How to celebrate Panwang Festival

The Panwang Festival can be held one at a time, or it can be held in joint households or in gatherings of people of the same clan and clan. But no matter which form it is held, animals must be sacrificed and banquets must be held to entertain relatives and friends. The festival usually lasts three days and two nights, and some can last as long as seven days and seven nights. During the festival, the Yao people kill chickens and ducks. Men, women and children, old and young, dress up in festive costumes and gather together to worship Panwang, sing Panwang songs, and dance the Yellow Nail Drum and Long Drum to commemorate the merits of their ancestors and praise their heroic fighting spirit. Secondly, celebrate the harvest, reward King Pan, and have fun. At the same time, young men and women carried out antiphonal singing activities to seize the opportunity to choose their perfect match. In some places, flower sticks, fireworks, and opera troupes are invited to sing. The Panwang Festival ceremony is presided over by 4 main masters, each performing their own duties: the votive master, the soldier sacrificial master, the soldier appreciation master, and the grain master, each with 1 assistant and 8 assistants. In addition, there are 4 singers and singers. The teacher, 6 boys and girls, a long drum artist and the suona band participated in the Panwang Festival. Its inheritance methods are mainly teacher-teacher and family inheritance.

Panwang Festival - The ceremony is mainly divided into two parts. The first part is to invite the saints, rank in position, anoint the saints, attract crops, make vows, and thank the saints. The suona band accompanies the entire ceremony, and the master dances "Pan Wang Dance" ("Bronze Bell Dance", "Sent out Troops and Retracted Troops Dance", "Joining Troops Dance") "Standard Dance", "Soldier Dance", "Turtle Catching Dance", etc.); the second part is to invite the ancestor gods of the Yao people and the whole tribe to come and have fun. Liule means having fun in Yao language. This is the main part of the Panwang Festival. All ancestors and gods of the Yao people are respectfully invited to participate in various cultural and entertainment activities of the Panwang Festival, and sing the long historical poem "Panwang" that expresses the Yao people's mythology, history, politics, economy, culture and art, social life and other contents. Wang Dage". The Liule ceremony usually takes place for one day and one night.

1. Main procedures

The Panwang Festival has fixed procedures. The first thing is to worship Panwang. During the festival, altars are set up and statues of gods are hung. The largest one in the middle is the statue of Panwang, and on the left and right are the statues of Zhenwu, Gongcao, Tian Gong, Earth Mother, etc. The sacrifice begins with three shots of muskets, followed by the blast of firecrackers. Amidst the sound of firecrackers, village elders offered pig heads, glutinous rice cakes, chicken, wine and other sacrifices in front of the statue. People faced the statue, bowed their heads and prayed silently to express their respect and memory. After the sacrifice, everyone sang Panwang songs and danced Panwang dance. "Song of King Pan" is recorded in Yao books, which mainly narrates the life story of King Pan in poems, with a seven-character sentence pattern. The poems are refined and the tunes are elegant and rich. "Pan Wang Dance" is accompanied by drums and gongs. The dance steps sometimes jump up, sometimes squat, sometimes turn left, sometimes turn right. The movements are strong and powerful, recreating the simulated scenes of Yao ancestors farming, hunting, and going out to kill enemies. , and sometimes there are male and female accompaniments.

2. Panwang Song and Panwang Dance

The singing and dancing activities of Panwang Festival are mainly singing Panwang Song and long dance. "Panwang Song" is an epic poem formed in the Hui Ge Hall, and it is also a popular collection of Yao poetry. There are now three manuscripts of "Pan Wang Ge", namely twenty-four, thirty-two and thirty-six. Each of them has more than three thousand lines, and the total number reaches up to ten thousand lines. It is huge in length and rich in content. Rich, involving entrepreneurship, migration, farming, hunting, love, marriage, etc. It takes seven days and seven nights to sing "The Song of King Pan". At that time, 1-3 pairs of unmarried young men and women dressed in costumes will sing "Pan King's Song" under the guidance of a master or a singer. The master's assistant danced to the song and performed the story of Pan Wang's entrepreneurship.

The dance can be divided into "Pan Wang Dance", "Bing Jiang Dance", "Knife Dance", "Three Yuan Dance", etc., among which Pan Wang Dance is the most distinctive. Accompanied by the sound of long drums, the dancers sometimes tumble, sometimes spin, and sometimes jump. Most of the dance movements imitate labor movements, such as clearing land, sowing, afforestation, logging, hunting, etc. The movements are rough and elegant, and the rhythm is complex and changeable. The whole scene has a warm atmosphere, giving people a rough and unrestrained feeling like a mountain. When dancing the Panwang Dance, the statue of Panwang and banners with slogans such as Guotai people's peace and prosperity for all generations are hung around the dance hall. Panwang dance, also called Panwang dance, is usually danced on Panwang Festival. Sometimes, when men and women get married, they also dance the Panwang Dance on an auspicious day. Choosing an auspicious day to dance Panwang Dance after marriage is to ask Panwang to bless the couple to never be separated and grow old together. The Panwang dance performed by couples after marriage involves the newlyweds, led by Mo Gong, standing in a circle with young men and women. The woman holds a cymbal and the man holds a seal. They face the center of the circle, bend down and stretch out, and dance forward and backward.

With each step, the cymbals and hexagrams sounded. After jumping forward and backward toward the center of the circle for a while, the formation began to rotate counterclockwise. After dancing for a while, the couple both knelt down to worship the father, and then the dance ended. In addition to offering sacrifices to Panwang, Singpanwang and Dancing Panwang during the Panwang Festival, some places also dance with flower sticks, set off fireworks and sing love songs