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The lion dance is a buttress of Chinese festivals within Vancouver’s vast Asian community.
By Jean Sorensen
Vancouver has a adore eventuality with lions, not customarily since of a Lions Gate Bridge and a B.C. Lions Grey Cup champions, though also since a lion dance has turn a informative buttress of many Chinese festivals within a city’s vast Asian community.
Now Royal Pacific Realty, with 3 offices (Kingsway, Oakridge and Richmond) believes it is a initial real estate classification in Canada to start a possess lion dance group done adult of Realtors.
“We had some-more people wish to join than we needed, so we had to cut it off (at 20),” says Ed Fung, vice-president/development for Royal Pacific Realty. A watchful list now exists. Only 13 to14 people are indispensable for a firm’s lion dance demonstration, that consists of dual lions, and people personification low-pitched instruments such as a gong, drum and carillon that paces a lion as a teams dance. The lion dance is mostly confused with a dragon dance. However, a lion has customarily dual people in a dress with one as a conduct and a other as a tail. The faces of a dual dancers are mostly hidden. The dragon can take many people and customarily a conduct is on a stick so that a lead dancer’s face is seen.
The lion dance is many informed during Chinese New Year as it prances via a blurb zone in Vancouver in hunt of a immature lettuce that shopkeepers place outward their doors. The lettuce symbolizes income and a lion snatches a lettuce to weigh good fitness and wealth for a new year. At one time a lion dancers were comparison martial artists who came from kung-fu organizations. Lettuce was placed adult high and a exercices used to strech a lettuce was partial of a show. Today’s dance is some-more moderate, nonetheless kung fu clubs are still a guardians of a event.
The lion dance is also achieved during special events such as weddings, residence warmings, emporium openings, or, as Fung says, when a B.C. premier attended a jubilee to symbol a launch of a trade goal to China. “It brings good fitness to a emporium or good fitness to a home,” he says.
Ed Fung, right, was dynamic to learn a lion dance and brought a thought to a brokerage. (Photos by Craig Hodge)
Fung became meddlesome in a lion dance about l0 to 15 years ago when dual lions came to a jubilee and demonstrated. “I wish to do that,” pronounced Fung, though he didn’t get a possibility until many later. Last year he went to Vancouver’s Chinatown and among a dispatch and discord of this colourful blurb area, with a uninformed furnish path stands, dim-sum shops, grilled beef unresolved in windows and herbal shops, he found several kung-fu clubs that taught a dance routine.
He was queried about either he would be means to dance, as carrying a complicated lions can be fatiguing during a dance or parade. Most of a dancers in these teams are younger people and Fung was 55-years-old. But he was dynamic and over a final half-year has complicated a lion dance.
One competence consternation because it takes so prolonged to learn to lift a lion’s conduct or wear a tail. There is minute choreographed suit that goes with a lion’s dance as he approaches a store or house. “When we watch a simple routine, we mostly see a lion is bowing in 3 directions,” Fung says. During a whole routine “you have to make a lion like he is alive.” And, customarily as an animal approaches food or, in this box a lettuce cautiously, a lion moves around it to make certain it is “okay to eat”. He might ambience a bit of a lettuce to exam it and if so, he swallows it. The people inside a dress chuck it to a throng as good luck.
There are also opposite routines. “If one lion meets another lion or there are three, 4 or 5 lions – we have to know how they hail any other,” he says.
Once a week, Fung hires someone from a Chinatown clubs to come to a Kingsway bureau and steer his dancers. He afterwards gives tutorials himself during other weekdays. It’s a approach of augmenting a ability of a team, though also gripping a informative dance total that has a roots in Chinese folk science that goes behind 1,500 years.
While a lion dance is famous via a Chinese culture, China has never been a healthy medium for lions. Various folk tales contend a lion is a gathering of other creatures or a reincarnation of a prisoner lion that is many mostly seen as a defender of a encampment or guardian of a people from immorality spirits.
Chinese lions come in opposite colours and sizes. The exuberant costumes are done in China, and Fung organised by a relations to have a costumes sent over.
The Royal Pacific Realty lion group has 3 lion’s costumes – gold, china and red. Gold and china are for wealth while red is good fortune. Fung has systematic 3 smaller costumes, as those they have are too complicated for a women to lift over a prolonged stretch in a parade. While a conduct customarily weighs 5 pounds, Fung says a art in a dance is that a conduct contingency be kept relocating like a lion on a prowl. (The team’s legs are mostly focussed and a front legs of a section are also a lion’s front paws that are lifted.) It is a severe workout.
“After 10 minutes, we am sweating like we am in a shower,” he says. “But it is good for your health.”
New costumes can not customarily be ragged though contingency initial go by a rite where a eye of a lion is painted, giving a quadruped sight.
Royal Pacific’s comparison vice-president Sing LimYeo, who works out of a Oakridge bureau and is concerned in a fund-raising efforts for a lion dance team, says that Royal Pacific is famous for contributing to encampment causes and ancillary internal projects. By carrying a lion dance group that can attend in events, it becomes a approach “to foster a culture, birthright and also minister to multi-culturalism.”
Last year, a group distinguished a Kingsway realty office’s 15 anniversary. Yeo, who has been concerned with organizing a Chinese New Year festivities in Chinatown, pronounced it is sparkling that this year a Royal Pacific Realty lion group will be partial of a march celebration. “We are also doing a proof in one of a facile schools in January,” he said, adding from there a group skeleton to strech out to a encampment and do comparison demonstrations for free.
Article source: http://www.remonline.com/home/?p=10850
