Lion dancing over New Years

It’s always exciting to watch New Years performances from around Australia and the world.

The best thing I can say is the quality of lion dancing is definitely at a higher standard than what it has ever been and the lions are getting more and more prettier. I think one of the most impressive collection of lions was at the Richmond Victoria St Lunar New Year festival down in Melbourne Australia. There was a huge amount of colourful and pretty lions from both the Jow Gar Kuen school and the Dai Bi Quan An lion dance team. If you do a YouTube search, you’ll find plenty of videos of the two teams performing a meeting and then a set involving lots of beer and lots of alcohol! Looks like they had lots of fun.

Highlight reel of Jow Ga Kuen Melbourne in action

Sydney Dragon Style Kung Fu
Back in Sydney, I was able to participate in some of the lion dancing myself with the Sydney Dragon Style Kung Fu team. It was a jam packed day with lots of performances in a number of different shopping centres. It’s sometimes a little disheartening when you start a performance and not many shops put up a Cheng. All that hard work in training and not a time to demonstrate your skills. That felt like it might have been the case when we started at a few of the shopping centres but fortunately as we slowly paraded around the shops, it became was quite atmospheric as lots of the stores that we were approaching scrambled to hang up a Cheng. Everyone (shopkeepers of all nationalities) was getting involved and in the end it felt like we were rock stars!