To Dance, From Dance Notation

This dissertation deals with three performance process of Shandong Qufu Confucius Ceremony in modern times including shooting the documentary "The Confucius Music and Dance" in 1957, performance of Confucius Music and Dance by Qufu City Troupe in the 1980s, as well as the "new" Confucius Music and Dance after Public Memorial Ceremony in 2004. The author investigates and analyses the art form that encompasses "song, dance, music" and ceremony and shows the revival, continuity and invention of traditional culture reflected in the performances on the basis of the text and combination of the performance and body memory through the participation and observation. We see neither the ancient music and dance performance, nor a variety of ceremony faces but a microcosm of traditional Chinese cultural renaissance through the dance text from the dance notation to the dynamic transformation, as rests on the history and art anthropological research perspective and method.Attention is paid to the practice of human behavior including the thoughts and deeds of the actor, director and staff in performing Confucius Music and Dance. The reason why we pay close attention to their saying and doing is we want to reveal the logic behind the system and cultural idea from their "technical" and "art" appearance. Therefore, this paper points out that ethnography case that studies art should focus on personal "experience" of researchers and who takes part in the process of artistic creation can truly understand artistic works and the meaning behind the action and that art anthropological research emphasizes both cultural and social perspective from the internal part and artistic language writing itself.This dissertation includes introduction, five chapters and conclusion. Combining the anthropological research into art (including dance) in the past with field investigation, the introduction summarizes my own research perspective and specific method. The first chapter describes space and historical context in which the Confucius Memorial Ceremony and the Music and Dance took place. It makes some presentations of the fieldwork based on books and my personal experiences, and points out that Qufu City, Confucius Temple and the Great Hall of Confucius Construction are a status symbol from the point of view of the space of the ceremony, so the history of Confucius Music and Dance symbolizes the hierarchy in the dynasty. The second chapter uses the relationship between dance and text as the background, by describing "a teaching of the ancient music" and the documentary filming process it states that "teaching" and "record" is not just the history of Confucius. We have seen in the documentary not only a dance of body, but the class and the country's political sign, which is metaphorically used to describe the unity and collaboration the state of the body. The third chapter describes the prelude and process of performing Confucius Music and Dance in the1980s, and states that Confucius Music and Dance has already turned ceremony to performance from here according to my own experience of learning Confucius Music and Dance. Chapter Four describes my own experience of participation in Ni Hill Confucius ceremony and gives an account of the process of Ni Hill Confucius Ceremony was invented, and shows that the traditional invention is completed as is supported by the audience's imagination in Ni Hill sacred context, so the recognition of the audience plays an important role during the ceremony. In Chapter Five the Public Ceremony and "Family Ceremony" have been the new inventions of that the present people draw on traditional symbol. "Family Ceremony "gets more traditional identity because traditional symbol in "Family Ceremony "is more than in Public Ceremony.Conclusion is a three-main-part summary. On the one hand it points that from dance notation to dance and from text to performance is the constant practice process of the meaning of culture, and people who pass down the cultural heritage is also a cultural practitioner, and so-called protection and continuation of today appear to have been turned to a creative invention. On the other hand it shows that the process of Confucius Ceremony and Confucius Music and Dance's disappearance, from scratch and from the fracture to the rehabilitation is both cultural revival and continuation of tradition in invention. Last but not the least, Confucius Ceremony and its music and dance performance materialize Confucianism. Emphasis on that the dance is a text means that we should pay attention to the performance, dancers themselves, and the whole cultural expression through "reading" the dance language and the main body of the dance. Finally the paper points out that the key to the thinking on the problem what we come from and where we will go is man's practice of today.