Wine-cup Dance

(chinaculture.org)

Updated: 2014-02-03

It is a kind of dance popular in Erdos, Inner Mongolia. On a festive or celebrative feast, after eating and drinking to their heart's content, people will grab wine cups from the table and start to dance to express happiness.

Wine-cup dance is a kind of dance popular in Erdos, Inner Mongolia.

At the end of some movements or in between two movements, some beautiful and fantastic moves are interjected. The lower body may kneel down or may be accompanied by various dance steps, such as round about steps. The head may carry a bowl or a lamp. As a mixture of toughness and gentleness, the dance appears graceful and simple and has lasting appeal.

Each hand holds two cups and taps them together to make different sounds: quick, slow, broken and trembling. Both hands move to the music and tap different rhythms. The movements include: both hands move in the line of a horizontal Arabic numeral "eight" and the upper body moves right and left as the hands move; two hands are crossed and tap the wine cups up and down, left and right while the body moves in the same direction; hands move in circles; both hands shake the wine cups at the second or the eighth position of the stage when the body moves in the same direction with the hands and the line of sight moves in the opposite direction, that is to say, the ears follow whatever direction the wine cups are moving and listen to the sound; so-called circle movement: one hand hangs over the head while another hand moves in circles in front of the body; so-called horizontal swaying movement: both hands move to one side at the back, and the range of action is small around the hip, middle around the waist and big when one hand is over the head and another hand is behind the waist.