Zhang Fuyu, leader of the Tangqiao Folk Arts Troupe, at a matou haozi rehearsal Photo: Cai Xianmin/GT

The troupe performs at the 2014 Shanghai Citizens Art Festival. Photo: Courtesy of the Tangqiao Folk Arts Troupe

 

A group of elderly men in a rough blue and white uniforms with towels around the necks move slowly and rhythmically across the stage, pulling a rope and singing and chanting as they haul their unseen heavy cargo along.

They are singing Shanghai dockers' work songs (matou haozi), the rhythmic songs and chants once used by dockers in the city ports as they hauled ships and cargos into berths and unloaded heavy items. The music, with its insistent beats and simple melodies, kept the dockers in time with each other.

The performers bringing this art form back to life from its origins in the 19th century are members of the Tangqiao Folk Arts Troupe in Shanghai's Pudong New Area. The troupe of more than 20 retired workers, most now in their late 60s and early 70s and from the Tangqiao neighborhood, are all enthusiastic about their new careers in show business and happy that the local government in 2005 decided to set up this unique theatrical company to help preserve some of the area's older art forms which were facing extinction.

Closely related

 "Unlike other folk music, matou haozi was only sung by dock workers. The songs were so closely related to the dockers' daily work that now they can only be revived by properly-trained performers as there's no longer any workers laboring like this on the city's docks now," Luo Jianchuan, the director of the Tangqiao Community Cultural Activities Center, told the Global Times.

According to Luo, in 2008 matou haozi was listed as one of the country's intangible cultural heritages because of its cultural value and historical importance. "Matou haozi is such a key record of the city's history and development that it has to be preserved and passed on," he said.

Shanghai dockers' songs can be traced back to 1843 when the city was forced to open up as a trading port. In a mere couple of decades, Shanghai grew to be the country's shipping center with a 10-kilometer-long coastline, the home for 80 or so dock areas.

The city's ensuing expansion as the leading port in the Far East created a new breed of worker, the docker.

 "Most dock facilities in old Shanghai were crude and basic. The job of loading, unloading, carrying and hauling the large and heavy pieces of cargo belonged to the local dockers. To move huge items they had to work together, moving and pulling at the same time. That's how the work songs originated - they helped coordinate the dockers so that they could pull and heave together. The songs also helped relieve the stress and discomfort the dockers suffered constantly," Zhang Fuyu, the 70-something leader of the troupe told the Global Times during a recent rehearsal.

The troupe meets every Thursday afternoon to rehearse and work on new routines. "As most dock workers in Shanghai have now passed away, it has become very difficult to find and record songs that were being sung more than 60 years ago," Zhang said.

Fortunately, local music experts and researchers lent a helping hand to the troupe by sharing the music recorded in the late 1950s and the early 1960s when the number of dock workers started to drop noticeably with the modernization of the port of Shanghai. "When we first started to perform the dockers' songs back in 2006 and 2007, we stuck with the most original forms to reinterpret this grass-roots art," Wang Yougui, the artistic director of the troupe, explained.

According to Wang, whose grandfather once worked on the city's docks, groups of dockers from different parts of the Yangtze River and other neighboring provinces dominated the docks along both sides of the Huangpu River.

Distinctive styles

Most of the dockers were poor people, farmers, fishermen and boatmen and there were groups from Shanghai, Ningbo, northern Jiangsu, Anhui, Hubei and Shandong provinces. Each group had its own distinctive style of singing, usually distinguished by their dialects and accents.

"The songs sung by the dockers from Jiangsu and Hubei were the most popular and typical of the time. And as most dockers were seasonal workers and they traveled from one dock to another, the work songs were passed down by word of mouth, from kinsmen to townies," Wang said.

The songs were a vital part of dockers' lives, he said - the rhythms and pace of the songs helped keep the men working in unison and probably helped prevent injuries or even death in a rough environment.

While the old versions of matou haozi the troupe performed in the first couple of years of its formation were true to the original work songs and vividly reflected the daily drudgery on the ports, Wang admitted they were a little raw and unsophisticated for theatrical performances.

"To make our performances more accessible and entertaining, we added some innovative and artistic touches so that the work songs appeal to a wider audience."

The routines created over the last couple of years are much more sophisticated and diversified. Wang recently created a segment involving the legendary Shanghai character San Mao, an orphan who was cruelly treated by his superiors but managed in the end to escape and live happily in the city. In the show San Mao finds himself work as a docker and, after the orphan explains his plight, he joins in singing with other dockers. Other sequences include monologues and poetry.

The new act has been enthusiastically received by audiences. The troupe has performed throughout the city and around the Yangtze River Delta, has toured to Germany and Brazil on cultural exchanges and has won dozens of awards for its presentations and its contribution to the preservation of matou haozi.

"While our lives after retirement have been greatly enriched by joining the troupe, most of us are also driven by a strong sense of responsibility to carry on this valuable cultural heritage as few young people these days really know the history of Shanghai," team leader Zhang Fuyu said.

Luo Jianchuan also called for more support to help preserve matou haozi. "Despite all the things we've been done over the past few years, there are still only a handful of people out there performing the dockers' songs apart from us, which is not enough to promote and preserve this properly. We really hope that matou haozi can be seen on a bigger public stage in future," Luo said.