Beating a path to the Bird's Nest

Ma Cunming has been counting down to the Olympics for the last year, ever since he discovered he would be performing at the Bird's Nest on the opening night.

The 33-year-old villager and 40 neighbors from Ansai county in Shaanxi province will perform their famous Ansai waist drum dance, entertaining the stadium crowd and TV audience before the Opening Ceremony.

"We are so proud to perform before the Opening Ceremony and to show off one of China's best drum performances to the world at such an important occasion," says Ma, a leading Ansai drummer, who was even invited to teach it in New Zealand and Peru.

"Although we've had some experience in performing it at big events, we have still prepared and rehearsed very carefully and promise to bring our best performance tonight."

Dating back 2,000 years, the Ansai waist drum is one of the most famous folk instruments in China and almost every village in the county has its own teams.

As China is turning itself into a more open and market-oriented society, the local farmer drummers have also widened their horizons - they now travel across the country and wherever they go, they play their special waist drums in teams at local festivities.

Ma and his fellow drummers performed at the ceremony celebrating the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997, the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the founding of New China in 1999 in Beijing, and an event to showcase Chinese culture in Berlin in 2001.

Ansai waist drum is one of dozens of folk and ethnic performances that will be shown at the National Stadium tonight. The 600-year-old Taiping Drum Dance performed by 80 farmers from Gaolan county, in Gansu province is another famous drum show on the bill.

A team from Gaolan county performed the Taiping Drum Dance at the climax of the opening ceremony of the 1990 Beijing Asian Games. Ben Stevenson, then the artistic director of the Houston Ballet Company, watched the show and acclaimed it "the No 1 drum dance in the world".

The drum is shaped like a big cylinder, about 70 cm high and 45 cm in diameter. With a picture of a dragon drawn on its red body and a tai chi diagram encircled by the Eight Diagrams on its cowhide cover, the Taiping drum incorporates the most important symbols of Chinese culture.

In 2007, the Taiping Drum Dance was listed as a national Intangible Cultural Heritage and received funding from the government.

Apart from powerful drum dances, tonight's pre-ceremony spectators will also see yangge, dragon dancing, Tibetan drama and shows performed by ethnic groups like the Yi, Miao, Dai and Zhuang.