Making the Lion Alive
Reflections on teaching, tradition and lion dance.

For most people, lion dancing is something they might see once or twice a year. For me, it has been part of my life for as long as I can remember.

I grew up in Cabramatta where lion dancing was a pretty normal part of Chinese New Year. On weekends, I’d go and watch the local teams perform and drag my feet through the exploded firecrackers afterwards, trying to find a few that hadn’t gone off. During the week I’d be sitting in class at Cabramatta Public School hearing the crack, crack, crack of firecrackers somewhere in the distance and wishing I could be outside watching lion dancing instead of being at school.

So in 2001, I joined the Dragon Style Kung Fu School in Cabramatta. That’s where I started learning kung fu, lion dancing and the traditions that came with it.

A lot of what I learnt came from my Sifu and the people senior to me and later, from some fellow senior Dragon Style practitioners in Hong Kong. The latter came at a time when I had already been training for a number of years, but that renewed exposure opened my eyes to another level of drumming and lion dancing. I learnt techniques, rhythms and routines. We would train together, perform together and go and watch other teams. I would listen to their commentary about the little things they were looking out for. It might be something about how the lion moved, something in the drumming, or just a small detail that made one performance better than another.

Looking back, I think those conversations gave me a very high standard for what I believed good lion dancing should be.

I also watched a lot of lion dancing outside of my own school. When I was younger, a lot of the time I was simply trying to work out what moves people were doing. I’d see a sequence and think, that was awesome, and then watch it over and over again trying to work out exactly what had happened. Sometimes I’d slow the video down so I could copy the movements and figure out how the sequence was put together.

I still do that now. I haven’t quite reached the point where I’ve figured out lion dancing and stopped learning from other people. Actually, it’s a lot easier now to learn with the widespread availability of video clips of lion performances not just here in Sydney but all over the world.

If anything, the questions I’m asking have changed. Initially, I was mostly asking, What moves are they doing? Now I still ask that question, because sometimes the answer is simply, “That’s an awesome sequence and I want to know how they did it.”

But I’m also asking bigger questions and one that keeps coming back is: What makes a lion feel alive?

Why does one performance make me want to keep watching while another, technically more difficult performance leaves me looking at my watch? Why does a particular drummer make the lion seem more energetic? Why does one dancer make a simple movement look interesting while another can perform a much more difficult movement and somehow make it look ordinary? Is it the timing, the way the lion paused, the way it was looking around, how the drummer and lion seems to be working together, the energy of the lion dancer?

I don’t think I have a complete answer to that even now. I’m still watching other people dance and still seeing things that I like and trying to work out why I like them. The difference is that I’m not only looking at the sequence of moves anymore.

When our school was revived in 2012, I had the opportunity to help teach the first batch of students. At that point I thought I knew a lot about lion dancing, but looking back, I probably hadn’t thought that deeply about how to teach it. I showed the guys enough for us to perform comfortably, but I never got around to teaching everything I knew.

There were some paired movements that I thought looked quite flashy, for example, but they took quite a lot of time to teach. At that stage I thought the better use of our training time was to get people comfortable with the basic movements and give us enough material to put a performing lion out there.

Then life got in the way. Work took me away from Sydney, relationships changed, and I stepped back from training and teaching for a while.

I never completely stopped lion dancing, though. Every Chinese New Year and Mid-Autumn Festival, I’d still get a message telling me where to be. I’d turn up, pick up whatever role was needed—lion, drum, cymbals, sometimes the Big-Headed Buddha—and enjoy performing with everyone else.

For a number of years, that was enough.

Then after Chinese New Year this year, I volunteered to teach again.

And that’s where this story really starts.