“YunnanCultures”
In no other part of Chinais cultural and environmental diversity more apparent than in Yunnanprovince, an area in southwestern China area where South, Southeast,and East Asian cultures and biodiversity meet. Nevertheless, ethnic harmony in Yunnan has lasted for athousand years regardless of changes in the central government. There are26 ethnic minority groups (including the Yi, Bai, Hani, Zhuang, Dai, Miao, Lisu,Hui, Lahu, Wa,Naxi etc.) inhabiting Yunnan,each with its own special way of life. Of these, 15 are not found in otherparts of China.The ethnic minority cultures in Yunnanhave many distinctive features, such as vastly different styles of buildings,colorful costumes and ornaments, fascinating folk songs and dances, and veryinteresting marital customs. There are many grand scale traditional festivals,such as the Water Splashing Festival, the Torch Festival, and the March Fair.As diverse as the landscape and as rich as the tropical rain forest, the ethnicminority people live in this natural environment generation after generation.Each one has a unique culture and life style dramatically different from allthe others. The ethnic cultural performances by these people thus deserve to beclassified into a specific category.
Nobody knows exactly how many cultural performance art formsthere are in Yunnan.There may be more than 300 different dances with a hundred names and thousandsof dance steps which, categorized by how they dance, could fall into five biggroups, namely, dance to drums, dance to songs, dance to strings, dance tolamps and random dances. Each of the minorities has its own movement, rhythm,and costume influenced by history, emotions, culture and beliefs. One canappreciate the pure beauty of these art forms, primitive as the Va and Jingpopeople's dances or refined and graceful as the Dai people's Peacock Dance,which use the movement of the peacock to express its suspicious nature and itssymbolism of good fortune. One can also learn more about the history andculture of these ethnic groups, for there is rich social, historical andcultural information behind every dance. Being regarded as a live museum ofhistory, the folk dances in Yunnanhave been protected and preserved in the different places where the dancesoriginated. Figure 7 was taken from a multi-ethnic dance drama “Pink Clouds inthe Southern Sky”.
