Hunan**Quan**Reporter Zou Nani Correspondent Yuan Xiaohui Zeng Zhenke.
In the first month of the Year of the Dragon, I walked along the bluestone road into Xiangdong Street, Xinhua County, and the red lanterns were hung high, "Dong Dong Chang Qiang, Dong Dong Chang Qiang......The sound of gongs and drums resounded through the streets. The Xinhua grass dragon sang all the way, danced all the way, and the big gongs and drums in front of the dragon and the dragon bowls and gongs and drums (or eight-tone gongs and drums) after the dragon boiled the entire county.
As long as the gongs and drums sound, we are full of energy! Yang Lisheng, a member of the dragon dance team, held the dragon head in his hand, and led the team behind him to support the grass dragon with a "yo he". The 28-meter-long grass dragon sometimes tosses up and down, sometimes circles and shuttles, and sometimes shakes its head and tail, winning the audience's applause again and again.
The grass dragon dance is a county-level intangible cultural heritage of Xinhua County, located in Gumei Mountain, with a history of more than 2,000 years. "The people take food as the sky, and the valley of all things is the head", in the hearts of Xinhua people, the grass dragon handmade with straw is the "head of the dragons". Every harvest and New Year, the locals will hold a grass and dragon dance performance, praying for good weather and good harvest, and prosperity for people and animals.
Among the terraced fields in Ziquejie Village, Waterwheel Town, Feng Jinwen, who is close to ancient times, is busy weaving grass dragons from morning to night. Feng Jinwen, who learned dragon dance with his master since he was a child, is also proficient in the weaving craft of grass dragon, and has become the inheritor of the folk grass dragon dance skills in the mouth of the villagers.
A grass dragon is generally divided into 9 or 11 sections, each section is more than 2 meters long, and it takes more than 10 people to work for about 1 month to weave it well. Feng Jinwen told reporters that the materials of the grass dragon are taken from the field. The dragon body is made of bamboo strips as a support, with dry straw weaving ** texture, palm bark to decorate the faucet, which needs to use more than 10 kinds of handicraft skills such as weaving, weaving, inserting, embedding, inlay, winding, winding, hanging, hanging, empty, don't, ticking, carving, and penetrating. Make a 28-meter-long dragon with a diameter of 0The 38-meter grass dragon uses about 80,000 straws.
During the Spring Festival, the grass dragon "dance" made by Feng Jinwen entered the East Street and performed a wonderful folk feast on the long bluestone slab. "When I was a kid, when it was New Year's Day, we would run around the streets with the dragon dance team. Watching the lively scenes when I was a child left good memories for the "post-95" You Liangni who grew up on Xiangdong Street. Nowadays, the folk culture of the hometown is once again "alive" and "warm".
It is not difficult to learn to weave and dance the grass dragon, and I hope that through the guidance of the older generation, a group of young people will be trained to inherit the craft, so that this traditional folk art can be passed on. To Feng Jinwen's relief, he accepted more than 10 apprentices, many of whom were young people.
Editor-in-charge: Xia Hong.
*:Hunan**.