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.