The Wa people live mainly in China’s Yunnan Province, a beautiful place with mountains and river around. Since ancient times on, the maidens of Wa people have valued the hair length most. Maidens like to wash hair in front of the bamboo house and sit there to wait for the wind to dry wet hair gradually. What a beautiful scene! Black long hair dance with the wind.
Hair-swinging dance was originated from a beautiful love story 500 years ago. At that time, there is an affectionate couple. The man’s name is Qi Yan while the woman Daier Yi. The handsome and masculine man and his charming looking wife with long black hair are made for each other. One day, they went to dig some bamboo sprouts as food. Unfortunately，they were trapped by spider’s net among the bushes. Daier was in a very embarrassing condition for her long hair all messed up. Qi was expected to be very clever and invent a comb with bamboo to help his wife finishing her hair while they chatted with each other joyfully and sweetly. Under the moonlight, they danced and song happily with smooth hair flying about in the wind. From then on, Wa people have developed a convention that man comb hair for woman and woman dance with hair. The customs have been held nowadays.
Hair swinging dance has a strong rhythm and unchained melody. The movements are so elegant and unconventional,sometimes like flames roaring, sometimes like overshooting waterfall and sometimes like huge rolling waves. From the simple and straightforward primitive dance, we can see the true dance with most direct, pure and adequate expressions.
Hair-swinging dance has the efficacy to help people keep fit and beauty. As a famous saying goes, life lies in movement, hair-swinging dance is no exception.
Compared to other dances, hair-swinging dance is very similar to cervical vertebra dance with the basic movements such as swinging, whipping and rotating. Due to long time sitting in front of computers, modern people usually have problems such as exhaustion, body stiffness, neck ache and so on. Hair-swinging dance will definitely solve them.
Nowadays, hair-swinging dance is more and more popular in the society. In 2007, in the opening ceremony of Licang Tea Culture Expo, thousands of people did a magnificent performance together about the hair-swinging dance, which was granted by Guinness book of records’ Shanghai agent and reported by many media by its big cast, wild hair swinging and elegant movements.
