Hey George,

Been awhile, man! I am so happy for your team and especially for Yip. I gotta write to him one of these days. Anyway, I just had a question about the results of the Malaysian competition - since KSK got the top 2 spots, does that mean they will be the only teams representing Malaysia in the world championships or will it be KSK A and C and Yip's team (total of 3) since KSK C is the returning world champion? I would love to see Yip's team compete this year!

It is unfortunate that the other two Malaysian teams didn't make it. I was anxious to see what the Melaka team would come up with this time. I know I am just a novice, but I think they had the most exciting routine in 1998 (with the multiple series of jumps and amazing height of their leaps). I was also anxious to see what Kota Tingii would do this year, too. They were the ones with the major fall in 1998, right?

Anyway, I hope you all have a successful new year this year. Best of luck! Thanks for the updates, George, and tell Yip that I will write to him very soon!

Willy

HI,

The place your looking for is:

Kuen Way Martial Arts Supply
28 East Pender Street
Vancouver, B.C. V6a 1t1

They also have a web page, call them to find the address.

Good Luck!
Tim

okay, thanks.

Hi guys,

just spoke with my teacher last night (over the phone),... I'm probably not going to be able to be at the greatest lion dance fest in the Hague,.. he wants me with another group in Arnhem, at 3 pm, and the dancing in the Hague is supposed to start around 1,... and for those who don't know the Netherlands, it's about 2 hours ...

Anyway, the Hague festivities are as usual, with about 10 lions of 7 schools or so, and it will end with a Kung Fu demonstration in front of the Schouwburg (I think,... next to the Spui, in case you get to make it).

As I get it, my teacher will be there with a team, and another one (where I come in the picture) will be in Arnhem at shopping centre Presikhaaf; after the dancing in the Hague, my teacher will come over and they'll dance again in the evening. There we will be the only school performing though.

Next week Wednesday (9th) the show is on in Rotterdam, again with about 10 lions, maybe also a dragon (they had one the last couple of years).

On the 20th there is a competition in Paris, 13th arr. (Chinese quarters) I don't know who or what, but I'm glad to be here for once..:-) Anyways, my teacher is coming with our team, I wonder who else will be coming. I know there'll be another couple of Dutch teams, one from The Hague, maybe a third,.. I don't know the location or time yet, but I'll let you know if anyone is interested, just drop me a line.

Take care and happy dancing, and of course: happy new year! (no bug craze this time, it must be the year 5467 or so..:-)

Rob Teng

Hello,

I'm looking for a group to perform the lion dance (and maybe other pieces) in Detroit. This is for a special event concert that will be promoting new direct jet service between Detroit and Shanghai. I'd be glad to discuss specifics with anyone interested in performing or with anyone who can help w/ referrals. Please contact me at bruce.margolis@nwa.com .

Thanks for the help.

Can anyone help this person?

Thanks,
Rob

>Date: Thu, 03 Feb 2000 14:13:59 -0600
>From: Erica Boyd
>Subject: liondancing in SF
>To: teng@ljouwert.et.tudelft.nl
>Organization: Univ. of Cal. -- Berkeley
>X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en] (WinNT; U)
>X-Accept-Language: en
>
>Hi
>How can I hire lion dancer in San Fransico Ca for the opening of my new
>firm?
>Thanks

I'm on it. Thanks for the tip, Rob.

Willy

Hello!

I am looking for help .........

The Profootball Hall of Fame in Canton, OH is busy planning our 2000 Grand Parade for 7/29/00. It is 2.2 mi. long and is viewed by more than 225,000 spectators and millions more on national TV. We would like to include a chinese dragon, chinese dancers or something appropriate to the new year.

Could you, by chance, help me to locate some of these units to invite??

Elaine Mott, Specialties
Grand Parade Committee

Hi everyone,

happy new year, if I understood correctly it's the year 4629 on the Chinese calendar, so you see, the Chinese really are advanced, they had the Y2K bug over two and a halve thousand years ago.

I got to go to the The Hague lion dancing in the afternoon on Saturday 5th, it was great, got on tv too. During the performances I had no VHS cam but managed to get my hands on a digital photocamera, I'll try to get them on my website soon...

In the evening, I had to go to Arnhem, did some more dancing/took some more pics, and we had food, not as good as they had in The Hague; oh yeah, I missed the Kung Fu performances there too, we were already in the car at that time..

Here, back in Paris, they had some festivities in the Chinese quarters (mostly the 13th arrondissement), I'm trying to find out if it was any good, but sofar none of my colleagues have seen it, people only heard about it...

My teachers group are performing: today in Koeln, Germany, tomorrow in Breda, Wednesday in Rotterdam (going to be like The Hague, for those who missed that) in the afternoon, they have another show in the evening, and I think another one on Thursday at some Holland Casino. Maybe I'll get to see pictures of that... in any case, they are really getting very good..

Howabout everybody elses New Year festivities?

Greets,
Rob

De Anza college looking for lion dance performer, if anyone interested please email to me back. This is for Cupertino CA area. Date will be Feb. 28 or 29th.

Lynn Lam

Rob,

It is 4698 according to the Chinese calendar, but some feel it should be 4697 (controversy over the year 0).

Seems lion dancing is catching on big time in Europe. Are most of the teams Chinese or mixed? Are they all associated with martial arts schools or are there some that are purely lion dance teams? How about Northern (Peking) lion dance teams and dragon dance teams? Who funds them (pay for equipment, traveling) and what is normal charge for a performance?

Most lion dance teams in San Francisco are over extended during the Chinese new year festival period. Aside from the usual performances for Asian stores/restaurants, we have two street fairs in Chinatown (flower faire on Jan 29/30 and community faire on Feb 19/20), Miss Chinatown USA pageant - Feb 12 & Coronation Ball - Feb 18, 10k Chinatown run (up and down the hills around Chinatown) this last Sunday, public school performances (maybe 50 schools are covered by various lion dance groups each year), various parties and banquets and then the main event is the Chinese new year parade on Feb 19 watched by over half a million spectators and millions more on TV. This year we anticipate at least 10 dragon dance teams in our parade plus the usual lion dance teams with their 100 or more lions. The performances don't end with the parade. All the family associations, district associations and Tongs have their "spring Banquets" in March/April and almost all hire lion dance teams to help with their celebrations. On top of these events, we have several Chinese dance groups putting on large productions during this time of the year. we already have one group inviting 25 young dancers from Shanghai to perform the weekend of Jan 28-30, this coming Friday another group is producing "Children of the Dragon" which is a $100,000 usd production imported here from Minnesota. On the 19th and 27th of this month, one last dance group will have the third and final segment of their "Dragon Trilogy" which features a performance with a black light dragon (can't see the performers on stage because they are dressed in black so dragon seems to fly thru the air on its own). quite a bit to do and see if you ever make it here for the new year.

go to our parade website for details of events and schedule: www.chineseparade.com

David

Hi,

The mailinglist was down for a few days because we upgraded the machine but forgot to uhm.. put the majordomo/sendmail config files back ;-) Funny thing is.. lots of things changed in the meantime so the old config files didn't work correctly anymore.. yay.

Anyway.. it seems to be working fine again now.. if there are any more problems please mail me or Rob.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Regards,

Serhat Sakarya

Hi guys,

well, it seems the list is back online, so here we go,..About the New Year celebrations in The Hague, Holland on the 5th (I have nothing about Rotterdam on the 9th, since I was back in Paris by that time): http://liondance.free.fr/LionYOTD.html Let me know if you like the format and if the downloading time is not too long etc..

On the 20th there was a tournament in Paris, I hope to have some footage on my website soon, .avi and .wav files..

In short, there were 6 teams competing:
France team C
Netherlands (from The Hague, team of Lau sifu)
France team B
Belgium (team of Ji sifu)
Malaysia
France team A

All the parts had poetic names, I don't recall all of them (but can look them up if you're interested), but for instance the performance of the Dutch team was called something like: climbing against the problems of the new millenium.

In any case, the Dutch team had a nice performance, but they fell a couple of times, ended 5th; the French B ended 6th I think, ... they fell and couldn't continue; then French team C got stuck whilst getting of the stages, they ended 4th, with France A ending 3rd, nice performance, they too fell once. Malaysia also fell, if not they would definately have won... very good music, impressive grabbing the green motion.. they ended second. Belgium ended first, didn't fall and had quite a nice preformance; unexpected moves when grabbing the green..

BTW the rules were explained on the paper with the programme; the height of the stage must be at least 80cm, and where the lion eats it must be between 2 and 3 metres. For an important fall the score is diminished by 1 point I think, and less is substracted for minor stuff. Forgot the rest, if you want I can post the rules later.

My teacher was asked to judge, I'll ask him if he knows the final scores if anyone is interested.

I hope to have some stuff on my website soon;

greets for now,
Rob

Hi guys...

Just wondering... does anyone know of a store that sells lion dance equipment in Vancouver Canada?? Or anywhere else in Canada? I'm awear of Jonie's Uniforms in San Fransisco, We're from Canada and the shipping and exchange rate proves to be little bit more expensive than what we had hoped to spend.

Thanks

Jason.

There is a place in Vancouver near the Chinese Cultural Centre in Chinatown Called Kuen Way Martial Arts It is located near the bottom of Pender street

Hey guys,

> I don't know either but this is a good guess. Can you tell us if mu'a la^n
> differs in anyway from the Southern Chinese Lion Dance? I've seen a few
> Vietnamese groups do lion dance but it always seems to be a variation if not
> exactly the dance from Southern China. My guess it started when the chinese
> population settled in Vietnam.
>
> As you well know, there is a northern version of the dance which is very
> different in intent and performance.

As far as I know, mu'a la^n is exactly the same as the Southern Chinese Lion Dance. They also use the same term for the Northern Lions. But I have never heard anyone mention the dragon dance in Vietnamese before...I think a reason why you see a lot of variations in the Vietnamese way of lion dancing is because many do not know the traditional Chinese myths and customs behind it (i.e. they are 'self-trained' lion dancers who are ignorant about a lot of the symbolism involved). Then again there could be a lot of Vietnamese symbolisms that I am just not aware of.

Maybe we should consult the Vietnamese national champions - they are ethnic Chinese, I believe.

> > At issue is the ambiguous translation of the creature involved. For those who
> > know, the Vietnamese call it mu'a la^n, or 'dance of the la^n'. But what's a la^n
> > you ask? Good question. It's neither a dragon (con ro^`ng or long in Chinese) nor
> > a lion (con xu+ tu+? [sp] or mo in Chinese).
> the chinese word is Shih (manderin) or Si (cantonese). Mo Si is "Dance Lion"
> which is one way many chinese refer to the lion dance.

Whoops! Just a mental-error-cuz-of-exams-induced typo...sorry. Meant to write 'mo si'.

But yeah, si and long are two different creatures, right? So I am wondering what's up with the hybrid la^n creature in Vietnamese.

> Do we? Since we do a lot of Lion Dances for non-asian audiences, I can't
> say how many times I've heard our performances the Dragon dance. I was performing
> at a Vietnamese Tet festival and the MC (vietnamese) called us the Dragon
> Dance. (In english). It could be the same phenomenon. they just relate
> it to the creature it most resembles to them. For many Americans, it looks
> like a dragon and is much closer to one then to a lion. (from africa)
>
> Is the la^n, the same animal as a Kirin/KeiLin/Unicorn? I could see how
> it could be confused since the Southern Lion has a horn. Notice that in
> english we call the KeiLin a unicorn but it is very different from the
> Unicorn of European mythology.

I don't think the Unicorn would be considered a la^n by the Vietnamese. I don't know the word for it but I do know that la^n is what the Vietnamese call the Southern and Northern lions. But the Chinese lions are mixtures of different animals, so maybe the Vietnamese do have a point in calling it some kind of hybrid creature - a mix between a lion and a dragon. Maybe? I doubt that anyone who saw one of Master Siow's Malaysian heads would confuse it with a dragon, though, but that's just me.

Willy

> Is the la^n, the same animal as a Kirin/KeiLin/Unicorn? I could see how
> it could be confused since the Southern Lion has a horn. Notice that in
> english we call the KeiLin a unicorn but it is very different from the
> Unicorn of European mythology.

I heard a story that said the horn was reattaching the lion's head to the rest of its body since it had somehow pissed off one of the big Chinese gods, but Kuan Yin took mercy and did the thing with the horn to put the head back on the body. This isn't exactly how it went I'm sure, but it may be close.

Andy!

Maybe i can share some of my idea with you about the word "La^n". La^n is one of four holy creatures Long(dragon), La^n(?), Qui(turtle), Phung(?). As you can see on many altars. In the western world they don't have any kind of creature look like "con la^n" so i thing that the translator had used the term dragon for "la^n" or "si", it's just because of the respect for it holiness and by the ways they belong together. In Vietnam we associate the southern style with "mu'a la^n", the northern style with "mu'a xu+ tu+?" and "mu'a ro^`ng" is the dragondance(in chinese long).

> As you well know, there is a northern version of the dance which is very
> different in intent and performance.

How many guys out there are doing the Northern (chinese) lion dance? We do, but I haven't seen any other groups around Seattle / Vancouver doing it. Usually, during the performance, the southerns go to 'sleep' and then they bring out the northern lions.

> Do we? Since we do a lot of Lion Dances for non-asian audiences, I can't
> say how many times I've heard our performances the Dragon dance. I was performing
> at a Vietnamese Tet festival and the MC (vietnamese) called us the Dragon
> Dance. (In english). It could be the same phenomenon. they just relate
> it to the creature it most resembles to them. For many Americans, it looks
> like a dragon and is much closer to one then to a lion. (from africa)

We brought the dragon out this year for new years, so hopefully some westerners learned the difference between a lion and dragon.

> Is the la^n, the same animal as a Kirin/KeiLin/Unicorn? I could see how
> it could be confused since the Southern Lion has a horn. Notice that in
> english we call the KeiLin a unicorn but it is very different from the
> Unicorn of European mythology.

Interesting.. is Kei Lin cantonese for unicorn? I think there are some steps in hung gar that are translated as unicorn steps or something like that.. but I'd have to drag out my old poster to double check. Does the 'kei lin' fit into lion dancing at all, or is it part of mythology elsewhere?

Geoff

Some info about kei lun, Vietnam, and hung gar.

Kei Lun is some magical horned beast, I guess you can call it a unicorn of sorts. But it is less like a horse, and more like a chinese lion. I used to import lion dance equipment from China with my friend, and lots of factories were offerring kei luns as well as lions. The interesting thing is, a company from Northern Vietnam was selling both lions, and kei luns. I've never seen a kei lun dance performed before, but I hear it is pretty similar to a lion dance. Just slightly different music and dance steps.

Lots of Chinese martial arts, especially hung gar and other southern styles use "kei lun bo" (kei lun step) in their training and forms. All it means is a colorful description for a wierd step, like drunken step, or plum blossom step, etc...

Hope that helped,

Paul Skrypichayko,
Edmonton, Canada,
http://www.oocities.org/Colosseum/Bleachers/1728/

Just to add a bit to Paul's answer...

Paul Skrypichayko wrote:
> Kei Lun is some magical horned beast, I guess you can call it a unicorn of
> sorts. But it is less like a horse, and more like a chinese lion.

Look on a can of Kirin Beer. You will see the Japanese version of the unicorn. It is very similar to the Chinese. It does look like the Southern Chinese Lion.

Maybe htran can tell us if the la^n is similar.

> I've
> never seen a kei lun dance performed before, but I hear it is pretty similar
> to a lion dance. Just slightly different music and dance steps.

It comes from the Hakka tradition. the head is narrower and the horn much longer. The movements are more snake-like with a lot of darting in and out. There is a small sample of it on the World Champion VCD's that David on this list has made available.

> Lots of Chinese martial arts, especially hung gar and other southern styles
> use "kei lun bo" (kei lun step) in their training and forms. All it means is
> a colorful description for a wierd step, like drunken step, or plum blossom
> step, etc...

From my understanding, KeiLinBo is not drunken or plum blossom. It is a twist stance in one direction chained to a twist stance in the opposite direction. This is the Hung Gar version. It's used a lot in traditional lion dance as well. It's called unicorn step because of how it resembles a horse doubling back on itself.

As to the lion being confused with a dragon? Happens all the time in the US. Lion is really a poor name since there lions are real creatures and the Southern Lion looks like no lion on earth. Since the dragon is mythical and many people have never seen a Chinese dragon, the Lion can easily be confused.

To Geoff, the Northern lion is more associated with the Opera and not martial arts. Today, both are interchanged.

Stephen.

On Wed, 23 Feb 2000, Paul Skrypichayko wrote:
> never seen a kei lun dance performed before, but I hear it is pretty similar
> to a lion dance. Just slightly different music and dance steps.

Hey dudes. The Unicorn dance is performed high (arms/head up) almost all the time and with quick movements of the head side to side. The stepping is quick and the animal moves around quickly. Alot of unicorn steps/crossing footwork are/is used.

Bye for now...but remember my question about dyeing rabbit fur!!!

Hugo

Actually, I was just in the process of replying to you! There are several types of dyes that you can use. Fabric shops might carry some (along with tips on how to use them properly) but my suggestion would be to consult with a local dry cleaner that also does alterations. When women need their dress or shoe color changed (for weddings or prom or whatever) these are the people that do it.

It is more expensive to go from a dark color to a lighter one than it is to go from a light color to a darker one. If you want white they may have to bleach it which will slightly lower the quality of the fur.

Hope this helps!

Did you build the lion from scratch or are you repairing an existing frame?

Chris