Dance in China

The earliest Chinese character for "dance" (舞), , written in the oracle bones, is itself a representation of a dancer holding oxtails in each hand.

[2] During the Six Dynasties era (220 - 589 CE), there were strong influences from Central Asia in music and dance.

For example, there are over 60 Grand Compositions alone, which are large-scale performances from the Tang court, and there were tens of thousands of musicians and dancers at the Imperial palaces.

[4] Furthermore, from the Song dynasty onwards, the practice of footbinding, which may have first arisen from dancers themselves, became increasingly popular, which limited the movements of women when the binding became tighter, and famous female dancers became increasingly rare after the Song dynasty.

[5] Greater social restriction placed on women may have also led to the virtual elimination of female dancers by the Qing dynasty.

A version of lion dance resembling the modern lion dance was described by Tang poet Bai Juyi in his poem "Western Liang Arts" (西凉伎), where the dancers wear a lion costume made of a wooden head, a silk tail and furry body, with eyes gilded with gold and teeth plated with silver, and ears that move.

In addition to daily life, every ethnic group likes to express their inner feeling the most by dancing.

Every time there is a festival, people will gather together to deduce the joy in everyone's heart in the form of dance.

According to Lüshi Chunqiu, during the time of Emperor Yao, a dance was created as an exercise for the people to keep healthy after a prolonged spell of wet weather.

[28] In modern China, it is common to find people using dance as a form of exercise in parks.

[29] During the Cultural Revolution under the control of Madame Mao, Revolutionary Model dramas came to the fore, and the repertory was eventually reduced to two ideological ballets – The Red Detachment of Women and The White Haired Girl.

[32] It was popular in the 1940s Shanghai nightclubs, and early Communists leaders such as Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai were also avid Soviet-style ballroom dancers.

Ballroom dances, however, reappeared after the liberalization of China later in the century, and it is now commonly found performed by many people in public parks in the morning as exercise.