Xoe dance involves people holding hands and performing six traditional acts including waving scarves, clapping hands, and offering wine. Traditional Thai xoe dance can be found in the provinces of Yen Bai, Lai Chau, Son La, and Dien Bien, located in northern mountainous Vietnam.
It is believed that xoe took shape during very early times. Thai people, regardless of their age or gender, held hands together whenever they accomplished a great deed, conquer nature's challenges, or defeated an enemy. Even today, when they meet a challenge, they usually dance around a fire or a tree, called a cay xen xinh, made of bamboo pillars and decorated with bamboo or wooden animal effigies, colorful ornaments, and fruits.
There are three main types of xoe dance. They are performed at rituals, weddings, village festivals, and community events. These movements are performed with props designed to symbolize human activities in ritual, culture, life, and work. For instance, there are scarf xoe, conical hat xoe, fan xoe, bamboo pole xoe, music xoe, stick xoe, and flower xoe.
The circle dance, however, is the most popular form. Rhythmic steps are followed by the dancers, slightly arching their chests and leaning backwards. The basic movements are raising and closing the hands and then clasping the hands of the next person. Although simple, these movements symbolize wishes for community health and harmony.
Various musical instruments are used for the dance, including gourd lutes, mouth organs, drums, gongs, cymbals, and reed flutes. The instrumental music blends with the vocals of the women, and the jingling of the silver jewelry that hangs around their waists.
This step-by-step process allowed the dance moves to develop into xoe as they are today. Several of the traditional xoe dances describe daily activities such as clearing land for rice cultivation, collecting water, and offering wine. Although many of them are simple, most of them express the wishes of the Thais for community health and harmony.
Xoe Thai art symbolizes beauty, containing the artistic values of dance, music, singing, costumes, cuisine, and cultural behavior. As of today, xoe stands for hospitality, ethnic culture, and identification of Thai ethnic people in North-western Vietnam. Xoe dance is passed from generation to generation within families, troupes, and schools, and serves as a symbol of hospitality and an important identity marker for the Thai minority.