Chi 201 Blog Post #1

1。我家有口人。我爸爸，我妈妈，一个哥哥，一个姐姐和我。
2。你明天晚上忙不忙？
3。不忙，为什么？
4。你想不想看电影？
5。想。你想喝点什么？
6。我要一杯茶，可以吗？

I was carousing through Youtube when I stumbled across some videos portraying some very beautiful traditional Chinese dances. It got me interested in the history of this type of dance and how it developed into what it is today. Chinese dance has its own unique style that sufficiently allows the artist to "express his thoughts and feelings with ease and grace." Ceramic pots from the Sun Chia Chai excavation site in the Chinghai province depict colorful dancing figures dating back to a time before the first Chinese characters were written. Around the 4th-millenium BC, the people of the Neolithic Yang-shao culture arranged group dances in which they would "lock arms and stamped their feet while singing to instrumental accompaniment."

Three-thousand years later, during the Shang and Chou periods, dance was divided into two distinct types: civilian, which included hand-held feather banners that represented the distribution of the game won by that day's hunting and fishing, and military, which featured weapons instead of ornaments and included the group swaying in a coordinated rhythmic motion. In both cases, their choreographed motions "expressed their veneration of the spirits of heaven and earth, acted out aspects of their everyday life, gave expression to shared feelings of joy and delight." One of the videos that I found on the internet is a very good example of what looks like a spiritual dance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EF-r2WgCBQw&feature=channel_page.

From 206 B.C.-220 A.D., members of the Music Bureau in the Han Dynasty made an earnest effort to collect folk songs and dances from different areas of Central Asia and Northern China.
This continued into the T'ang Dynasty during 618-907 A.D. during which the Garden Academy, the Imperial Academy, and the T'ai-ch'ang Temple came together and created the "Ten Movement Dance," which incorporated dance elements from China, Korea, Sinkiang, India, Persia, and Central Asia. Filled with intricate body movements, rich, colorful costumes, poetry, music, and plot, this colossal dance became the predecessor to the modern Chinese opera.

This is at least a brief overview of the origin of Chinese dance, although it's probably incomplete. Dance and music are one of the oldest human traditions in just about every culture, so it came to no surprise that China, as one of the oldest, would have a rich hostory of it. I'm not a dancer myself, but I love to watch them and I think it would be amazing to attend a live performance one day.

One more video I'd like to show consists of a Chinese "Ta Ge" dance, which is a folk dance accompanied by singing and was popular in the older days. The name literally means "singing while stamping the feet." The dance is usually performed during festive gatherings in the street or other public places: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=954mWpfKQiM

Sources: http://www.cultural-china.com/chinaWH/html/en/28Arts451.html
http://www.houstoncul.org/eng_culexg/c004.htm