The Research Of Errentai’s Culture And Artistic Features

ErRenTai is a type of folk drama, popular in the west of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, Shanxi, Shangxi and Hebei provinces. It is called by Er Ren Tai because it usually takes the form of singing by a Chou (the clown) and a Dan (the female role).ErRenTai is closely related to emigration culture of leaving for the western entrance. Its formation and evolution are based on the history that the people of Shanxi, Shangxi and Hebei Province went west to the Tumochuan Plain, Hetao. Its complex multieculture of leaving for the western, one of the population migrations in the Chinese historydimensional cultural characteristics were due to the collision, in the vast grassland, of the culture of Shangxi and Shanbei, the Chinese farming culture, and the one of Erdos tribe, the Mongolia culture, the coexistence of Mongolian and other ethnic groups, the fusion of various natural geography features and the mixture of a variety of folk music. Er Ren Tai, with such characteristics, records the long and arduous historical changes---leaving for the western. It also records the history of the Western Inner Mongolia and the changes of custom, language and culture. It experiences five stages---Da Zuo Qiang, Da Wan Yier, Feng Jiao Xue, Da Ruan Bao and Professional Troupe---during its development. It involves love, challenging feudal ethics, using anecdotes of the past to allude to the present and singing the praises of the traditional virtues. It has a short, simple, diversified, plain and humorous form by using the Western dialects, such as Reduplicated, Crosstalk and etc. Er Ren Tai, being the important part of the local cultural life, mixes folk songs, dramas, dances, vaudevilles, instrumental music and other forms of folk arts into one.During the development, Er Ren Tai gradually formed different artistic styles, including Eastern and Western. This paper only studies the artistic and cultural values of the Western Er Ren Tai. The paper analyzes Er Ren Tai to reveal its artistic characteristics, cultural value and practical significance by taking cultural mixture as the main line, the fusion of Mongolian and other ethnic groups as the cultural background from the multidimensional perspectives of folklore, sociology, anthropology and music under the cultural context of leaving for the western. The paper includes three parts:the first part discusses the initiation and development of Er Ren Tai, Through explaining its origin, generated time, geographical features, cultural background and several stages of development to find its root and sources; the second part mainly studies on styles of themes and artistic features by discussing its three main themes, performance features, music features and etc.; the last one focuses on the cultural value and practical significance of Er Ren Tai, and then proposes some views on its inheritance and development.