A show of fighting spirit

Performers take 300-year-old warriors' dance to Europe for the first time as part of UK's Chinese festivities, report Zheng Wanyin and Wang Linyan in London.

For more than a month, Chen Jinxiang, a villager from Puning, a city in South China's Guangdong province, had been living a life like the fictional Clark Kent: working by day — in this case as the owner of an online clothes shop — and becoming a hero when needed.

But Chen was no superhero and adopted his hero persona for entertainment, along with other dancers in his troupe who practiced traditional Chinese Puning Yingge folk dance for an upcoming trip to London in February.

The dance, a national intangible cultural heritage in China, dates back to the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) and is considered a dance of heroic warriors due to its close association with the classic novel about Chinese heroism called Water Margin.

Through its combination of opera, acrobatic dance, and martial arts, it retells the stories of good suppressing evil.

Performers wear opera-style facial makeup in diverse colors and patterns that reveal the personalities of the characters they are portraying. And with a pair of short batons in hand, they jump, swing, and hit the sticks together while walking and dancing, all to the resounding beat of drums, gongs, and shouts.