The mysterious folk traditions and mythic arts of the east have long held a fascination for the west. Indeed, many such traditions are thought marvelous by the Chinese too. In the Spring Festival, this year of the sheep, Lanzhou, the capital city of Gansu Province, held a street performance of junnuo that astonished the audience with its spectacle.
“Nuo!! Nuo!! Nuo!!” came the shouts, as a 40-person group jumped out from the crowd. Wearing masks and dressed all in black, they jumped, danced and moved around the people with great determination. “What’s going on?” someone shouted but nobody answered. A once famous dance and performance spectacle was now entirely new to its audience. Wang Guangpu, a famous specialist on folk custom was able to answer the question.
“This is the performance of junnuo, which re-enacts the scene of the battle between the Yellow Emperor and Chiyou, the head of the southern tribe. Most city people don’t know this folk performance art form any more, even many villagers feel strange about it. In the Qingyang area of Longdong, in Gansu, the earliest cradle of Chinese junno culture, it is virtually unknown.”
The ancient nuo performance tradition, Wang Guangpu says, has a history of more than 4,000 years. The person who leads the group is the Yellow Emperor, an ancestor of the Chinese people; the four saint animals (the Blue Dragon, the White Tiger, the Red Bird and the Black Tortoise) stand in the four corners to protect the group. In the center, deity beasts like the tiger, leopard, bear and brown bear and some gods perform.
Now, this mixture of religion and entertainment is near extinction. According to the Chinese history books, nuo was originally considered a witchcraft ceremony that was meant to drive out ghosts and sickness for the ancient Chinese. It appeared at different points of Chinese history: In the Shang Dynasty (c1600 BC – c1100 BC) and the Zhou Dynasty (c1100 BC – 221 BC) it was performed as a sacrificial rite, in battle and hunting preparation, its name, nuo, coming from the sound made in the performance; in the Western Zhou Dynasty (770 BC – 221 BC), the xiangren nuo (meaning villagers’ nuo) was very popular; in the Han Dynasty (206 BC – AD 220) the performances at the palace were known as da nuo (or great nuo) and there were different variations of the nuo tradition, such as junno (asking success for the army), xiangnuo (asking success for the farmers), yunuo (asking for rain); and in the Tang Dynasty (618 -907), nuo was combined to suimo danuo (or great nuo at the year’s end) where its function was as a simple religious ceremony asking for success and entertainment that introduced historic and folk traditions to ceremonies.
In the Song Dynasty (960 -1279), nuo was performed as opera and called nuo xi, which came from nuo, and was also very popular and moved from the central China to the south of China. There was then nuo opera in Miao, Tujia, Yao and Zhuang ethnic groups and in the Han areas such as the Guichi of Anhui Province and Enshi of Hubei Province.
(China.org.cn by Chen Lin February 25, 2003)
