Firewood gathering dance is the representative folk dance of Li Minority, called "Zhuancha" and "Taicha" in Li's language. It originated from Li's funeral custom in ancient Yazhou Prefecture (today's Sanya City of Hainan Province). It is a dance for ancient Li people to protect corpse after someone died, to drive beasts away, to help someone get over a shock or to worship their ancestors. Presently, there is a funeral custom called "Hansai" in Li villages, that is to say, a corpse is placed in coffin for 12 days, 24 days or one month before being buried. In such a period, the dead person's family members and relevant people in surrounding villages will come to the family and dance every evening.
Firewood gathering dance is also called "bamboo pole dance". On a grain-sunning ground or a piece of level ground on hill side, two square woods as thick as a man's leg are placed in parallel with a certain interval to work as the cushion rack, across which several long bamboo poles as thick as a man's wrist are put. Pole holders hold one end of a pole with every hand respectively and knock the poles on cushion rack or other poles to produce rhythmical sounds, called "firewood gathering". A dancer or dancers will jump into the poles, skip back and forth, squat, and imitate human beings' working scene or various animals' actions and noises.
Pole holders could sit, squat or stand. The dance is compose of nine relative independent dancing gaits, i.e. paso ordinario, knife sharpening gait, rope twining gait, small frog gait, big frog gait, dog-chasing-deer gait, rice sieving gait, monkey-stealing-grain gait, and crow gait. With the rhythmical and regular sounds, dancers should spring up or down agilely at the moment when the poles open or close, and should also make grace movements naturally. When one and another pair of dancers jump out of the poles, the pole holders will hail "hey, he-hey" loudly. The atmosphere is rather hot. If any dancer is not good at the dance or timid, his or her feet may be nipped by poles or his or her head may be hit. If so, the pole holders will raise the person with poles and throw him or her out, and everyone will laugh. On the contrary, if any boy is good at dancing and is nimble enough, he may be popular among girls.
