Carp Lantern Dance

Carp Lantern Dance

Nominating Unit: City of Meizhou

Carp Lantern Dance first appeared in Hounan Village, Baihou Township, Dapu County in the City of Meizhou. It was said that, Yang Zuanxu, a fellow from the village was appointed Justice Commissioner in Shaanxi Province in the 22th year during the reign of Emperor Qianlong of the Qing Dynasty (1755). He was said to be the person who introduced this dance to Dapu County from Shaanxi. It has a history of over 200 years. Now it is mainly distributed in Baihou Township and some villages in Xihe and Huliao Townships of this county, and some areas in Heping County, and Lianping County in Heyuan Municipality.

The main props for Carp Lantern Dance are 5 carps, with one male and four females. The male carp is green, while the female ones are red or orange. All of them have three fins on the tail, made of bamboo strips, 3 feet long, covered with color-painted paper or cloth, with its head and tail segments moveable. There are lights of different sizes installed in the eyes and bellies, hence the name. The performance is conducted with one person playing the male carp, and four persons playing the female carps, so it is called “five carps and five gongs”. The main story includes “five carps jumping over the dragon gate” which bears strong traditional and customary traits, and is composed of three phases, i.e., “carps celebrating spring”, “carp mating”, and “carp jumping over the dragon gate”. The show is conducted in the evening, and only uses the lighting from the carp props. In the dim light, the dancers would manipulate the props, vividly mimicking the movements of the carps’ swimming, floating and sinking, playing with water, kissing, etc. with the changing of their shoulders, elbows, and waists. The expressions and manners of carps’ swimming in seaweed, playing, mating, surfing, until jumping over the dragon gate are lively rendered in a beautiful and romantic way.(https://www.daowen.com)

The music of Carp Lantern Dance doesn’t follow restricted rules. Some music is only made up of drum beats, with giant drums and horse gongs to be the musical instruments; some music is played with trumpets and drums from Guangdong Hakkas Instrumental Music, with scores mostly like “Qing Yuan Hui”, “Dian Jiang Chun”, “Yan Er Luo”, “Lang Tao Sha”, etc. The dance performance is made even more ancient and elegant with the accompanying Han music.

For the locals, carp is viewed as a symbol of auspice and harvest, and is often used to welcome the coming of the new year and the spring, and the lantern festival, in order to express their hopes for the coming year. After the reform and opening up, Carp Lantern Dance has even developed from a traditional 5-carp small dance into a 24-carp stage performance, sometimes even a huge square dance with as many as 80 carps. Its transmission history is the valuable living evidence to the study of the relations between southern China’s and central China’s cultures.

With the change of time, the living conditions for Dapu Carp Lantern Dance has changed as well. Especially, it is faced with a lack of transmitters. For example, the prop making skills is almost lost. Therefore, urgent effective protections are called for.