Speaking at the opening ceremony of the festival, Mr. Uong Minh Long - Vice Chairman of Thuy Nguyen City People's Committee, Head of the Organizing Committee of the 2025 Spring Dum Singing Festival - emphasized that Dum singing is a unique folk art form that has been associated with Thuy Nguyen people for generations.
This is not only a form of artistic performance but also a way to express the spirit of solidarity and unity of the community, a place to preserve the legends and traditional customs of the locality. In particular, the festival was chosen to be held in Nam Trieu Giang ward - the core area of the ancient heritage of Dum Tong Phuc singing.
The Vice Chairman of the People's Committee of Thuy Nguyen City hopes that, along with the development of the city, the Dum singing festival will become a typical cultural festival, organized increasingly impressively, on a large scale and professionally.
The artists will continue to research and compose quality works that are close to life in the integration period and proactively propose good practices and effective models in teaching so that Thuy Nguyen Dum singing can develop further.
This year's festival attracted a large number of visitors, thereby contributing to improving the cultural and spiritual life of the people and developing tourism, promoting the image of Thuy Nguyen to friends inside and outside the city.
The 2025 At Ty Spring Dum Singing Festival took place over two days from February 1 to February 2 (ie from January 4 and 5), attracting 200 artists to participate. Previously, on the morning of the 4th day of Tet, the festival's Organizing Committee, members of Dum Singing clubs in Thuy Nguyen and local people performed incense offering and worshiping rituals at the village tutelary god temple of Phuc Le village, Nam Trieu Giang ward according to local traditional rituals.
The afternoon is the opening program of the festival with special performances by 9 Dum singing clubs from 6 wards in Thuy Nguyen city with 10 singing styles: Greeting, welcoming, meeting singing; Hue love singing; painting singing; Do giang singing; soldier singing; tobacco invitation singing; wedding singing; rich singing, wine singing, playing at home; going to school singing and going home singing.
In addition, within the framework of the festival, delegates and a large number of people also had the opportunity to interact with artisans and participate in interesting cultural activities and folk games.
According to the Documents of the Department of Cultural Heritage, Thuy Nguyen Dum Singing is closely associated with the formation and development of the population, mainly concentrated in agricultural areas. It can be said that the homeland of Hai Phong Dum Singing is Phuc Le, Pha Le, Lap Le communes (Thuy Nguyen), where the number of songs, themes, and ideological content are rich and diverse.
Hat Dum is a type of folk song, at first it was just a single voice singing, then there was a response to form the singing sessions, the response gradually became called Hat Vi. When the singing sessions were included in the Phuc Le pagoda festival, it was called Hat Dum.
At first, Dum singing only included greeting songs, congratulatory songs, question songs, riddle songs, painting songs, love songs and going-away songs. Later, soldier songs and letter songs were added. Dum singing mainly took place in village festivals (from the 4th to the 10th of the first lunar month). The rules of response were strict, and the side that could not respond would lose.
