*Puning Ying-Ge Dance

*Puning Ying-Ge Dance

Nominating Unit: City of Jieyang

Ying-Ge, with a history of over 300 years, is a kind of folk dance prevalent among the people in Puning. Deeply loved and advocated by the masses and with a wide mass and social foundation, it is considered to be the symbol of safety and auspiciousness by praising the good while restraining the evil.

Puning Ying-Ge Dance is a kind of group dance performance by the Han males to show robustness and masculinity, mainly revealing the morale and heroism of the heroes in Liangshanpo while attacking the Damingfu (a story in the Heroes of the Marshes). The number of people to dance varies from at least 24 or 36 to as many as 72 or 108. To resemble the heroes in Liangshanpo, the performers wear unique styled masks, warrior gowns, tight and short, and hold two coshes to dance by raping one on the other. The dance, dubbed with gongs and drums as well as shell trumpets as the background, shows a range of formation called “Two Dragons Thrusting out of the Sea”, “Fierce Tiger Coming Down a Mountain”, “Flowers from Wheat Ears”, and “Circles Made by River Snails” and form its particular moving rhythm with various motions and postures like “Butian”, “Xijie”, “Xuanchui” and “Chuihua”. The dancing is grand and vigorous. The style of Puning Ying-Ge performance, brave, vigorous, unconstrained and heroic, embodies the valuable character and spirit of the Chinese nation, resolute, fi rm, united and courageous.(https://www.daowen.com)

Many experts have paid great attention to the prominent spiritual, social and artistic value of Puning Ying-Ge Dance which has been exalted in the sentence “As Ansai Yaogu is famous in the North, Puning Ying-Ge is famous in the South”. Puning is thus named “Hometown of Guangdong Province’s Folk Art”.

Now as the imbalance of economic development between the rural and urban areas as well as the aging of successors, the Puning Ying-Ge dance team is shrinking with insufficient dancers. Urgent measures are needed to save and protect the Ying-Ge.

Puning Ying-Ge was selected into the list of the first batch of state-level intangible cultural heritage in 2006.