The Tapestry of Folk Customs in Ritual Expressions: Hsinchuang Dizang Temple’s Lead Generals Performance

Abstract

Temples in Taiwan host colourful parades for birthdays of the divinities on specific dates of the lunar calendar, per ancient folk customs. These parades and rituals constitute a crucial and intangible heritage experience in Taiwan Culture. During these ritualistic festivals, leaders of the parade, known as ‘Jia Jiang’ (家將), put on heavy makeup, don colourful, religiously-symbolic costumes and move in a distinctive, choreographed procession that mesmerizes many. The Jia Jiang’s are folklore characters widely loved by the Taiwanese, and indelibly reenacted in dramas, animations and video games in pop culture.

Hsinchuang Dizang Temple (De Záng An), located in New Taipei City, is a Buddhist temple dedicated to Kṣitigarbha Bodhisattva, built in the mid-eighteen century to lay the neglected ghosts to eternal rest. The temple’s annual neglected ghost worship ceremony has been running for over a century. This ritual activity is listed as an intangible cultural heritage, the legacy of which also includes the ritual performance of ‘Lead Generals (Guān jiāng shǒu)’, which had originated here.

The heavy crowd and limited space of the temple courtyard have resulted in a scarcity of thorough documentation of performers' choreographed movements, and the import within. To secure the legacy of Lead Generals, and further expand the application of edutainment purposes, this study adopts the Optical Motion Capture as its digital documentation approach.

The tracking technique in Optical Motion Capture digitalizes the locomotion and performance of parade formations into 3D motion information. The information curated can thus be transformed and shared via a 3D-model platform, Sketchfab. In comparison with the traditional mentor-mentee materials (e.g. the textual narrative, or 2D images and video recording), 3D digital motion information can vividly present both the dynamic picture of parade formations and individual figures' movements, to timelessly acknowledges the ritualistic elements. The above outcome offers a more ideal solution in education programs, animations, interactive performance, and intangible cultural heritage preservation in the post-COVID-19 era.