Whirling Meteors and Tools of the Hunt
A shooting star flashes across the night sky and is gone, leaving a fleeting but unforgettable image. The acrobatic act known as Whirling Meteors, with its origins in the ancient skill of slingshot hunting, em-bodies just this type of ephemeral beauty.
A hundred millennia ago during the Paleolithic Age(c.2,000,000-8,000 BC), China’s prehistoric Dingcun Culture flourished on the banks of present-day Shanxi Province’s Fen River. Among the arti-facts unearthed from Dingcun archeological sites are a number of round throwing stones of various sizes, used by these prehistoric people for hunting. Their descendants invented a throwing weapon consisting of a flexible rattan strip attached to stone projectiles, that enabled them to bring down prey from even greater distances. Images of people wielding this weapon, which came to be known as the feishisuo, appear in 3,000-year-old cliff paintings in Cangyuan, Yunnan Province. The feishisuo even-tually evolved into pre-gunpowder weapons such as the liuxingchui,a throwing weapon composed of two iron balls affixed to a long iron chain, as well as the acrobatic props known as “whirling meteors.”
The Way of the Sword,a poem by the famous Tang Dynasty(618-907 AD) poet Du Fu(712-770AD), includes the following line:”Furious claps of thunder arriving, crystaline ocean and river receding.”
This description of the poet’s impression of a performance of Whirling Meteors by renowned acrobat Lady Gongsun, which he attended in 717 AD when he was six years old, captures perfectly the dazzling speed and momentum of the whirling meteors, and the contrasting serenity they leave in their wake.
Whirling Meteors is the acrobatic embodiment of power and beauty, speed and technique.
