Teeing up the tea dance

By Shen Yuan, Yichang International Communication Studio

Tang Ningli is a music teacher with a love of movement and a love of tea.

A teacher at Wufeng Vocational Education Center, she has created a set of dance movements set to music that present tea culture in a lively and attractive manner.

Wufeng is a tea-producing county where tea plantations cover an area of 221,000 mu (14,733 hectares) and more than 70 percent of the population are involved in tea production and sales in some manner.


In 2012, Tang came to Wufeng Vocational Education Center to teach music. As she learnt more about the county, she began thinking about an art form that would connect art education with the tea industry.


In the fall of 2018, Tang founded the "Tea Journey" art club. She visited more than 180 tea farmers and 30 enterprises and observed the movements tea farmers made when planting, weeding, fertilizing, cutting and picking.


Those movements formed the basis of the tea dance movements. By December 2020, the set of movements had been completed and it went on to gain the approval of a team of national experts.


The tea movements combine the rhythm of dance and the strength required for physical exercise. Scenes of tea picking, tea making and tea tasting are presented in an artistic way.

Tang has now been working in the training center for 11 years. Nearly half of Wufeng’s more than 200 tea processing enterprises have hired her students, and the tea movements she helped create can be seen in the county's tea market, in tea sales outlets and in tea tourism activities.

Pictures by Bailonggang Chronicle.