Ansai Waist Drum

Introduction

Drummers on a Song tomb brick found near Yan'an move much as Ansai drummers do today

The Ansai waist drum is a drum dance of Ansai near Yan'an in Shaanxi, and the date of its beginnings can no longer be fixed. In 1981 a tomb at Wangzhuang village near Yan'an yielded Song-dynasty bricks showing waist drummers whose steps closely match the horse stance and forward step used today. The dance is played either as a road drum, beaten on the march, or as a ground drum, in which ranks shift through patterns on a square, and it also divides into a civil style that stresses swaying and a martial style that stresses striking. A troupe can be a handful of drummers or more than a thousand. It won the top award at the first Chinese folk dance contest in 1986 and appeared at the opening of the Eleventh Asian Games in Beijing in 1990. In 2006 it entered the first national list of intangible cultural heritage.