Shaman dance is currently circulating among Manchu in Tailai County of our city, and the best preserved one is in Daxing Town of Tailai County. The following is my introduction to the shaman dance of Manchu in Tailai. Welcome to read for reference!
On festivals, people take turns to dance, with one leading the song and others dancing harmoniously. In the course of thousands of years of historical development, shaman dance, which combines religion with song and dance, has become an ancient national literature form loved by Manchu people. Shaman dance is a primitive cultural form. Ancient people worshipped and prayed for all kinds of natural objects and unpredictable natural phenomena, forming the primitive cultural concept of animism.
The universe is dominated by "gods", the wind has "wind gods", the rain has "rain gods", and there are various animal gods, plant gods and ancestor gods on the ground ... forming a universal worship of nature, totems and ancestors. In northern China, it is freezing in the cold, and Manchu and their ancestors, as the indigenous shaman songs and dances in Baishan and Heishui, are displayed through the existence of shaman jumping activities, which is unique to shamanism.
From the scenes and postures such as drinking and laughing, singing and talking like shouting, dancing to music, singing or calling songs in the dance, we can realize that this kind of song and dance has warm and pious character and its "original voice" and "original style" characteristics. It also shows the brave, rough, tough and witty character of Manchu people. In the era of slash-and-burn cultivation, Manchu people prayed to God for happiness, thanked God for his harvest, and expressed their happiness and joy through shaman dance.
In shaman dance, there are many instruments used, such as magic table, waist bell, bronze mirror, drum grasping, drum whip and so on. They are all engraved with various designs of gods, especially in sacred cases and colorful masks when robbing drums in ancient times. Artistic value, academic value, folk value and cultural value are all precious.
In the later period of liberation, this kind of dance gradually declined, and old artists died one after another, and fewer and fewer people knew it. An old artist in Buqi Manchu Village, Daxing Town, Tailai County was nicknamed "Little Buddha" and became one of the few inheritors. After the death of Little Buddha, another artist, Tong Yingshan (75), continued this folk dance. At present, 58-year-old Zhang Zhenhai is the inheritor of shaman dance.
Shaman dance is a concrete embodiment of Manchu culture, social life and folk history, and reflects the style and civilization of history of manchu. It is of great historical and practical significance to explore and protect shaman dance for studying national cultural phenomena. As a kind of minority dance art, Manchu dance has important national cultural value and unique artistic value. In the long historical development, the "source" of Manchu dance records the growth mark of a nation who can sing and dance in fishing and hunting life and vivid body language expression. With the development of the nation, it also includes the transformation of national culture brought about by the role transformation of the ruling nation from Shan Ye to the Central Plains. However, in contemporary times, Manchu dance has not gradually formed a relatively complete and systematic performance system like other minority dances. The unique and distinctive national culture it contains has not pushed it to the peak of artistic creation, but it is facing a crisis of survival with the complex historical process of this nation, such as the evolution into folk culture songs and dances, primitive architecture, tanning skills, costumes, ornaments, paintings and other plastic arts. These cultures are still living cultures, which provide many foreign ethnologists with answers that have not been solved for a long time in ethnology and anthropology research, and become the key to explain many problems of primitive shaman culture. ;