Snowflakes are everywhere, and gongs and drums are heard. The dancing red silk and colorful flags were as hot as flames. The giant dragons were leaping in the center of the stage, and the lions were waving their unique skills and flew up and down, winning cheers... "Start the drums and dance the dragon" Urumqi's social fire welcoming New Year's event was recently launched under the Xinjiang International Bazaar Tourist Tower. This year is the first time that Urumqi has held a social fire welcoming New Year's performance.

Civil Society Fire (Xinjiang Society Fire) will be included in the National Intangible Cultural Heritage Representative Project List of Extended Projects in 2021. This social fire welcoming Spring Festival couplet activity included more than 100 teams and more than 5,000 members. The audience can not only see traditional community fire performances such as dragon and lion dance, stilt-dry boats, yangko gongs and drums, but also enjoy local cultural characteristics such as Xinjiang Flowers and Maixi Refu, which are full of New Year atmosphere.

In the Urumqi Railway Garden Cultural Square, teams from the High-tech Zone, Midong District, and Ganquanbao Economic and Technological Development Zone showed their new style with full enthusiasm at the "Start the Trouble and Dance the Dragon" activity sub-venue.

Liu Kaiqiang, an employee of Xinjiang Derun Thermal Power Co., Ltd., and his teammates were wearing silver-white "space suits" and red safety helmets. The steps were uniform, and the movements and flags were cleverly coordinated to show the style of industrial technology; the street dance team members were wearing gray work clothes, following the rhythm of the music in an orderly manner; the lion swelled up and down in the snow, landing steadily... The audience called it novel and interesting. "The social fire has a strong industrial style, and this combination is quite creative," said Li Muzi, a citizen.

The performances of the Ganquanbao Economic and Technological Development Zone Community Fire Team are diverse, highlighting the modern science and technology and industrial elements of the district. At the same time, they integrate into modern corporate culture and produce logos and slogans of dozens of backbone enterprises and leading enterprises in the district, showing the corporate style.

Many teams incorporate new elements into their performances. The "Economic Development and Development Upward" modern industrial fire team formed by enterprises such as automobile manufacturing, food processing, cultural and tourism parks, cleverly integrates representative industrial products such as the "China-Europe Express", "Cotton Picking Machine", "Excavator" and other elements, as well as intangible cultural heritage, animation, and national trends into the fire performance. Through program innovation, the changes in urban development and the lives of people of all ethnic groups, as well as their expectations for the New Year are shown.

"Life is getting better and better. Through the social fire performance, we express our blessings and love for the city of Urumqi." Liu Kaiqiang said.

The early musical instruments of the civil society fire performance in Midong District mainly relied on "knocking", and the performances mainly relied on "twisting", and the performers were older. Today, civil society fire has become a part of the cultural life of local people, with more and more participants and more and more age groups.

So Yating, a member of the social fire team, is from Shierhuxi Village, Sandaoba Town, Midong District. She is the new face of the social fire performance team this year. The community fire performances in Midong District, Urumqi have a deep mass base and cultural atmosphere, and Sandaoba Town is even known as the "hometown of community fire".

Su Yating was initially very hesitant when choosing the stilt walking project. Stilt-strolling is one of the more difficult events in the community fire performance. Among the 15 Midong District teams participating in the joint performance at this branch venue, only Sandaoba Town team has this event. With the patient help of Zhang Yahan, secretary of the Youth League branch of Sandaoba Village and members of the town fire team, she learned to walk on stilts in less than half a day.

Su Yating's father and younger brother were also in the club fire performance team. One of them danced the dragon head and the other rowed the dry boat. There are many families like this who "the whole family goes together" in the "Sandaoba Town" performance team. Fan Zhongcheng, Party Secretary of Sandaoba Town, introduced that a total of 244 villagers participated in the community fire performance this time, and everyone was very enthusiastic. Not only were there old comrades who had participated in the performance for more than 20 years, but more and more young people also joined in, forming a lineup of the combination of the old, middle-aged and young generations.

"Sandaoba Town has a deep foundation in folk culture and art. In recent years, the Party's good policies for rural revitalization have been continuously implemented, everyone's lives are getting better and better, and spiritual demands are getting higher and higher. More and more young people are willing to join the social fire performance." Fan Zhongcheng said.

Sandaoba Town strives to build a cultural brand, continuously protect, inherit and carry forward traditional folk art, empower beautiful villages with distinctive culture, attracting nearly 400,000 tourists every year, and the villagers' lives are getting more and more prosperous. In recent years, the local area has vigorously enriched the cultural life of villagers, and organized cultural and artistic backbones of each village to carry out community fire performance training for villagers every month, and actively carried out form and content innovation. During this year's performance, the team members added shadow puppetry elements to incorporate the content of rural revitalization on the basis of adhering to traditional social fire performances.

From cities to villages, streets to communities, schools to enterprises... The steaming Xinjiang community fires dance people's longing and blessings for a better life. (Source of this article: Economic Daily Reporter: Qiao Wenhui Fan Chuchu Li Qiuyang Geng Dandan)