Teaching rhythm before asking students to freestyle.

So now that I’m teaching again, I know that teaching a catalogue of moves is not enough for us to be great. So where do I start. One thing that I’ve recognised as a point that is lacking in lion dancing training is following the rhythm of the music. 

For me, that has always felt quite natural. I’ve been watching lion dancing for a long time and I also drum, so I tend to just move with the beat without really thinking about it.

But I’ve realised that isn’t necessarily obvious to someone who’s new to lion dancing.

Let’s be clear: the lion should move with the drumbeat. There are set moves and beats when we head shake and set moves and beats when we pao si but when it comes to the walking beat, it’s generally up the lion dancers to freestyle and dance however they place. 

What I’m seeing is that a lot of lion dancers are just throwing out movements without really paying attention to what the drummer is doing. And what I’m hearing especially amongst the newer dancers is that they sometimes feel lost with what moves to do during the walking beat because there are no set moves. 

My initial answer was to teach them individual moves and then string individual moves together to form tried and tested combinations. But even then i felt like something was missing when the team was practising and then i realised it’s because the timing of the moves were off. 

The answer that I’ve come up with is, it’s  more important that the dancers move the beat even if the moves are basic and repetitive. In other words, the rhythm gives the lion something to move against. Imagine a breakdancer who dances out of beat to the music, or a freestyle rapper who’s singing out of tune to the beat. It just doesn’t look and sound right. But even an amateur back up dancer who’s bopping up and down to tune or the beat can look good. 

After learning a bit of piano, it seemed obvious to me that I needed to bring lion dancing back to the same thing.

Learn to move to the beat.

So that’s what I’ve been doing.

I’ve been getting the newer students to slow everything down. We count. We practise the movements against a rhythm. We work on moving the lion high, low and somewhere in between rather than just bouncing around at whatever speed feels natural. But always against a rhythm. 

I’ve even made the more experienced dancers go backwards a little to do this. (I might argue that they’re moving forwards as I think this will aid them better). They’re used to throwing out movements much faster and more freely, but I’m asking them to slow down and make those movements fit the rhythm.

I suspect some of them found it a little frustrating because it’s not how they’ve been dancing but I’m ok with that. I’d rather everyone learn to move together at a slower tempo first and once we’re comfortable doing that, we can speed things up and introduce different rhythms without losing the connection between the lion and the drum.

I encountered two sets of problems. 

The first problem revolved around the students who knew how to dance. After going through rhythm and trying to show them newer ways to dance out individual moves, a lot for them would invariably go back to what they already knew. Good movements but random timing. 

The second problem revolved around the students who hadn’t previously danced.  I think they grasped the concept of rhythm but it’s now a question of what combinations of movements can they dance to the music. We had practised individual movements and combinations but I found that most hadn’t quite developed an eye for how they fit together, nor how to string them together on the fly.  

So I decided to give them something to dance.

I put together a sequence of movements that everyone could learn. It’s essentially a series of four-move blocks strung together into a longer routine. I’ve chosen the movements and put them against the rhythm we’re learning.

That means they don’t have to stand there wondering what to do next. They can concentrate on moving, keeping the beat and making the lion look alive.

I’ve deliberately put in combinations that I think look good. Not necessarily the most difficult movements, but movements that flow into each other and create changes in direction, height and energy.

In other words, I’m giving them a model of how I want a lion to dance. They can copy it, they can practise it, they can get comfortable with it. And hopefully, over time, those movements and that rhythm become part of them so that they’re not just doing movements but Dancing.

What Penn & Teller taught me about watching lion dancing.

Recently, I’ve been watching a lot of Penn and Teller Fool Us. It’s just been a pleasure to watch great magic performances. And it got me thinking about the parallels between good magic acts and good lion dancing performances.

What particularly got me interested me was that the trick itself often seemed like only one part of the performance.

A magician could perform an incredible trick or sleight of hand, but there was usually a bit of a build up before hand. There was music. There was storytelling. There was comedy. There was timing. The trick might only take a few seconds whilst the performance leading up to the trick much longer, but what the magician does is engage the audience right the way through .

I think lion dancing can be a little bit like that.

We can become very focused on the tricks or difficult stunts. The jump. The thigh stack. The shoulder stack. The head sit. The acrobatics. The move that makes other lion dancers say, “How did they do that?” And those things are useful. They can be impressive and they can give a performance a highlight.

But I don’t think they automatically make the whole performance interesting.

I’ve watched lions perform technically difficult things and found myself losing interest. I’ve also watched lions do relatively simple movements and found myself wanting to keep watching.

When I used to put together a performance, my first instinct was often to think about what movements we can include. What tricks do we know? What haven’t we done before? What would look impressive?

Now I’m thinking whether I should treat lion dancing as theatre. What is the storyline? Where are the moments where the audience should be paying attention? Where can we slow things down? How else can we build the energy?

I’m not suggesting every lion performance needs a complicated storyline, characters and a dramatic ending. But I am starting to get a sense that there is more to putting on a good performance than collecting enough impressive things and arranging them into a sequence.

A good move can be part of a good performance.

A good trick can be part of a good magic show.

But the trick isn’t the show.

And I’m starting to think the same thing applies to lion dancing.

Learning the moves is one thing. Learning how to perform is another.

One of the things I’ve been thinking about since I started teaching again is that I can teach someone a movement without necessarily teaching them how to dance.

Previously, I taught moves — enough variations of head shakes, pao si and walking movements so that we could quickly get a functional group together and perform on the streets. Once the students were competent, the next step was usually to learn more variations. But I’m slowly realising that knowing a lot of movements isn’t necessarily the same as knowing how to dance.

Some lions are just more interesting to watch. It’s the way the dancers move. The way they string their movements together. The way they use pauses, direction changes and space. Sometimes it’s the tempo, or the way they make the lion feel lifelike without necessarily copying what a real lion, cat or dog would actually do. And I’ve seen some lion dancers do all of that with a relatively limited number of movements.

So how do I teach something that I’ve mostly learnt by watching others and developing a taste for what I like? I don’t think I have a complete answer to that.

I’m still watching other lions. I’m still finding movements and sequences that I like. I’m still stealing little ideas where I see something good.

But I’m starting to realise that teaching lion dance isn’t just about passing on a catalogue of movements.

It’s also about passing on an eye for what makes good lion dancing.

And I’m still developing that eye myself.

Sometimes the problem isn’t that something has changed. It’s that nobody noticed.

One of the things I’ve been thinking about since coming back to teach is how easily something can be passed from one person to another without anyone really understanding what they’re passing on.

I don’t think this is unique to lion dancing. Growing up Chinese, we had an altar at home. We would light incense and pray. At least, I assume that’s what I was doing. I watched the adults light the incense, hold it in their hands and mumble something quietly to themselves. So when it was my turn, I did the same thing. The problem was that I had no idea what I was supposed to be saying. Nobody had really sat me down and said, “This is what we’re doing, this is why we do it, and this is what these things represent.” I just watched. And then copied. For a long time, that seemed perfectly normal. Until I set up my own little altar at home. It took 2 years after we moved in to get there. And I only have it because, you know, it makes my house look a little more Asian and exotic and it gives me a reason to pass on some of my cultural roots. However, it’s rather basic and it’s missing all the extra paraphernalia that my parents have. There’s no fruit, no electric candle, no little speaker box that has a continuous Buddhist chant. I thought that I could explain all those things away. But I do have incense; and I have two little curious kids who have bluntly asked me, “what are you mumbling?, and why are we lighting incense?; and if it’s to respect our elders, how come we only do it when you remember (I light it about once a fortnight) and not every day like when you make us say good morning and good night to you?” I don’t have real answers to those questions, except that I did it out of habit because that’s how I remembered doing it as I grew up, but now when it’s convenient for me in a setting that looks a little less cluttered visually.

With that example in mind, the older I’ve gotten the more I’ve started asking myself whether copying something is the same as understanding it.

I think lion dancing has some of the same problems.

There are a lot of things that we do because we’ve seen other people do them.

You watch someone bow three times, so you bow three times. Someone else bows nine times, so perhaps you bow nine times. You watch the lions meet another lion and you follow along. You see someone perform an eye-dotting ceremony and you remember roughly what happened.

Eventually, one of those people becomes the senior person in the room. Then somebody asks them why we do something. And sometimes the answer is probably, “That’s just how we do it.”

I’m not saying that everything needs a philosophical explanation. Sometimes there may be a very practical reason that has simply been forgotten. Sometimes different schools may genuinely do things differently. And sometimes the answer might simply be that a particular tradition has been passed down that way for generations. But I think there’s a difference between saying, “This is our tradition and this is why we do it,” and saying, “We’ve always done it this way,” when really what we mean is, “I’ve seen other people do it this way and I never thought to ask.”

I’ve started noticing this in our own lion dancing.

One of the things I watched the students perform recently was the sleeping routine.

It was recognisably the same routine that I knew. The lion went to sleep, woke up and started cleaning itself. But as I watched it, something didn’t quite make sense. The lion would wake up, clean one part of itself and then go back to sleep. A little later, it would wake up again, clean something else and then go back to sleep. It was close enough that I could see where the routine had come from but it had slowly changed. And once I started looking at it as an audience member rather than simply as someone checking whether the students knew the sequence, it seemed strange. A lion doesn’t wake up, clean one eye and then decide it needs another nap. Then wake up again, clean its ear and go back to sleep. At least, not in the version of the story that makes sense to me. It sleeps. It wakes up. It stretches, looks around and starts cleaning itself. Then it gets going.

That may sound like a small point, but I think those small points are often where a performance starts to feel either polished or unfinished. If the students haven’t been taught the full sequence, they have to fill in the gaps themselves. And they’ll usually do that with whatever knowledge they already have. That’s perfectly understandable.

In fact, I think that’s exactly how these things slowly change over time. Someone learns ninety percent of a routine. They forget ten percent. When they teach the next person, the missing parts get replaced with something that seems to make sense. The next generation learns that version. They forget another small piece. Eventually, everyone is still performing what they believe is the same routine, but if you compare it with where it started, there are small changes everywhere.

None of this requires anyone to deliberately change anything. It just happens.

I’ve seen a similar thing with some of the ceremonial aspects of lion dancing. During an eye-dotting ceremony, for example, there are a lot of details things happening that a junior member might simply observe but pay no attention to. There’s the material- cinnabar, the ribbon for the horn, the pomelo leaves (these are usually left out because they can be harder to source), the peacock feathers, and then some sort of a school eye dotting ceremony poem is read, the eyes, facial features and body are dotted and the lions are alive. To the junior member, they might just be observing the ceremony with no need to organise anything or know the order in which things happen. Everything is simply there when they arrive. Someone senior knows what to do. And one day, without really noticing it, the junior person watching is now the senior. Someone else is looking at them. And that’s when you realise that if nobody ever explained it to you, you might not know what to do. So do we just fit in whatever feels right?

I’ve had that experience myself.

There are traditions that I know about because I’ve been taught them. There are others that I’ve done because I’ve watched someone else do them. And there are probably things that I don’t even know that I don’t know. That last category is the dangerous one. If I don’t know something, at least I have the opportunity to ask. If I don’t realise there’s something missing, I’ll never think to ask the question.

One small example came up during an eye-dotting ceremony.

After the lions had been awakened and had eaten the lettuce, the lettuce was tossed and sprayed towards the altar, where incense was burning, rather than placing it in front of the altar as an offering. I don’t think anybody was deliberately trying to do the wrong thing. They were doing what seemed natural. The lion eats the lettuce and scatters it. But that was exactly the point where I realised that some things need to be said explicitly. You don’t throw lettuce into burning incense. It sounds obvious when you say it out loud. But if nobody has ever said it out loud, perhaps it isn’t obvious at all.

The student isn’t responsible for knowing something that nobody has taught them. That has probably changed the way I think about my role as a teacher. When I first started, I assumed that if I demonstrated something clearly enough, people would pick up the details. Now I’m less convinced. Some things can be learnt by watching. Others need to be explained. And sometimes the explanation itself is the important part.

I don’t just want someone to know that the lion bows. I want them to understand when it bows, who it is bowing to and why. I don’t want someone to simply remember that the lion eats a lettuce. I want them to understand what that part of the performance is supposed to represent. And if I know why we do something, I want to tell them.

If I don’t know, I’d rather say that too. Because pretending that something is important when I can’t explain it doesn’t really help anyone. I think this is where I differ slightly from how I used to think about tradition. I used to think that preserving a tradition meant keeping everything exactly as I had been taught. I’m not sure I believe that anymore. I think the first step is understanding what you’ve been given. Then you can make a more informed decision about what should stay, what has already changed and what might need to change again.

But you need to know the difference between a tradition and a habit. One has been deliberately handed down whereas the other may simply be something that nobody ever got around to questioning.

And as I start going through our lion dancing piece by piece, I’m finding that there are probably more of those questions than I expected and that’s not necessarily a problem.