Spring Lantern Show
Jiubao Ancient Town Welcomes the Spring Festival Lion Dance Competition
The Achang ethnic group, a small ethnic group in southwest China, is mainly distributed in the western Yunnan region, although there is no native script, but it has created a combination of folk customs and folk opera to play spring lanterns to welcome the new year. This unique traditional annual cultural activity is widely prevalent in Lianghe County, Tengchong City, Mangshi and other places in western Yunnan, where the Achang ethnic group lives. The Achan ethnic spring lantern play activity was held during the Spring Festival, with the worship of the lamp god who blessed the prosperity of the family and the abundance of grain in the legend of the Achan ethnic group as the center, with folk opera as the main form of expression, strong traditional culture, strong national characteristics, and a strong festive atmosphere. Because of the influence of the ethnic distribution environment and the surrounding culture, the Spring Lantern Playing Activity of the Achan ethnic group has different characteristics in different regions, rich and diverse, and has diversity under the premise of unity.
Play spring lanterns
Achang spring lantern custom, Achang language called "pedal column", the local custom is called play lamp, play spring lamp, there are three different styles of spring lamp. From the form of expression, there are "lion lamp", "fire horse lamp" and "unicorn lamp"; from the cultural function, there are "god lamp", "wish lamp" and "taiping lamp". Some are also given place names, such as Mengke Spring Lantern (belonging to the Fire Horse Lantern), Manxiang Spring Lantern (belonging to the Qilin Lantern), Mangzhan Spring Lantern (and the other 12 Spring Lanterns belong to the Lion Lantern). According to statistics, there are 14 lanterns in the Achang ethnic area, and each lamp is a spring lantern team. In the main villages inhabited by the Achan ethnic group, there are spring lantern teams. Each spring lantern team, the number of team members as small as 30 people, more than about 50 people, the current number of people who have participated in or will play spring lanterns about a thousand people.
The members of the spring lantern performance team came from various villages and consisted of old, middle-aged and young men of the Achan ethnic group who were of good character, clever and clever. A highly respected elder who is responsible for organizing and managing the Spring Lantern Team. Middle-aged people are experienced and energetic, take on important roles, chant congratulatory messages, play gongs and drums as accompaniment or management props. Young people participate in learning and practice various spring lantern trades. In various Achan villages, people practice lanterns in the tenth winter month, lanterns on the Spring Festival in the first month, many lights on the second light field of the first year, play drill family lights one by one, go out of the country with lights, collect the lights on the sixteenth day of the first month, and return to the church to sweep the hall to send lights. The whole lantern play activity accompanies the New Year, playing the lantern lion dance, walking the village and stringing the village, which is very popular.
The Achan Spring Lantern Show has different trades, divisions of labor and terminology. There are lamp roots, there are lamp gods, there are lamp souls. The inheritors of spring lantern culture are called lamp heads, or lamp heads and fire heads. The dancer who plays with the lion is called the lion's head. The inheritors who participate in the performance are called the Lantern People. Send an invitation letter, call send a lamp post. Out of the village performance, call out the lights. The performance is called closing the lights. The whole village performs, called playing crowd lights. The performance of the household is called playing with the drill house lamp. The Spring Lantern Festival is called Samson Autumn (the meaning of worshiping the god of autumn). Organize a lantern team, in charge of the worship of the lamp god's family, called the lamp head family.
When playing with lights, according to the theatrical program, there are costumes, gongs and drums, props, various paper paste lanterns and animal idols. The characters include Lao Tiezi, Mao Zhaode, Mao Jia Milk, Daytime Trickster, Daxian, Lao Tu, Fairy, Boy, Shouxing, Tea Gong, Tea Woman, Jiangxi Guest, Businessman, Reading Lang and so on. These characters, according to the occasion, appeared in ink, sang the traditional drama of the Achan ethnic group, recited the lines and dramas in the dialect and the native language of the Achan ethnic group, borrowed from the Han costume drama and civilization drama procedures, passed on the manuscript script, and performed related dramas, which were locally known as "spring lantern tones".
Before the spring lanterns are performed, gongs and drums are beaten, lion dances are performed, congratulatory speeches are spoken, and then several dramas, tunes, and folding plays of the Achan ethnic group are staged according to the requirements of the audience, and martial arts are performed. The custom of playing with spring lanterns is full of rich and thick traditional cultural values, and the spring lantern culture is welcomed by the local Achan ethnic group and other ethnic groups.
The Achang people play spring lanterns, perform spring lantern plays, small plays, origami plays have a lot of repertoire, although the character stories, plot contradictions, drama conflicts, etc. of these operas, the structure is relatively simple, the form is relatively single, but in the process of singing and dancing, forming a folk song and dance style, which is very distinctive.
Make spring cattle
The Achan people play the custom of spring lantern sacrifice lamp gods, accompanied by spring lantern drama, sacrifice lamp god sweep plague god, He Spring Worship New Year, lion dance to open the door of wealth, dialect and local language mixed with Achang language to perform spring lantern drama, popular in Achang folk.
The Spring Lantern Folding Zi Drama "Making Spring Cows" is an excellent representative work of the traditional drama and opera of the Achang ethnic group. The main characters are: Old Tiezi, Mao Zhaode (Old Tiezi jokingly called Wow Sun Zi), Mao Jia Milk, Daytime Trickster, Gambler, laughing monk. Other characters include: Bull Head, Tiger Head, Mussel Shell, Great Heron, Crane, Big Yellow Dog, Behind the Scenes, etc.
Because the dramas and operas of the Achan ethnic group are performed by men, and they are not from the class, the scripts are mostly oral and hand-copied, and wrong words and wearing gangs are inevitable. At this time, there will be a special person on the sidelines to quietly correct it, and the people in the field will inevitably gag and joke in order to take care of the whole thing. For a time, inside and outside the field, you came to me with a word, who is right and who is wrong has nothing to do with it, and it makes everyone happy. It can be seen that another feature of these dramas is that they mostly use dialects and local slang national mother tongues, and the correct language is reversed, and it is witty and interesting. Like what:
Yunnan came to fight the tiger general, came to Tengyue Huang. Everybody says I'll sell it, and I'll sell it. How much the mountain roe deer collected, the tiger man's gold weapon did not leave his hand, and he was going to go with his feet. Peach blossoms bloomed all over the ground, and the Immortal Mountain Tiger came down the mountain. The gong and drum clanged, and the little flower cat jumped out. Mosquitoes and fleas are eaten by you, and the old cows and horses please open them.
Many of the dialogue lines in the spring lantern play "Make Spring Cows" contain a variety of agricultural life. The following line is the summary of the agricultural production experience of agricultural civilization and the profound experience of social practice, incisive and vivid, colloquial, catchy, widely inherited in folk villages, in the occasion of crowd lights, drill family lamps, rural masses welcome, many people want to designate the performance of this folding play. "Making spring cows" is a representative play performed when playing with lights, the lines are wonderful and funny, full of life wisdom, and the folk characteristics are outstanding:
A good piece of flat land, diligent cattle to go, lazy cattle to plough. Diligent cattle do not go, lazy cattle do not cultivate, where are the grains born? Diligent cattle with thin feet and lazy horses with many manes. To buy cattle, you have to buy a horn, and your wife is not as good as your grandmother. Buy needles to buy noses, and the wife is not as good as the brother-in-law. The horns of the bull are slender and long, and they must fight the bull king. The horns are thick and the tail is thin, and it must be good strength. The waist bow and ass collapse, it must go hot. Pink mouth thrush eyes, make the collapse all over the mountain. The head collapses the horns, so that it is difficult to catch, and the raw people come to catch, and the pockets are a corner. Placed in the tip of the two brains, a well of water is not dry, a puddle of grass, a pond of green water, eating fat toots, flies can roll down from the back of the cow.
This line is the crystallization of the collective wisdom of the Achan people who play the lamp. The rich and colorful agricultural production rural life and farming culture experience is summarized, and the theatrical performance of "Making Spring Cows" created by the old iron boy fu plough spring ploughing is full of rice farming history farming civilization ideas and social aesthetic experience.
Visiting relatives
The outstanding feature of the lyrics, drama texts and scripts of the Spring Lantern Tune is that it borrows from the Han drama and music art. According to research and analysis, some Chinese dramas and songs that were transmitted by the Han culture in the Central Plains to the ethnic minority areas in the southwest frontier were absorbed, transformed, created, transplanted and interpreted by the Achang people, and passed on. The lyrics of "Visiting Relatives" are also interesting:
In the first month, visit relatives, visit relatives to the West Street (pronounced "the") heart. Count your life in front of Cross Street and congratulate you on your marriage. In February, I went home and told my father to tell my mother that I would count my life before cross street, and a lot of flowers would fall to my house. In March, I went to ask for a signature, and before entering the temple with incense paper in my hand, I was busy burning the incense paper to the ground and asking for a marriage to sign. In April, go to the media, the media media wife more to go back, ten times eight times to ask you to go, buy a saddle horse to thank the matchmaker. In May, go to the pressure, eight rice dumplings and eight fruits, three animal wine ceremonies on the table, the matchmaker only receives two fruits. In June, go to press the tea, Wolong wine to your house, put on the Ayara water line, and hem Ayara a flower. In July, go to marry a relative, blow carefully through the heart of the street, the lantern torch goes forward, and the flower palanquin follows. In August, when marrying into the door and stepping on the lotus mat under the car door, the two red ladies helped Yuancheng, and the slave family became the Lang family. In September, I went to the chapel, first worshiped the heavens and the earth and then worshiped the mother, and the three relatives and six relatives all worshipped, and turned around to worship Xiao Lang. In October, led into the room, the slave family did not look at lang, and the two drank a cup of wine, like a fairy with a talent.
Shooting notes
Tracing the history of the spring lanterns of the Achan people, it is generally believed that it originates from the worship of the lamp god in the traditional polytheistic worship of the nation. With the belief in the lamp god, the custom of playing with the lamp produced dramatic performance content. Later, the form of playing with lanterns was fixed and stylized, the content was single, simple and boring, and I began to learn from foreign drama programs, especially a large number of theatrical elements and excellent programs that absorbed and transplanted the excellent flower lantern qing opera of the Han people, and adapted and transformed according to their own abilities and audience needs, which were used by me and passed on orally in the folk. Bring the programs that suit you, collect the essence from foreign cultures, and through the folk transformation of "localization" and "Achanghua", gradually form a strong national characteristics of the Achang ethnic group playing spring lantern customs.
The spring lantern of the Achang ethnic group was formed in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, and the peak was formed in the late Qing dynasty and the beginning of the people. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, it flourished in the countryside in the 1950s and 1960s, but there are few video and picture archives.
In May 2020, we went to the Lianghe County Archives to look up photos of the collection, and found only a few pictures. Only a few photographs from the early 1980s were found. One photo is of the lion lantern dance of the Spring Lantern Team of Nongbe Village taken by Bin Yuanshou of the Lianghe County Cultural Center during the Spring Festival of the Achang Ethnic Group in Guanzhang Village in 1985.
The photos used in this article are the earlier photos of the spring lantern play in the Achang village. On January 30, 2006, on the second day of the first lunar month, the author filmed guanzhang village playing spring lantern performance "Making Spring Cows". On the second day of the first lunar month on January 24, 2012, the author was invited to collect spring lanterns such as lion lanterns, paper horse lanterns, and fire horse lanterns organized by Mangzhan Village and Mengke Village in Jiubao Achang Nationality Township, Lianghe County, and filmed them on the spot in these villages. In April 2018, the custom of praying for rain on Zhiben Mountain in Caojian Town, Yunlong County, was displayed. In the Spring Festival of 2019, the Qilin Lantern in Manxiang, Tengchong City performed the crowd lantern scene. In the Spring Festival of 2019, Lianghe County Jiubao Achang Nationality Township Mangzhan Spring Lantern Lion Lantern won the first prize of jiubao ancient town new year lion dance competition. (Author: Cao Xianqiang Text/Photo Unit: Yunnan Radio and Television Station)
Source: Kunming Information Harbor
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