Happy day 15. I’m not sure if that’s how you say it but it’s officially a wrap for Chinese New Year. It’s been an overcast day in Sydney so I didn’t get to enjoy watching the moon whilst I munched on tang yuen balls with the kids.

The past two weeks have been crazy in Sydney with performances left right and centre. I think we’ve been pretty lucky here with the city as a whole really getting into the celebrations and for their part, having lion dance teams perform and be part of the celebrations. There was a mix of community day events like those seen at Cabramatta, Canley Heights, Burwood, Eastwood, Hurstville, Bankstown, Chatswood, Fairfield Showground. Unfortunately, Rhodes had to cancel there’s due to terrible rainy weather. There were also plenty of shopping centres, banks hiring our teams and of course the streets of Cabramatta, Canley Vale, Bankstown, Flemington. I think it’s pretty hard to not bump into lion dancing at all during this period.

Of course, the highlights for me has to be firecrackers! So watching the teams perform in Cabramatta is always the best. Actually, I’ll have to give Flemington a bit of a shout out. I missed seeing Qing Fong perform here this year but I watched them last year and it was great. It reminded me so much of older Cabramatta where all the shops were prepared with their lettuce and red packets in advance so the lions could just go from shop to shop continuously rather than criss cross town for performances at certain shops and at specific times. I guess that’s how territorial Cabramatta may have become.

We’re a much smaller team this year so we only picked up a few gigs but it was great fun nonetheless. I took a break from two of the performances to take some pictures and just enjoy the performances for what it is. Our performance schedule culminated in our Cabramatta Lunar New Year showcase. We performed two lion routines and some kung fu demos. Our first routine was a “snake impedes” the path cheng. We thought we’d send out the old snake year with that one. The second routine I’ve coined as “the golden horse leaps forward” cheng. The premise of it is that the lion encounters the horse cheng which is made up of bananas for the body and red chilli’s for its mane and tail. The lion absorbs the strength and power from the horse and gains the ability to leap and jump. It then is able to dance over the benches to get the prize of the lettuce. It then returns to the horse and changes it the horse shape into a golden coin with the 4 words 馬上發財 in the four directions. I thought it was a pretty good play on words to wish the crowd gets rich quick as well as the horse literally changing its form to become $$$$$. We quickly distributed the bananas and some chilli’s to the crowd. As I was coming up with the concept for the Cheng, I did worry about the ability of the crowd to understand what we’re trying to convey. There’s a good chance that the majority of the people in the crowd weren’t Chinese, or can read Chinese or pick up on some of the subtleties. So I was thinking about how to make the symbolism as obvious as I could.

That’s one good thing about Cabramatta. All the teams have a little something different to showcase and I’d like to hope that we can continue to perform and set up these more “traditional” style routines and that people do enjoy it. I’m just mindful, that we still need to make it relevant enough for people to understand and entertaining and exciting enough for them to want to say, let’s go see Dragon Style Kung Fu perform because their routines are fun to watch!