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Taichung, Taiwan – First of all, a dozen young people – and a woman – are kicking, sweeping and pirouette training to warm up to the beat of a big traditional drum. Then, in turn, they make the same movements holding a large lion mask in their hands, which threatens to completely swallow some of the younger students.
Then some are practiced in pairs: while one holds the lion’s head, the other, bent over and covered with cloth, follows the step to create the effect of a surviving animal. Eventually, the dancers will also have to manipulate the puppet’s face as they move, so he gestures and opens his mouth like a real animal. By the end of the two- to three-minute routine, everyone is out of breath.
“This is a blocked practice. We teach them a new movement and they train together 10 times, ”said Chen Chung-yu, head of the physical education department at Taiwan National Sports University, in addition to training lion dance students.
The point, he says, is to give students a sense of how to improvise by testing different combinations of movements.
The lion dances are one of the most iconic performances in the world of Chinese culture and are performed throughout the year to celebrate and celebrate religious festivals. The New Year of the Moon, however, is the busiest time of the year and the beginning Year of the Tiger, many performers have been preparing for performances for weeks.
Tradition as a team sport
For many Chen students, lion dance is a cross between team sports and dance class.
Taiwanese students start practicing at a young age, such as tennis, soccer, or gymnastics.
“My family didn’t know what to do with me,” Chen Zhenyuan, a university student, said, describing her energetic personality as an eight-year-old. So her parents signed her up for the lion dance.
Her past training focused on the lion dance variants of southern China, in the iconic “Cantonese” style, moving her hairy, full-bodied mask away from the bad luck that can be seen on the streets of Hong Kong to London. The performance is usually very interactive, with the audience giving gifts to the lion, while the performers tie the animal and pose to the rhythm of the drums and the clash of cymbals.
Now older, Chen has finally begun to learn more North Chinese or Beijing-style acrobatic dance, where a pair of performers jump together on stacked table-top platforms and outside, mimicking the movements of a light, huge cat. .
There are international competitions from school to school every two years at the Genting resort in Malaysia with a World Championship.
The strength and agility required in some performances are one reason to suspect that Qiu Zifang University students are one of the few women practicing in addition to two professors. Qiu, who first saw a lion dancing in a local temple near his home, was eager to join his high school team and won several medals.
He says that “because it is a kind of folk custom, there are more men,” in line with the gender stratification found in traditional Chinese culture. In Taiwan, at least, this attitude has changed, as many school groups now receive government funding.
The Chinese community in Malaysia developed a kind of lion dance on high poles and won world championships on several occasions. [File: Ahmad Yusni/EPA]Chen’s students have the opportunity to learn Taiwanese Hoklo and Hakka styles, which come from two of the island’s first two Chinese ethnic groups. The two variants of the movement take root in the martial arts of dance, just as early immigrants practiced to maintain their physical condition and fighting skills, similar to Taiwan’s popular martial arts Songjiang Zhen or Songjiang Battle Array, Chen said.
Innovations
In competitions, performances are usually divided into “northern” or “southern” lion dances to standardize judgment, but there are many variations depending on location, cultural background, and even a particular lion dance master, Tsun-Hui Hung said. , A Taiwanese musician and scholar who has written about the history of lion dance in Taiwan, for the non-profit Asian Studies Association.
“Chinese culture is not just a big culture, it’s more like an umbrella term. So you have something called a ‘lion dance’, but then the way the decorations and the steps are done are very different from place to place, ”he said from his home in Hawaii, where he is also a well-known musician. he plays the erhu (a traditional two-stringed instrument played with a bow) and plays with lion dancers.
“In Taiwan, in the 1800s, people wanted to practice lion dancing because they wanted to have physical training, but then for other regions, they just want to bring good luck to the community (and do so) and so they have different reasons,” Hung said.
The lion dance is popular among Chinese ethnic communities around the world in the New Year of the Moon and the performances are very interactive. Here a dancer from a Bangkok group collects tips from the audience 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]This mixture and cultural exchange between lion dance groups continues to this day, thanks to technology.
From the sharing of VHS tapes of performances in the 1980s to the Internet in the 1990s and 2000s, lion dancing has continued to evolve.
“Practice is on the rise because you can watch a video on YouTube and learn how to do it, and it’s easy to get online and buy equipment, but you had to go first-person to find someone to teach you,” Wang said. .
In Taiwan, the method still chosen to learn lion dance seems to be to join a group or learn in school, but as the Year of the Tiger begins, all kinds of lion dances will be shown around the world.
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