The Gongmo Dance

Introduction

A Han scarf dance; by tradition the scarf recalls Xiang Bo's sleeve shielding the future Han founder

The Gongmo dance is a music-and-dance piece handed down from the Han, and Shen Yue's treatise on music in the Song shu, written under the Southern Dynasties, says it was the scarf dance of his day. By tradition, at the Hongmen feast Xiang Zhuang danced with a sword, and Xiang Bo shielded the future Han founder with his sleeve and told Xiang Zhuang 'gongmo', meaning 'sir, do not' harm the king of Han. The Song shu explains that the scarf in the dancer's hand copies the form of Xiang Bo's sleeve, yet it also notes that the Qin cao already has a tune called Gongmo Crossing the River, so the music is older still, and it rejects the Xiang Bo story. The same treatise preserves one song text for the scarf dance, labelled at its end the Gongmo Scarf Dance Song. The scholar Xu Yunhe agrees with Lu Qinli that this text is what the Han called a record of sound inflections, a notation that spells out the rise and fall of the singing in characters rather than a script for a song-and-dance drama, and that removing the vocable characters leaves twenty stanzas of lyrics.