Chapter 21 Section 7 Yangko

Yangko is a collective folk dance popular in northern my country. It is mostly used in traditional festival celebrations. For example, the Lantern Festival on the fifteenth day of the first lunar month must have Yangko to create the atmosphere of the Lantern Festival.However, in recent years, Yangko has broken the tradition of only showing up during festivals. In large and small towns in northern my country, people can see many Yangko teams composed of middle-aged and elderly people every morning or evening. People, as many as hundreds of people, twisted and danced amidst the bursts of whistles and the sound of gongs and drums, full of youthful vitality.Yangko is a combination of entertainment and sports, and has become an eye-catching sport among the mass sports in our country.

Tracing back to the source, this kind of Yangge with simple movements and clear rhythm may have a certain relationship with the long-standing "Tage".Tage is a kind of mass singing and dancing. People connect their arms and step on the ground as a joint, singing and dancing.As early as in the Yinshan rock paintings in ancient times, there were prototypes of tage, and in the Han Dynasty, tage had already entered the hall. "Xijing Miscellaneous Notes" records that Liu Bang and Mrs. Qi, the emperor of the Han Dynasty, "entered the Lingnv Temple on October 15th, and used the porpoise and millet to make music for the gods. , playing the flute and beating the building, singing the song of "Shang Ling", and then stepping on the ground with arms and arms as a festival, singing "The Red Phoenix Comes."

After entering the Tang Dynasty, Tage developed to its peak and reached a scale unimaginable today. For example, on the night of the Lantern Festival in the second year of Emperor Xuanzong of Tang Dynasty (712 AD), a huge lantern wheel tree was erected in Anfumen, the capital, to organize Thousands of women, with heavy make-up and bright makeup, sing songs under the lamp wheel for three days and three nights (Volume 3 of "Mian Zai Zai"). Perhaps influenced by Tage, the working people in ancient my country creatively combined the rhythm of song and the movement of dance with production. In his "Notes on Eastern Guangdong", Li Tiaoyuan of the Qing Dynasty recorded that Guangdong farmers went to the fields every spring. When planting rice seedlings, put a big drum on the ridge of the field, and an old man beat the big drum loudly with drumsticks. At this time, dozens of women planting rice seedlings in the field started singing while planting rice seedlings. Competing songs will last forever", the author said that this is Yangko.The records of a local chronicle in the fifth year of Daoguang in the Qing Dynasty are even more interesting: when the farmers pulled the seedlings, they pulled each other's sleeves, walked in the field according to the rhythm of drumming on the ridge, and used their toes instead of hoes. Time after time, sometimes fast and sometimes slow, it seems to be a kind of interesting entertainment ("Huangzhou Hall").In the Qing Dynasty, this custom of drumming and singing when transplanting and harvesting rice seedlings was not only popular in Hunan and Guangdong, but also in Sichuan.Planting rice seedlings and harvesting rice seedlings are quite tiring and monotonous productive labor, which can easily cause physical fatigue and mental distress.It is a wonderful way to integrate some repetitive single labor movements into singing and dancing to make production labor artistic and entertaining, which not only improves production efficiency, but also makes people get entertainment from it and cultivates the collective sense of workers .

Because it is close to the lives of the masses, Yangko has strong vitality, and various forms of Yangko have gradually developed in various parts of China.