On the fifteenth day of the first lunar month in 1978, Tan Guangming got up as usual. The room was very quiet and the wife Zhang Lizhen was 8 months pregnant with a kangaroo belly. In the afternoon, their family received a notice from the street and invited Zhang Lizhen to join the shrimp dance performance team. Tan Guangming is not a person who loves outdoor sports, but as a well-known wife protector, he had to learn to dance shrimp to become his wife's safest partner, and since then the two have appeared together in the driving range and performance team.
Within a few months, Zhang Lizhen successfully gave birth to a girl. The daughter is forty years old this year, which is the length of time that Tan Guangming and Shrimp Dance have been associated. Today, in addition to being retired employees of the Xiangtan Water Transport Corporation, their other identity is the only descendant of the shrimp dance in Hunan Province, and the "accidental combination" of forty years ago has become the reason why the shrimp dance has survived.
<h3>The rise and fall of the shrimp dance</h3>
Tan Guangming and Zhang Lizhen also lived in Xiangtan Eighteenth General. In the dictionary of history, "Zong" is the wharf of Lao Xiangtan, of which eighteen are the most famous, and the advantages of water transport make it a place where merchants and travelers gather, gathering the four major markets of rice market, steel, machinery industry, and timber. Today, the buildings here are low, some of the buildings have preserved the ancient style of brick tiles, and the shop signs have not been replaced by uniform white characters on a gray background. According to locals, the tentacles of urban transformation have gradually touched the old city, and in the past two years, eighteen have also faced the fate of demolition.
The pier and the water gave birth to the shrimp dance. Since the Yuan Dynasty and the Ming and Qing Dynasties, relevant records of the Xiangtan shrimp dance have frequently appeared in poems, and the grand scene of the eighteenth general Tangxing Bridge boatman's shrimp dance can be seen from the "Jiangchengzi Tangxing Bridge Side Shrimp Dance" by a private school gentleman in the Qing Dynasty -- "The sunset outside Shizui'an (that is, Tangxing Bridge) is red, the crowd gathers, the night is hazy, the boatman dances shrimp, like in the picture, the joy alarms the rising moon, thousands of miles away, Su Guangtong."
Tan Guangming and Zhang Lizhen still remember that after the end of the "Cultural Revolution" in 1979, folk art finally reappeared and shined, entering the heyday of the Xiangtan Shrimp Dance.
At that time, from the first day of the Chinese New Year to the fifteenth day of the first month, if there is no accident, Tan Guangming and Zhang Lizhen should both spend time in the compact shrimp dance activity. Their shrimp and lion dances, including an exclusive band of whistle-blowers and drum-beaters, formed a 50- or 60-member Spring Festival team. A group of people crowded into several large trucks and went to large shops, factories and mines or government departments to perform. This type of car has no seats and can only shelter from the rain and serve as a means of transportation.
From Hexi Dance to Hedong, the queue is huge, and the people watching the liveliness line up in long lines. The Chinese New Year Dance Team has a tight schedule every day, and it takes 3 hours to perform one performance.
This traditional folklore, which originated in the basin of the middle reaches of the Xiang River, was in the past an embodiment of a kind of gang connection. In the Qing Dynasty, the Xiangjiang River was busy with water transport, and its influence spread with the radiation of the waterway, and ships from all over the world stayed at the Xiangtan wharf, and the boatmen spent their lives together in the Xiangjiang River Basin on weekdays. Before meeting his wife, 7-year-old Tan Guangming also saw the shrimp dance performance of the boatmen at the inauguration ceremony of the Xiangtan Wooden Sailing Cooperative (the predecessor of the Water Transport Corporation) in 1956. Zhang Lizhen's brother is a boatman who travels through the Xiang River all year round, and she has mastered the essentials of shrimp dance in her childhood entertainment activities.
However, due to the development of railways and highways in the early 1990s, people and goods abandoned the waterway, and Xiangtan, where water transportation was developed, was no longer beautiful. Now on the street of the Eighteenth General, the names of the couple and even the dancing shrimp are very unfamiliar to the neighbors.
<h3>Dancing shrimp is a technical job</h3>
Like then, Tan Guangming still stands on the tail of the shrimp, and his wife stands on the head of the shrimp. The difficulty of the shrimp tail is higher, and the offensive action of the multi-jump type is large. In contrast, shrimp heads are more passive. This also shows that their choice of positions for shrimp heads and tails was out of consideration for the safety of their partners, and originally according to folk customs, more skilled wives should assume the role of shrimp tails and bring Tan Guangming.
They walked to a vacant lot of the house and showed the reporter the dancing shrimp. The four sets of actions of "snowflake topping", "dead tree rooting", "pearl combination", and "jade belt wrapped around the waist" were done, and a shrimp that sometimes churned and jumped, sometimes wrapped around and played, appeared in front of me. As the screams sped up, like the shrimp competing on the sea, the people under the shrimp also competed secretly. The two, who are nearly seventy years old, formed a tacit understanding above ordinary people and became the best pair of shrimp dancers in the whole team.
Tan Also asked reporters to take a close-up shot. The two feet in black-faced cotton shoes, exposed from the trouser barrel, seemed nothing special. "When you start, your feet are a small figure-of-eight. The Navy's submarines are in the sea, the boats are in the river, the wind and waves are bumpy, and if you stand like this, people fall into the river. When I stand like this, I am very stable. Tan Guangming said.
According to their experience, a novice learns to dance shrimp, and the effort is relatively fast, and it takes at least 20 hours. Considering the physical exertion of the dancing shrimp, it can only queue for 1-2 hours of classes every day, which is equivalent to about 10-20 days to return from school. As for whether the play is smooth, whether it is authentic, of course, there is also an element of personal understanding.
According to Tan Guangming, the shrimp dance has very high requirements for the shrimp dancers. "We dance shrimp pay attention to the first is cooperation, the second is coherence, just like writing articles, can not play and play out of the knot, need to respond before and after." The third is to require the shrimp dancers to be tough and soft, and not to play lazily. It depends on who is fast, several shrimp have competition, and it is fast and good. Dancing shrimp is not purely a performance, there is a competitive taste between each other. So we don't have any feeling for music now, it's about being fast and smooth."
<h3>The last boatman</h3>
In recent years, from the central to the local call to inherit and carry forward traditional culture, Xiangtan dancing shrimp has also risen, and in November 2014, it was rated as an intangible cultural heritage of Yuhu District of Xiangtan City. For a while, there were many people who came, and the local university invited them to be sports coaches, and the TV station followed the film for several days. They were visibly physically exhausted and had to turn down part of the interviews and meetings. Of all the shooting, Tan Guangming's favorite film, "The Last Boatman", was broadcast on the Hunan Comprehensive Channel for three consecutive days. It conveys the attitude of the performers.
However, reality is like a gyroscope, constantly flipping, and after hard work, it seems to return to the original point. The Dancing Shrimp Team has experienced the establishment and division to the point of extinction in name only. In October 2011, the dancing shrimp team consisted of 12 middle-aged and elderly people, and almost all the expenses since its establishment were spent by Tan Guangming and his wife, coupled with the fact that the performance did not require remuneration, the team members were constantly lost, and the couple's life was difficult to sustain.
"I think about it every day, but I just don't know what to do." Tan Guangming will confess this worry in almost every show. There is not much that can be done, and the two people are willing to try to apply for the provincial intangible cultural heritage, and the question is whether there will be anyone who performs the shrimp dance at that time. Although the body is tough, but after all, they are old, they have to give up the New Year performance in recent years. The wings of hope were planted in the house, and they brought two new apprentices—grandchildren who were slowly growing to the age of thirteen or fourteen.
When dancing shrimp, Zhang Lizhen will occasionally hum a song - "Eighteen total oh big dock, comb powder oh rouge oil, color is good and fragrant, give your sister a good comb of hair." This is the "Dancing Shrimp Waterway Song" compiled by the Xiangjiang boatmen during the Guangxu period of the Qing Dynasty. Looking back now on "that taste of that year", Tan Guangming and Zhang Lizhen were sighing. Compared with the noisy gongs and drums in the past, now there is only one shrimp dancing alone in front of the church, which is slightly lonely.