, the Dai folk art also has unique elephant foot drums, hydrazinium gongs and other musical instruments as the accompaniment of rapping. In addition to the Zanha rap, the Dai folk art also features unique musical instruments such as the peacock dance and the elephant-foot drum dance, which are widely popular.

Young men and women of the Dai ethnic group often sing as a matchmaker, accompanied by leaves or gourd sheng singing, including production, labor, marriage and other aspects of social life, most of the tunes are melodious and slender, but the Dehong area is broad and bright. Xishuangbanna has a specialized singing artist "Zanha". Dance is mainly imitation of animal behavior and embellishment, there are peacock dance, fish dance, crane dance, elephant foot drum dance, deer dance and so on. In Xishuangbanna and Dehong, there is also a relatively young art form - Dai opera. The festivals of the Dai people are often accompanied by numerous singing and dancing entertainment activities. Xishuangbanna Dai in the New Year after fine Buddha, men, women and children will splash each other for fun and blessing, in the rhythm of the elephant foot drums and gongs jumping Jar Yang Dance, elephant foot drum dance, the atmosphere is joyful and enthusiastic, and at the same time, there are also put on the high rise, dragon boat racing, throwing packets, singing, swinging and other entertainment and competition activities. Jinping, Xinping around the Dai are often in the festival to invite friends of the same age, each funded to get things together to eat, drinking, singing and dancing, commonly known as "playing flat guys".

Zanha

"Zanha" means folk singer in Dai language, and Zanha singing is a traditional form of literature and art that the Dai folk enjoy, and it has a wide mass base. Zanha plays an extremely important role in the inheritance and development of Dai folk literature. Their singing is beautiful and vivid, and their characterization is delicate and euphemistic, with strong artistic influence. They have the talent of improvisation and are loved and welcomed by the masses.

The Dai Opera

The Dai Opera has a history of about two hundred years. Earlier plays include Twelve Horses, Gongsun Plowing the Field, and Chang Shao Duet. At the beginning of this century, Yingjiang Tusi set up the first Dai opera troupe, which absorbed and adapted a lot of Beijing opera and Yunnan opera repertoire on the basis of the original repertoire, and at the same time absorbed their costumes, props, musical instruments and other components, which enriched the Dai opera. Dai opera generally has few characters, mainly reflecting the working people's production and life customs, etc. The performance forms are flexible, lively, and the contents are short and concise, with a strong flavor of life and national characteristics, which are loved and welcomed by the masses of the Dai ethnic people.

Crafts

There are many kinds of traditional crafts of the Dai people, including paper making, umbrella making, pottery making, weaving, knitting, smelting and casting (mainly silver), tailoring and sculpture.

The Dai people have an ancient tradition of making pottery, and most of the pottery used are made by women, and the types of pottery are cooking utensils and religious articles. Cangyuan pottery is mainly round-bottomed, and Jinghong is mainly flat-bottomed.

The Dai women like to use gold and silver to make the necessities of life and ornaments, mainly silver belts, necklaces, rings, earrings, bracelets, hairpins, silver bubbles, etc. In the past, the nobles used silver tableware. In the past, the silver tableware used by aristocrats or fine to the Buddhist temple bowl, pots, etc., inside and outside the object are carved with exquisite patterns, including the betel nut box appearance of the most wonderful hollow drilling techniques, is a silver crafts of the finest.

Yunnan Dai women's Dai brocade craft has a long history, it is cotton yarn for the warp, five-color floss for the weft weaving, flowers in the texture plate in the arrangement of the design. Dai brocade patterns include animals, plants, people, buildings and other aspects of the pictorial pattern, as well as triangular, rhombic, chevron, curved wave-shaped, convex zigzag, mesh and other geometric patterns, which can be used to decorate the uniform skirt, the production of shawls, quilt tops, bedsheets, tube pas and so on. Dai brocade products are colorful and varied, rich in national style, historically one of the tributes to the central dynasty.

The bamboo forests around the Dai settlements are dense, and there is no shortage of bamboo products for living and production, including bamboo stools, gabion tables, lunch boxes, holding boxes, gabion cabinets, back baskets, waist baskets, bamboo baskets, baskets, tea trays, fish cages, fish baskets, etc. The patterns of bamboo weaving include basket patterns, diagonal patterns, and the like, and there are many different patterns of bamboo weaving. Bamboo patterns include basket pattern, diagonal pattern, square pattern, back pattern, zigzag pattern, twisted pattern, etc., which are made by using two different natural shades of bamboo inside and outside the gabion, so as to make the artifacts present a natural and simple aesthetic sense. Some of them are coated with tung oil ash on the outside, brushed with vermilion color, then coated with gold powder, then piled and embossed with wavy pattern, curly grass pattern or peacock feather pattern, or set out patterns on the surface of the vessel with glass pieces, colored glass beads, etc. This technique is known as the woven lacquer craft, which is commonly used in the round tables, tea trays, baskets, and boxes used in the fine Buddhist temples.

Paper-making and umbrella-making account for a large proportion of the traditional handicrafts of the Dai people. Raw materials for papermaking are taken from the bark of the kozo tree, and there are eleven procedures in the production process. After the pulp is pounded and made into a paper film on the paper copying machine, the handmade cloth curtain paper is commonly known as cotton paper. Cotton paper is mainly used by Buddhist monks to write and copy scriptures. Broussonetia bark pulp is also a raw material for making umbrellas, or directly make a good umbrella bone immersed in boiling thick pulp, paste the pulp on the surface of the umbrella bone cooled down into paper umbrellas, or will be made of thickened cotton paper with a black red wild eggplant juice glued to the umbrella bone, umbrella surface is also coated with a layer of the paper surface to make the paper surface taut and flat and waterproof. Dai paper umbrellas are flat in shape and ancient in color.