chinese_dance中国古典舞.docx

The Art of Chinese DanceMost people use sound to communicate in their everyday life, but a dancer on stage uses his limbs and body to do the same thing. Just like the Chinese language, Chinese dance has its own unique vocabulary, semantics, and syntactic structure that enable a dancer on stage to fully express his thoughts and feelings with ease and grace.The art of Chinese dance traces its origins to even before the appearance of the first written Chinese characters. Ceramic pots have been unearthed in the Sun Chia Chai excavation site in Ta-tung County of the western Chinese province of Chinghai that depict colorful dancing figures. A study of these archaeological artifacts reveals that people of the Neolithic Yang-shao culture of around the fourth millennium B.C. already had choreo graphed group dances in which the participants locked arms and stamped their feet while singing to instrumental accompaniment. Chinese dance was divided into two types, civilian and military, during the Shang and Chou periods of the first millennium B.C. In civilian dance, dancers held feather banners in their hands, symbolizing the distribution of the fruits of the days hunting or fishing. This gradually developed into the dance used in the emperors periodic sacrificial rituals held outside the city, and other religious rituals.In the large group military dance, on the other hand, the dancers carried weapons in their hands, and moved forward and backward in coordinated group motion. This later evolved into the movements used in military exercises. Chinese used choreographic movements of the hands and feet to express their veneration of the spirits of heaven and earth, to act out aspects of their everyday life, and to give expression to shared feelings of joy and delight. Dance was also a performing art that brought pleasure to both the performers and the audience. After the establishment of the Music Bureau in the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-220 A.D.), an active effort was made to collect f