Can't focus on reading the article? Let the Nuo Opera radio read it to you!
"Dong dong qiang, dong dong qiang..." In Tianjing Village, Gongxi Township, Xinhuang Dong Autonomous County, Hunan Province, during major festivals and peak tourist seasons, some villagers wear masks, climb onto the stage, and perform an authentic Dong ethnic Nuo opera called "Dong Dong Tui" for fellow villagers and tourists.
Tianjing Village, once an obscure small mountain village in Huaihua, has become increasingly well-known due to the Dong ethnic Nuo opera. The Dong Nuo opera, popular in Tianjing Village, is also known as "Dong Dong Tui" because it is performed with jumps and dances to the rhythm of "dong dong" (drum beats) and "tui" (a small gong with a protrusion in the middle). It has a history of over 600 years and is a product of Dong agricultural civilization.
In 2006, Dong Nuo opera was included in the first batch of national intangible cultural heritage list.
Nuo is a sacrificial activity aimed at expelling pestilence and avoiding epidemics. It originated from shamanism in primitive religion and was initially intended to drive away ghosts and expel diseases. The ritual was named Nuo because the shamans made continuous "nuo nuo" sounds during the ceremony. Nuo opera originated in ancient times, and as early as the pre-Qin period, there were shaman songs and Nuo dances that entertained both gods and people.
In the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, various local operas flourished. Nuo dance absorbed opera forms and developed into Nuo hall opera and Duangong opera. After Nuo opera took shape in the Xiangxi region during the Kangxi era, it spread rapidly to various places via the Yuan River and the Yangtze River, forming different schools and artistic styles.
The repertoire of Nuo opera includes "Meng Jiangnu," "Lady Pang," "Dragon King's Daughter," "Gods of Peach Blossom Spring," and some plays based on stories from "The Story of Mulian," "Romance of the Three Kingdoms," and "Journey to the West." Due to different historical backgrounds and artistic influences, Nuo opera is divided into three types: Nuo hall opera, ground opera, and Yang opera.
Ground opera is a type of Nuo opera performed by the descendants of soldiers who were left to guard the frontier in Yunnan and Guizhou during the "Northern Expedition to the South" in the early Ming dynasty. It has no plays about folk life or talented scholars and beautiful ladies; all performances are martial arts plays reflecting historical stories.
Yang opera, on the contrary, is performed by Duangong priests for the living after completing rituals. Therefore, it mainly performs small plays reflecting folk life, and its singing style absorbs many elements from folk small operas such as Huagu and Huadeng.
Nuo opera is widely distributed, found in Hunan, Hubei, Sichuan, Guizhou, Shaanxi, and other places, but Dong Nuo opera is mainly passed down in Tianjing Village, Gongxi Township, Xinhuang County. Gongxi Township is located at the southern end of Xinhuang County, with numerous hillsides. Gongxi has related legends from the Tang Dynasty, but Dong Nuo did not originate here.
According to the genealogies of the Long and Yao families in the area, the Long family migrated from Jingzhou Miao and Dong Autonomous County to Tianjing Village during the Yongle period of the Ming Dynasty. The Yao family moved from Xinzhai in Xinhuang County to Tianjia Village in Gongxi, and later to Tianjing Village, bringing the Nuo culture with them.
Dong Nuo opera is not performed independently but exists as part of Nuo sacrificial activities, performed by Nuo opera troupes that satisfy both religious worship and entertainment needs.
Long Jingchang, a 70-year-old elder, explains that Tianjing Village used to have one Pangu Temple and one Feishan Temple. During the Spring Festival, each temple would take turns hosting sacrificial ceremonies every other year, and "Dong Dong Tui" was always performed during these ceremonies. Long Jingchang is not only the "village elder" of Tianjing Village but also a national-level representative inheritor of Dong Nuo opera.
In the 1980s, Long Jingchang became an apprentice to the old artist Long Ziming and began learning Dong Nuo opera. Under Long Ziming's guidance, Long Jingchang learned the basic skills and performance art of Dong Nuo opera. Before each Dong Nuo opera performance, Long Jingchang and his opera troupe would perform a ritual to invite the Nuo gods.
"The performance can only begin when the Nuo gods are present," Long Jingchang says. The Dong people revere the land and nature. Besides the common repertoire in Nuo opera, "Dong Dong Tui" also includes plays adapted from historical stories and local people's lives, such as "Dancing Earth God," "Leper Stealing Cattle," and "Old Man Pushing Cart."
The music has also evolved from local mountain songs and folk songs, with tunes such as Liuliu, Shigen, Yinsong, and Leige. Unlike other Nuo operas, Dong Nuo opera's singing and dialogue are entirely in the Dong language, fully preserving the original ethnic cultural characteristics of the Dong people.
The most distinctive feature of "Dong Dong Tui" is the masks, also known as "Jiao Mu." The masks are carved from camphor wood, clove wood, poplar, or other wood that doesn't easily crack, and then painted. Each mask represents a character, including gods, ghosts, spirits, scholars, farmers, county officials, village thugs, and others.
"When inviting the gods, everyone wears different masks according to their roles; on regular days when not inviting gods, these masks symbolize the gods and are enshrined in the ancient temple of the village," Long Jingchang explains. Since the performers wear masks, the audience cannot see their facial expressions, so the movements in Nuo opera are exaggerated, forming a primitive and bold performance style.
After the founding of New China, due to various reasons, all the masks of "Dong Dong Tui" were once lost. Long Jingchang admits, "For a long time, we older artists had to either make temporary paper masks or use face paint as a substitute when performing."
In the 1990s, to perform Nuo opera well, most of the masks were recreated with the joint efforts of local people, restoring the original appearance of "Dong Dong Tui."
Today, "Dong Dong Tui" has become a cultural symbol and landmark of Tianjing Village. "If you don't watch 'Dong Dong Tui,' you've wasted your trip to Tianjing Village." This is a common sentiment among many tourists who visit Tianjing Village. Dong Nuo opera is not only a ritual of group worship for the Dong people but also a way for them to entertain themselves and a spiritual and cultural anchor.
However, with the continuous development of society and the impact of modern entertainment, Dong Nuo opera, like many other intangible cultural heritage items, once faced difficulties in passing on the tradition.
"Learning Nuo opera requires long-term dedication and repeated practice, but it doesn't make money after mastering it, so young people are unwilling to persist," Long Jingchang admits. Now, it's hard for traditional Nuo opera to retain young people. Even if some come to learn, many leave halfway through. Today, there are only a dozen people in the Nuo opera troupe, most of whom are villagers from Tianjing Village.
We must not lose what our ancestors left us; we must pass on traditional culture.
To further protect and inherit Dong Nuo opera, in recent years, Xinhuang County has taken advantage of the opportunity for cultural and tourism integration, increasing protection and support for traditional cultures such as Dong Nuo opera. By revitalizing the cultural and tourism resources of Tianjing Village, more and more tourists are visiting the village, and Nuo opera is gradually becoming known to the public.
Moreover, with increasingly frequent cultural exchanges, Dong Nuo opera has begun to slowly "go out," showcasing its charm to the world.
In 2016, at the 60th anniversary celebration of Xinhuang Dong Autonomous County, the "Tian Nuo Bless Huangzhou" program from Tianjing Village, Gongxi Township, combined the triangle jump and Nuo Masks from Nuo opera with modern elements, allowing people from various places to appreciate the wonder and magic of Dong Nuo from a new perspective.
"It's beautiful and has a special flavor. It deepened my understanding of Chinese history and culture," said Jae-ho Fu, chairman of the Jeju branch of the Korean Art Federation, after watching the Dong Nuo opera performance at the 57th Tamna Culture and Art Festival in October 2018.
At this event, Dong Nuo opera not only went abroad but also became the only representative program from Hunan Province to perform in Korea. This is just a glimpse of Dong Nuo opera's journey out of the deep mountains. In Xinhuang, Dong Nuo opera has become a must-have program for various local festivals and cultural galas.
Furthermore, to build a better platform for showcasing, Xinhuang County has transformed the original cinema into a Nuo opera theater, allowing ethnic culture to be fully expressed here.
"Nuo opera is a synthesis of history, folklore, folk religion, and primitive drama. It contains rich cultural genes and has important research value. We need to let more people know about it and protect it," Long Jingchang believes. While increasing efforts to showcase and promote it, Nuo opera also needs to strengthen the training of inheritors to encourage more people to learn it for the long term.
"We should start with children, cultivating their interest in Nuo opera from a young age," he hopes. Dong Nuo opera can enter schools, allowing more children to understand Nuo opera and fall in love with traditional culture. As a "living fossil" of Chinese drama, Dong Nuo opera will surely ride the wave of cultural and tourism integration to regain new vitality and vigor.
Traditional Nuo opera, which once captivated both the elite and common people and even went abroad, has accumulated numerous cultural information and artistic characteristics from ancient times to the modern era, possessing rich connotations. It has extremely high research value for various fields such as history, religious studies, humanities, opera studies, fine arts, folklore archaeology, and more.
Therefore, in the protection and research of this ancient theatrical culture, we should not only focus on its artistic form but also pay attention to its inner cultural meaning.
I apologize, but there is no additional content to translate. The text you provided has been fully translated in my previous response. The translation ends with the bolded paragraphs discussing the research value and cultural significance of Nuo opera. If you have any more text that needs translation or if you have any questions about the existing translation, please let me know and I'll be happy to help.
