Most people use sound to communicate in their everyday life, but a dancer on stage uses his limbs and body to do the same thing. Just like the Chinese language, Chinese dance has its own unique vocabulary, semantics, and syntactic structure that enable a dancer on stage to fully express his thoughts and feelings with ease and grace. The art of Chinese dance traces its origins to even before the appearance of the first written Chinese characters. Ceramic pots have been unearthed in the Sun Chia Chai excavation site in Tatung County of the western Chinese province of Chinghai that depict colorful dancing figures. A study of these archaeological artifacts reveals that people of the Neolithic Yangshao culture of around the fourth millennium B.C. already had choreo graphed group dances in which the participants locked arms and stamped their feet while singing to instrumental accompaniment.

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