PIEN HUANG, HOST:
Nearly 2 billion people are set to celebrate Lunar New Year Wednesday and the year of the wood snake. There are all kinds of customs and traditions that come with the holiday. Families gather to reflect, and there's food and fireworks to fend off legendary mythical beasts. One of the staples of Lunar New Year celebrations around the world is the lion dance.
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HUANG: Two people dressed in a long, colorful lion costume are dancing in lockstep with high-energy choreography. It's an art that dates back to the Han Dynasty and is said to bring good fortune and ward off evil spirits, but it is hard to pull off. Grace Yeoh found out firsthand. She's a correspondent for Channel News Asia, and she spent a full month with former global lion dance champions, the Singapore Yiwei Athletic Association.
GRACE YEOH: I wanted to try the physical aspects of it. So that's, like, actually being either the lion head or tail, and then going on the stilts. But because it was just a month, and I didn't have any prior experience before that - so I only tried the musical instruments, but even that was harder than I expected. I think a lot of people underestimate the importance of being on beat and having a sense of rhythm. I tried the cymbals and as well as the gong.
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YEOH: It didn't follow the usual five-six-seven-eight kind of dance rhythm that I was used to with my dance background. So for lion dance, the rhythm is not like that at all.
HUANG: And so, with the music, are there scores that people do? Is there a specific beat? Like, is there a message embedded in the - you know, the clash of the cymbals and the banging of the drums?
YEOH: Yeah, because according to legend, the banging of the drums and all that was meant to chase away bad luck, if I'm not mistaken.
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YEOH: But in terms of when I was learning, there wasn't so much, like, say, a physical paper in front of me to show me what beat do I hit the cymbals on. A lot of it was very intuitive, which I struggled a lot with, but I was also very impressed that these boys that I was training with could pick up these things so easily. It was very natural to them, like, to just listen to the rhythm and to internalize it.
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HUANG: Yeah. So it sounds like there is a particular, you know, rhythm and beat that is, you know, driving the lion dance. And let's talk about how that meshes with the choreography. So, as we mentioned, there's two people, one costume. How does that work? And is there, like, a specific design to the steps that they're taking?
YEOH: They would tell me things like, OK, we're going to move the lion head in a certain way, and then that is supposed to convey, like, a little bit of a playfulness or a cheeky vibe. And then sometimes the lion would move a little bit slowly to indicate, you know, that they convey some sense of being coy. But then again, it's also very much based on the individual lion dancers themselves because different people would have a different kind of dance style. And when I was there, they did mention that the partners, so both head and tail, have to kind of understand each other's body movement and rhythm in order to come up with what actions would feel most natural to them.
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HUANG: Yeah, I mean, that gets me to my next point, which is the crowd work. I mean, like...
YEOH: Yeah.
HUANG: ...When you see a lion dance in a parade or at a celebration, like, it is a very interactive experience. You know, the lion is winking at you or coming up to you and, you know, taking things from your hands. So tell me about those interactions with the crowd. Like, what types of interactions might the lion have?
YEOH: The way I noticed them work the crowd is - I guess maybe they'll pick out a certain member in the crowd who is exceptionally transfixed onto the lion, then they will saunter over, kind of tease the crowd member a little bit, you know, drop some oranges or, like, nudge the crowd member with the lion's head - things that will convey some sort of playfulness, I think, and things that the other crowd members watching will laugh at. I think that's always a crowd-pleaser - anything that makes everyone else laugh.
HUANG: That's journalist Grace Yeoh talking about the lion dance.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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