Embodied Practice and Field Interweaving in the Qilin Baima Dance of Zhaoqing, Lingnan

Abstract

The Qilin Baima Dance is a folk dance form in Fengkai County, Zhaoqing, Lingnan, organized around the local narrative of Mo Xuanqing, the first zhuangyuan, or top-ranked imperial examination scholar, associated with Lingnan. Its performance mobilizes a composite set of media, including the qilin, the white horse, the ceremonial gate, parasols, lanterns, mountain songs, and percussion. Through the embodied techniques of riding, passing through the gate, interweaving movement, procession, and singing, it transforms the local memory of scholarly success and honored return into an embodied practice situated within village festivals. Drawing on theories of embodied practice, field-habitus, and collective memory, this article moves beyond treating the dance as a static intangible cultural heritage text. Instead, it examines the generative logic of the Qilin Baima Dance through bodily memory, spatial order, ritual relationships, and symbolic meaning. The study argues that its embodied practice emerges from the interaction among the landscape of the Lingnan borderland, village ritual organization, and zhuangyuan cultural belief. Its contemporary transmission therefore requires a relational reconstruction among body, field, and community, so that living continuity and aesthetic transformation can be achieved while preserving its core bodily mechanisms.