Last Thursday, students, locals, and those visiting Hanover filled Spaulding Auditorium as a weeklong celebration of arts and culture culminated with "Yunnan Revealed," a show featuring a mix of indigenous instruments and music from a southwestern province in China.
The Yunnan province -- an area slightly smaller than the state of Texas -- is a predominantly mountainous area in southwestern China that is comprised of 25 different ethnic groups and is thus widely regarded as one of the most culturally diverse places in the world. In Thursday's performance, artists from the Dai, Wa, Naxi and Yi nationalities presented the audience with the dancing and music that is typically seen and heard in the farming villages of Yunnan.
Thursday night's performance featured as a literal backdrop four panels depicting the diverse writing forms of the four minority cultures included in the show. However, while their spoken and written languages were different, the performers nonetheless came together to give the audience a peek at a group of cultures now being threatened by the globalization and development of rural areas in China.
The visiting group of performers from the Yunnan Province spent the week in Hanover as part of an extended stop on their North American tour. The week began on Monday with a smaller cultural arts presentation in Collis Commonground, followed up on Tuesday with a film screening meant to inform people about the preservation efforts of the Yunnan province's minority cultures. Thursday night's show was the group's final presentation in Hanover, serving as a cap to the week's festivities. The group will perform later at such renowned sites as the Kennedy Center, the American Museum of Natural History, Connecticut College and World Music in New York.
"Yunnan" began with singing and dancing meant to depict a party scene from the Yi people of Yunnan. The high-pitched female voices resonated throughout the room as the dainty female dancers were carried on the shoulders of the Yunnan men in order to depict the "dances" of indigenous animals, while the rest of the performers maintained the beat by tapping tobacco boxes. This introduction properly set the mood for what was to follow.
The group-dancing routines were easily the most impressive aspects of the entire performance, but the solo gourd-flute and mouth-harp performances were also interesting displays of real Yunnan work songs and courting melodies. Gen Dequan, a member of the Dai nationality, played a personally handmade gourd flute and performed a love song that he had composed himself titled "Under the Golden Autumn Moon."
The Naxi portion of the show featured an ambitious solo performance of a song that told the creation story central to the Naxi people's beliefs. Representatives of the Naxi people also performed songs based on important stages of the life of the typical Naxi person, including the self-explanatory "Song of the Marrying Off the Daughter" and a piece called "The Dog Chasing the Red Deer," about the nomadic hunting ways of the Naxi people.
Many of the performances were also based on folkloric tales from the Yunnan minorities. Others were inspired by "sorcerer dances" that are still performed today on the first and fifteenth of every month to ward off evil spirits and cure illnesses.
The highlight of the night was the energetic "Country Stomp" of the Yi people, who danced in handmade green, red and gold costumes. Even the audience -- most of whom probably could not discern the dialects from the excited shrieks and songs -- was able to feel the energy radiating from the performers as they literally stomped across the stage. The stomp commemorates a time when the Yi people were defeated in battle by another tribe and began to dance around a bonfire after coming to a standstill in their retreat. The enemy tribe heard the dancing and singing of the Yi people and subsequently fled, fearing that the Yi had found additional warriors to fight alongside them.
For those with any knowledge at all of the minority cultures of the Yunnan province, this show was the perfect way to experience the dancing, clothing, music and folklore of the area. For those who had not exactly brushed up on the group's background, the show was probably not as effective in bringing the culture to life. Yet even such newcomers undoubtedly found something valuable to take from this rare opportunity to experience a distant culture that is in danger of becoming extinct. Overall, the week of events ending with "Yunnan Revealed" was an unqualified success, proving to be a unique cultural opportunity for those who chose to take advantage of it.
