Tano Festival (redirected from Dano-nal)

Tano Festival (Dano-nal; Swing Day)

May-June; fifth day of fifth lunar month

An ancient spring agricultural festival in Korea, the Tano Festival started as a planting ritual and a time to pray for a good harvest. It falls in the farming season between the planting of rice seedlings and their transplanting to the paddy fields. With the lunar Sol or New Year's Day and Mid-Autumn Festival, it is one of the country's three great festivals on the lunar calendar. Festivities in the countryside include swinging contests for girls: swings are suspended from tall poles or bridges, and the girls, sometimes in pairs, try to ring a bell with their feet as they swing. Boys and men sometimes compete in this, but usually they take part in ssirum, native Korean wrestling, a sport that can be dated to 400 c.e. Today ssirum matches are nationally televised.
In the usually sleepy east coast town of Kangnung, the festival goes on for nearly a week. Activities include a mask dance-drama of ancient tradition and shaman kut, ritualistic ceremonies combining theatrics with music and dance.
The ceremonies are performed by a shaman, or mudang, a priestess who is able to appease spirits to prevent natural disasters. The mudang is also a talented performer with supernatural powers when in a trance. A long-lived indigenous shamanistic faith of uncertain origin involves the worship of spirits and demons who reside in natural objects—rocks, mountains, trees, and so on. Shamanists also believe the dead have souls, and that the mudangs can mediate between the living and the departed.
Korea is nominally more than 70 percent Buddhist and more than 15 percent Christian, but it actively remains about 90 percent shamanist.

CONTACTS:
Korea Foundation
10-11F, Diplomatic Center Bldg., 2558 Nambusunhwanno, Seocho-gu
Seoul, 137-863 Korea
82-2-3463-5684; fax: 82-2-3463-6086
www.koreana.or.kr
Gangwon-do Tourist Office
15 Pongui-dong
Chunchon-shi
Kangwon-do, Gangwon 200-700 Korea
82-33-254-2011; fax: 82-33-249-4018
eng.gwd.go.kr/page/main.html

SOURCES:
BkHolWrld-1986, Jun 16
FolkWrldHol-1999, p. 374
HolSymbols-2009, p. 933