Yu brings horse lantern dance back to life

By courtesy of Yu Yuefeng / Ti Gong

If it was not for Yu Yuefeng’s efforts over the years, the horse lantern dance, an ancient folk art in Xinbang Town, might have been lost. He wiped the dust off this old, long-forgotten local dance and made it glow again.

“I was captivated by the local dance when I was such a little boy,” recalled the 60-year-old Songjiang native. The normally quiet and reserved farmer becomes animated and talkative when it comes to the horse lantern dance.

The folk art can be dated back to the late Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) when General Li Zicheng fought a bitter battle in Xinbang. Ambushed by enemies at midnight, Li got on his horse and fought hard. Moved by the general and his men, the villagers beat drums, clanged gongs and lit torches to boost their morale. Li and his troops were finally victorious.

To celebrate the triumph, people made horses and lanterns with colorful paper, drummed and danced to recreate the scene of the battle.

This gradually developed into a dance performed in every village of the town, lasting the entire 15 days from Spring Festival to the Lantern Festival.“It was the major event of the year during the festival, and everyone was so happy,” Yu said.

The first night show often began at the town’s central temple, and a lantern was lit by kindling from the temple. Then the happy team danced from one village to another night after night.

Villagers prepared feasts and invited relatives and friends to enjoy the performance. They would give “red envelope money” to the performers to thank for the dancers for their efforts.

Folk art revival 

The dance had 32 various formations of four to eight sets of horses and lanterns, featuring different props such as silk umbrellas, candles, handkerchiefs, swords and big bowls to the beats of drums, gongs and cymbals.

However, the tradition was forbidden during the “cultural revolution” (1966-76) because it was regarded as one of the “four olds” (old ideas, culture, customs and habits).

In the late 1970s, Yu was assigned to the town’s cultural center and he dedicated himself to restoring the old horse lantern dance that had so impressed him during his childhood.

Yu spent years visiting old performers and recording the dance’s steps, props, costumes, music and formations to restore and revive the art piece by piece.

“No one really cared about it at the time, but I just couldn’t see it die in my generation without doing anything,” he said.

In 1983, Yu set up a horse lantern dance troupe made up of 32 dancers.“We ventured to 11 villages to give performances, and I remembered some old farmers were moved to tears because they didn’t expect to see the dance once again in their lifetime,” Yu recalled.

The tradition was back and toured the towns at the beginning of every Chinese New Year.

In 2009, the horse lantern dance was listed as a Shanghai intangible cultural heritage.

The dance continued to thrive as Yu added more modern elements. He added catchy tunes and staged performances at local temple fairs, tourism festivals and sports meets in Shanghai as well as across the Yangtze River Delta region.

The folk art also danced into local schools, communities and remote villages, attracting dancers aged from 8 to 80.

Yu is even busier these years as more people get involved. He often hangs out with dancers out in the countryside for rehearsals, writing scripts for different scenes and making props.

In order to make the dance more dramatic, Yu combined Chinese legends into the dance, such as that of the Lady White Snake and the Eight Immortals and Seven Goddesses.

He asked his wife Song Muxiu to join his cause and, though she didn’t know much about the dance, took out all of her good-quality silk, her dowry, and sewed the performers’ costumes. “He has sacrificed a lot to the dance, and this was what I could do to support him,” she said.

In addition to the horse lantern dance, Yu also rescued the town’s another folk art — farmland songs, which were added to the city’s intangible cultural heritage list in 2011.

“I was born and grew up in the town. I never left it ever since,” he said. “So I felt it my duty to protect it and its culture and traditions."