Who has the straightest waist drum?

The source of Ansai waist drum was the old waist drum in Hengshan County, Yulin.

Hengshan waist drum is widely spread in towns and villages in Hengshan County, Shaanxi Province. It is the most popular folk dance form in the local area and is deeply loved by people in northern Shaanxi. Hengshan county is known as the "authentic waist and drum nest".

Hengshan old waist drum has a long history. Legend has it that in ancient times, in order to adjust their lonely and monotonous grazing life, shepherds dug a hole with a tree root, stretched dead sheepskins at both ends, made drums, and trained their flocks to entertain themselves with them. Later, with improvisation and percussion, it developed into a simple and unrestrained waist drum art with Shan Ye style.

Some scholars have studied that during the Guangxu period of the Qing Dynasty, there were old waist drum artists from Hengshan who went to Yan 'an and Ansai to preach. In the seventeenth year of the Republic of China, the hungry people in Hengshan fled to Yan 'an and Ansai, and spread the waist drum in Hengshan to there.

According to Meng, a folklore scholar in Yulin City, it was a great immigrant in the Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia border region in the 1930s and 1940s. While singing the folk song Dongfanghong, the folk singer Li Youyuan also brought the waist drum art in Hengshan County to Yan 'an area, especially the Zhenwu Cave in Ansai and Xihekou Village, which are now the most famous for their waist drums. Some villages in Hengshan County moved here, and they brought the old waist drum in Hengshan County to Ansai.

So it can be said that Ansai waist drum is a genre developed on the basis of Hengshan old waist drum.

Hengshan old waist drum is a unique dance form for local working people to adjust their spiritual life and express their emotions. Its movements are rough and bold, vigorous and passionate, vigorous and powerful, smooth and elegant. During the performance, the formations are alternately interspersed and the footwork is changeable. Two people, four people and eight people fight, and the venue is a gossip pattern. With percussion music, it is lively, exciting and powerful, which fully shows the brave and simple character of northern Shaanxi people. Up to now, the old waist drum in Hengshan County is still noisy at every festival and jumps at every meeting. It still has some technical skills. Once the drummers jump onto the stage, there is no distinction between high and low.

From 65438 to 0985, professional dancers from Shaanxi Song and Dance Theatre excavated and arranged the waist drum of Hengshan Mountain and participated in the performances of Portuguese, Spanish and French folk art festivals.

In 2007, Hengshan Waist Drum named after "Hengshan Old Waist Drum" successfully applied for the first batch of intangible cultural heritage protection list in Shaanxi Province. In 2008, with the approval of the Ministry of Culture, it entered the second batch of intangible cultural heritage protection list in China.