How the 1,000-year-old lion dance has moved with time | Articles and Culture Issues

Taichung, Taiwan – First come experiments to warm up like a dozen boys – and one woman – to beat, sweep and pirouette in large drums. Then they take turns doing the same thing with a large lion’s head – which threatens to irritate younger students.

A few then experiment in pairs – one with the lion’s head and the other, twisted and covered with a cloth, slowly following to create the effect of a living animal. Eventually, the dancers will also need to adjust the doll’s face as they move, thus blinking and opening their mouths like real animals. At the end of every two to three minutes, everyone is out of breath.

“This is forbidden to do. We teach them new movements and they do it together 10 times,” said Chen Chung-yu, who heads the physical education department at National Taiwan Sport University including teaching students to dance the lion.

The point, he says, is to give students ideas on how to make a difference in testing different pathways.

The Lion Dance is one of the most popular dances in Chinese culture and is held year-round to celebrate religious festivals and bring good luck. Lunar New Year, however, is a very busy time in the year and a beginning Tiger Yearmany athletes have been preparing for weeks to play it over and over again.

Ceremony as a team game

For many Chen students, the lion dance is a cross between a sports team and a dance class.

Taiwanese students start practicing at an early age, such as tennis, soccer, or gymnastics.

“My family did not know what to do with me,” said university student Chen Zhenyuan, describing his strong personality as an eight-year-old. So his parents wrote him a lion dance.

His previous studies looked at various forms of lion dancing from southern China as a well-known form of “Cantonese”, whose furry shell can be seen on the streets from Hong Kong to London to chase disaster. The game is often very romantic, and the audience gives gifts to the lion as the actors make the animal flirt and sing loudly with the drums and drum beats.

Now that he is older, Chen has begun to study the amazing dance form of northern China or Beijing, where actors jump together on platforms like tables, mimicking the movements of a giant cat. .

There are competitions from the school to the international level and the International Competition at the Malaysian Highland Resort of Genting every two years.

The courage and bravery required in some sports is one reason why university student Qiu Zifang doubts that she is one of the few women to be trained than two female teachers. Qiu, who first saw a lion dance at a nearby temple, was encouraged to join his high school team and won several medals.

He says “because this is the culture of the people, there are many men”, in line with the differences between men and women in Chinese culture. In Taiwan, that attitude has changed because many school groups now receive public funding.

Chinese people in Malaysia have developed another form of lion dance on long poles, and have won several international competitions. [File: Ahmad Yusni/EPA]

Chen students also have the opportunity to study the Taiwanese styles of Hoklo and Hakka, who are from the first two ethnic groups on the island. The move to both nations is linked to martial arts as well as to immigrants in the past in order to maintain their resilience and martial arts, as well as Taiwanese military skills Songjiang Zhen or Songjiang Battle Array, Chen said.

New

In competitions, theaters are often divided into lion dancing “north” or “south” to judge, but there are significant differences depending on the location, culture, and other expert dancer, Tsun-Hui Hung said. , a Taiwanese singer and student who wrote about the history of lion dancing in Taiwan at the Association of Asian Studies.

“Chinese culture is not one big thing, it’s like an umbrella word. Then you have something called ‘lion dance,’ but the decoration and the way the stairs are very different from place to place,” he said at his home in Hawaii, who is also a singer. well known. they play erhu (a two-stringed instrument played with a bow) and are often accompanied by lion dancers.

“In Taiwan, in the 19th century, people danced for lions for the sake of gymnastics, but in some places they just wanted (action) to bring opportunity to the community, so they all had different reasons. ”Said Hung.

Lion dance is very popular with Chinese people all over the world during the Lunar New Year and the performances are closely connected. Here the dancer from the Bangkok band takes the instructions that the audience puts in the lion’s mouth [File: Rungroj Yongrit/EPA}

The development of the 1,000-year-old lion dance has benefitted from the huge Chinese diaspora, with overseas Chinese and Taiwanese keeping the tradition of lion dance alive when it was banned during China’s Cultural Revolution, while also adding their own spin.

Malaysian and Singaporeans masks are valued by many performers because they are made with lighter materials than the originals, while Malaysians are widely credited with developing a stunt where performers jump between high, narrow poles – sometimes over water.

Once a performance staple in Southeast Asia, the popular trick is performed in competitions around the world and has even made its way back to China.

Taiwanese melting pot

Many Taiwanese troupes also have a distinct flavour of their own thanks to the island’s unique immigration patterns, said Wang Qing-zhong, who heads the four-generation Ching Ho Kuang Lion Dance Troupe in Taipei’s Wanhua district.

Taiwan’s first immigrants originally hailed from Fujian but, at the end of the Chinese Civil War, millions of refugees fled to the island, bringing with them cultural practices from across the country. For the first time, people who had been isolated in different provinces suddenly found themselves living side by side for the first time.

As the first in his family to study lion dance, Wang’s father learned a hybrid style from the southern Guangdong and Guangxi provinces because its founding members – two military officers seeking to keep fit – created a single hybrid troupe that united styles from different provinces.

While the founders originally taught only students born in China, they eventually allowed in Taiwanese members like Wang’s father as old and new arrivals began to blend together, not only in cultural activities but also across Taiwanese society.

The Ching Ho Kuang Lion Dance Troupe has continued the Guangdong-Guangxi tradition even though their family originally came from elsewhere in China, but Wang says a similar pattern was repeated across Taiwan as styles became “mixed up together.”

Wang Qing-zhong, heads of the Ching Ho Kuang Lion Dance Troupe in Taipei displays one of his troupe’s lion masks  [Erin Hale/Al Jazeera]

The integration and cultural exchange between lion dance groups continues to this day, thanks to modern technology.

From the sharing of VHS tapes in the 1980s to the internet in the 1990s and 2000s, lion dancing has continued to take place.

“The process is getting more and more popular because you can watch a YouTube video of this and learn how to do it and it’s easy to go online and buy weapons, when in the past you had to go on your own to find someone to teach you,” Wang said. .

In Taiwan, the technique of learning to dance for lions still seems like joining a group or learning it in school, but by the time the Tigers Year begins, every type of lion dance will be on display worldwide.