Learning from piano, Wing Chun and the students in front of me.

I’ve now been teaching for about eight sessions, and my approach has already changed quite a bit.

Nobody ever taught me how to teach lion dance. I’ve been taught lion dance, but that’s not quite the same thing. I’ve spent years being a student. Someone showed me something, I tried it, I got it wrong, someone corrected me, and I practised it until I could do it. Turning all of that experience into a lesson that works for a room full of different people is something I’m having to work out as I go.

I also don’t know how long I’ll be teaching for this time around. It might be years, or life might get in the way again. That makes me quite conscious of how we use our training time. If I’m going to give up my time to teach and they’re going to give up their time to learn, I’d like us to make the most of it. I want them to actually leave better than when they arrived. I also want to leave an effective way of teaching so that the current cohort of students will find it easy to teach the next group.

When I first started, I wrote myself a fairly ambitious lesson plan. I basically made a big reference guide of all the different lion dance movements I knew and thought the students should eventually learn. I split it into head shake variations, walking variations, pao si variations, bowing variations, eating a lettuce variations and so on.

My idea was to show them all of these movements early, let them see what was possible, and then come back later and break them down properly. I’m not sure that was particularly useful and in hindsight, maybe have wasted a session or two trying that approach.

There’s a big difference between seeing someone perform a movement and being able to perform it yourself.

I could demonstrate something and the students could understand what they were looking at, but that didn’t necessarily mean they had any better ability to actually do it. There are plenty of things I’ve watched other people do where I thought I understood what was happening, only to try it myself and realise I had no idea.

So I’ve started moving in another direction. Rather than showing them everything, I’m breaking things down much more.

The biggest thing I’ve added is timing.

This actually came from learning piano. I’ve been trying to teach myself piano through online lessons and one of the things I really liked was how the teacher stripped everything back. Before worrying about playing complicated pieces, there was counting. There was clapping. There was learning to feel where the beat was. Each time we moved along with the lessons, there was a reminder to go back to the earlier lessons and repeat them, this time using skills that we’re developing. Our timing and dexterity should be better.

That made a lot of sense to me for lion dance.

I’ve started teaching the students to count out movements rather than simply copying what I’m doing. We count the beats, we put movements against those beats and then we practise them again and again.

The idea isn’t to learn something once and then move on forever.

You learn something, then you learn something else, then you come back to the first thing. You keep revisiting the foundations while adding new material. The beats don’t change just because you’re learning something more complicated. The basic movements don’t disappear just because you’ve learnt another ten movements. Ideally, you’re doing the same moves better.

That’s something I’ve also experienced through my Ving Tsun training.

My Sifu is quite good at letting people make mistakes. He’ll correct something, but he doesn’t try to correct everything at once. Sometimes it’s one small detail. A few minutes later he’ll come back to another detail. Eventually, those little corrections start to add up.

I’ve realised I’m naturally inclined to do the opposite. I see ten things that could be improved and I want to tell someone all ten. I’m having to learn to hold some of that back.

If someone isn’t doing something perfectly but they’re competent enough to move on, perhaps it’s okay to move on. I can always come back to it later.

That’s probably where my teaching has ended up at the moment.

If they’re competent, we move on.

It doesn’t mean they’ve mastered it. It just means they’ve got enough of it that we can build on top of it. And as with the piano lessons, even as we build on top of it, we continue to come back to these foundational movements to try to master them.

I’m finding that this is also changing the way I think about what a lesson should look like. I don’t necessarily need to show the students everything I know. In fact, doing that might be counterproductive. There is a temptation when you know something well to show people all the interesting things because you want them to see what’s possible.

But sometimes the most useful thing I can do is spend twenty minutes on something that looks very basic. If they can count properly, move properly and understand what they’re doing, then the more complicated stuff becomes much easier to teach later.

The other thing I’ve taken from Ving Tsun is the idea of getting senior students to teach junior students. My Sifu does this deliberately. When someone is learning a form, they don’t just learn it from him. Once they’re ready, he gets every student who have already learnt the form to teach it.

There’s a practical reason for this. Teaching exposes what you actually know.

You can think you understand something until somebody asks you to explain it. Then suddenly you realise there’s a section you don’t really understand, or you’ve been doing something for years without knowing why. Or you may have made something up because you forgot.

It also means the junior student gets to learn from several people. Everyone has slightly different strengths and remembers different details. One person might be particularly good at explaining the footwork. Someone else might be good at the hand movements. Someone else might have a really good understanding of the body mechanics. We end up learning the strengths of different people.

I think there is something useful there for our lion dance training too.

At the moment, I’m still doing a lot of the teaching myself. In fact, I’m probably micromanaging it more than I eventually want to. But I think there’s a reason for that. I’m still trying to establish a baseline.

I want to see what everyone’s actual skill level is. I want them to understand what I think good lion dancing looks like. I want to make sure that when I eventually ask someone else to teach a movement, they’re not teaching the version they’ve half-remembered from three years ago.

Once that foundation is there, I’ll be much happier handing things over.

If someone forgets a movement, I want them to be able to ask someone senior. If someone doesn’t understand a routine, I want them to be able to work through it with someone else. And if the senior student can’t explain it, that’s useful information too. They can come back to me and ask or go researching the answer for themselves.

I hope in this way, the knowledge and skills starts becoming something the whole team owns rather than something than just in my head.

It’s only been eight sessions, so I’m still working out what works and what doesn’t.

There are also a lot of things I haven’t worked out yet. I’m teaching people of different ages, different physical abilities and different levels of experience, and I’m finding that what works for one person doesn’t necessarily work for another. That’s probably going to take me a while to figure out.

But that’s probably one of the more interesting (often frustrating) parts of teaching for me so far. I thought I was going to spend my time teaching lion dancing. Instead, I’m finding that I’m having to work out how I think people actually learn and adapting to them.

And I’m borrowing quite a bit from the other things I’ve learnt along the way.

Passing on what was taught, and filling in what was missed.

When I volunteered to teach again after Chinese New Year, I had a fairly good idea of what I wanted to teach and achieve. I also quickly realised that knowing something and teaching it are two very different things.

The first time I taught, I had a fairly simple objective. I wanted the students to know enough lion dance that we could put a lion out there and perform comfortably for Chinese New Year.

There were certain routines and partner movements that I knew, but some of them were quite flashy and took quite a lot of time to teach. At the time, I decided that the return wasn’t really worth the investment. If I could spend that same time teaching another group of movements that would allow the students to perform more of a complete routine, that seemed like the better use of our training time. Skills like shoulder stacking, eating a lettuce and bowing, what to do at an altar were much more important than spinning in a lion.

Looking back, I was teaching but my knowledge was also much narrower. I knew a collection of movements. I knew some routines. I had an understanding of what made a basic routine work. I knew how to perform them and I could teach enough of them for a team to get out there and do a performance.

What I know now is quite different.

I still know those routines, individual moves and sequences and I’m still building up my repertoire. But I’m increasingly interested in everything around those movements as well.

Why does the lion move that way? Why does the drummer play that beat there? Why does a performer pause? Why does one simple movement get a bigger reaction than a technically difficult one? Why does one routine feel like it has a beginning, middle and end, while another feels like a collection of tricks?

And perhaps most importantly, how do I actually teach someone else to understand those things?

That last question is probably the biggest difference between what I knew then and what I know now.

When I taught the first group, I was mainly passing on what I knew how to do. Now I’m thinking much more about why we are doing it and what I want the students to understand when they eventually start making their own decisions.

This has also made me look differently at what happened to the team while I was away.

I don’t think anyone deliberately changed what we were doing. That’s not really how traditions disappear.

Imagine a Chinese restaurant.

You have a Chinese chef teaching the next chef how to cook. The next chef learns most of what they were taught, forgets a few things, changes a few things and eventually teaches someone else.

Then perhaps that next generation doesn’t have a Chinese chef teaching them anymore. They know some Chinese cooking, but there are gaps in their knowledge. So they start looking elsewhere.

They see something at a Vietnamese restaurant that looks good, so they borrow it. Then they see something at a Thai restaurant and borrow that too. Then perhaps they see something from another style of cooking altogether and incorporate it into their cooking.

None of those dishes are necessarily bad. They might actually be very good.

But if you keep doing that because you’re trying to fill gaps in your knowledge, eventually you end up with a Chinese restaurant that is serving Chinese-Vietnamese-Thai fusion without ever having deliberately decided to become a fusion restaurant.

That’s how I started to think about some of what I was seeing in our lion dancing.

There were things being done that weren’t necessarily wrong. They were just things that had been picked up from somewhere else, or used because they seemed to work, or because there was a gap where nobody really knew what was supposed to go.

And that’s different from deliberately going to another restaurant because you want to learn something different.

If I know how to cook Chinese food properly and then I go and learn Thai cooking because I want to experiment, that’s a different situation. I’m not borrowing Thai cooking because I don’t know how to cook Chinese food. I’m borrowing it because I want to explore something outside of it.

That’s the distinction I’m interested in. I don’t want our students to think they need to copy other teams because there are gaps in what we know. I’d rather fill those gaps first.

Once they have a good understanding of our own style, then if they want to look at what another school is doing, or another style of lion dancing, or even something completely outside lion dancing, they can make a conscious decision about what they like and whether it belongs in what they’re doing. That’s much more interesting to me than simply adding more things because we don’t know what else to do.

And that’s probably one of the reasons I wanted to teach again. I don’t think the answer is to tell everyone to stop looking at other teams. Quite the opposite. I want them to watch other teams. I want them to steal good ideas in the sense that performers have always learnt by watching other performers.

But I’d like them to have a strong foundation in their own lion dancing first, before they decide what they want to add to it. And I’m increasingly realising that having that foundation means more than simply showing someone how to do a movement and hoping they pick up the rest by watching.

It means I need to think carefully about what I know, what I assume people know, and what actually needs to be taught.

And that’s turned out to be a much bigger job than I initially thought.

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.