Human-AI Co-creation for Intangible Cultural Heritage Dance: Cultural Genes Retaining and Innovation

The hand-waving dance, originating from the Tujia family in China, represents an ancient sacrificial ritual and has attained recognition by being included in the national intangible cultural heritage (ICH) list. This study is committed to promoting its continuous development while retaining the cultural genes of hand-waving dance. Our contribution is tripled. First, in order to preserve the inherent cultural lineage of hand-waving dance, the performances of folk inheritors and their interpretation of the meaning of dance movements were carefully recorded through videos, thus forming a dataset of inheritors performances, which contains dance sequences and corresponding semantic annotations. Secondly, we introduced innovative choreography into the hand-waving dance with the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI), and then transformed the novel dance sequence into an experimental performance. Third, with the power of AI, we produced creative short films based on videos of experimental performances. The author emphasizes that the cooperation of folk inheritors, professional choreographers, designers, artificial intelligence engineers and other stakeholders will play an increasingly important role in the preservation, inheritance and dissemination of intangible cultural heritage dance.