Our group splits the oranges and tangerines into 4 segments like a little flower and leave one on each side of the door of the store/restaurant. Another way to eat oranges is to cut the peels into long strips and then use them to form Chinese characters.

Lettuce is spread in front of the place in 3 "spurts" from the mouth that follow the same directions as the bows (left, right, center). One Sifu from the LA area told us that only untrained "wild" groups kick the lettuce anymore--professionals always spit it out. I don't think I agree with him, but everyone is entitled to their opinion of what looks good.

The water cheng that Jason and Dr. Doong Chang mentioned is like a regular cheng, but after eating the lettuce the lion should drink the water while picking out the coins (the person playing the head actually slurps some up and spits it out through the lion's mouth. If the dish is small enough you can pick it up in the lion's mouth to do this. I don't know how other groups do this, but when we saw a store owner setting this up we always went looking for a good drinking straw to help out.

Regardless of the cheng set out we were taught to always approach it with caution. The lion must first determine if it is "safe" food before eating it. Three approaches are made (again from the left, then right, then center) to test it. On the final approach the cheng is eaten. After eating, the lion should clean his mouth and beard.

We freestyle all of our performances, but before we begin we determine who is going to eat. This person takes the dominant lion and before making the three approaches mentioned above will playfully fight off our other lions. While this lion is eating the other lions take a submissive position with their heads lowered. Sometimes we share food, sometimes we don't. It all depends on how much there is.

Jason mentioned other types of fruit and I'm also interested in knowing how these would be eaten. The oddest thing I remember being offered was a fish.

Regarding the Paqua, I vaguely remember reading a section in "Journty to the West" where the Monkey King is thrown into a firepot as punishment for one of his many pranks. He survives this by moving toward different Chinese words that are inscribed on the pot which symbolized things that countered the stages the fire went through. Anybody else able to shed more light on this?

Chris

Break dancing is just a bunch people that know how to break to strut their skills and talents. There isn't anomisty toward each other. People battle each other to see who's has the best moves and creative moves. When it's over they give each other "props"(which is just compliments) and they leave. My my, what a large discussion I created. It's good to see a lot of people's opinion. Wow the stuff you wrote of is extreme.

Albert Le

This past Saturday I visited an Asian antique shop here in Pasadena and happened to notice a very old looking lion head. It was obviously used, but still in great shape, so I asked the owner how much it was--expecting it to be somewhere around $100 and hoping I could bargain him down to around $50 (how much can a used lion head with no tail be?). So he looks at the tag and with a straight face tells me $3,200. So much for bargaining.

It was built around 1920 and is painted red and gold. The hair is all worn off or missing, as is the beard (although it still had the metal wire under the lower jaw that the beard would be attached to). There are no holes in the paper as far as I could see, but there are tell-tale orange juice stains on the mouth that show it was used. I didn't get to handle it, so I don't know how sturdy it is, but if it survived from the 20s I'm guessing it's well-built.

The main differences between this head and a modern Southern Fat San head is in the pompoms and the eyelids. The pompoms are a solid red instead of being mixed colors (red and white, red and black, multi-colored, etc.) and seem to be a softer looking material than the bristly ones today. The nose pompoms are also relatively smaller than modern ones, and looked only about maybe 2 inches in diameter.

The eyelids are more like eyebrows. On modern heads the lids are made silk and completely cover the eye when closed. These are more like rectangular flaps as wide as the eye, but only sticking out maybe two or three inches. They are set above the eye in slits and wiggle up and down.

The paint job is also more simple overall--not as many swirls on the cheeks. But the gold design on the top of the head between the horn and the mirror is quite intricate. Not in a tacky gaudy way either, but in a way that makes you stop and wonder at the amount of time and care that must have gone into it.

I asked his permission to go back sometime to photograph it (if I can't afford to own it, I at least want some pictures for historical purposes) and he said I could. If anyone is interested in seeing it I'll post pics after I get a chance to go back.

I know tradition says you're supposed to burn lion heads when they retire to return them to heaven, but I'm glad this one survived. A head like this really deserves to be displayed and seen--it gave me a sense of history in the art. Kind of like the scene in Once Upon a Time in China 3 where the school has all their old lion heads hanging on the ceiling but one, "The lion head of our ancestors!" is given a place of special honor and is a symbol of pride for the school.

So now I'm thinking, "Do I want a car, do I want another quarter of school, or do I want an eighty-year-old lion head?" :)

Just thought I'd share...
Chris

P.S. by contrast I was in LA Chinatown the other day and checked out some brand new heads from China. The paper was cheap (some already had holes in them), they all looked like they were produced on an assembly line (all features were the same, only the colors changed), and although they were nice and light I'm sure they wouldn't hold up to very many performances without some serious reinforcing. And they wanted $750 for them.

>I almost never get to see any lions go through puzzles like this, and they
>are usually never explained to people in the younger generation like me.

Hold on a sec, what kinda puzzles are you talking about??

>Also, do you know anything about approaching a live crab or a live snake?

I've never encountered a live snake, but i have come accross 8 live crabs. Like any other cheng, you'd approch it 3 times and on the third time you would eat it. the way I was taught to dismantle a live crab was like this.

1) rip the legs off
2) rip the shell off the main body
3) crack the body in half. If you look at the anatomy of a crab you'd see that it's easy to crack it vertically.

Each part we would throw out of the mouth seperately, however, when I was doing this routine, it was for a grand opening of a grocery store, I had to keep the legs and had to spell something with them. There was also 3 "man made" crabs. (man made being a metal dish turned upside down with chop sticks representing legs. I had to write out "sang yee hing loung" in chinese characters, which was pretty difficult because I couldn't hold all of the segments to write the saying, so i had to put some down my shirt.

Speaking of writting sayings, We've also encountered like i had said, a water cheng where there was a big dish with water, lettuce, and coins. We had to spell something out with the coins, something to the same effect as "sang yee hing loung"... along thoes lines.

Jason

Yeah our school does tha same. We have a fight routine for the cheng but we end up sharing at the end. I think it definitely add more to the performance.

Paul,

re: Ba Kua Cheng (8 trigram maze) a bit complicated to explain via e-mail and I have forgotten much of it.

Chung Ngai Dance Troupe learned the Ba Kua cheng in Taiwan from Sifu Li Fei of Liang Kwang Kung Fu Association along with several other chengs. a variation of it was performed in 1974 at the Masonic Auditorium for the new year celebration. 8 chengs were performed as part of the Ba Kua Cheng.

I have not heard anyone else mention the "death door" in all these years since 1974 until your e-mail. yes, there are set entrances and exits and one "door" you never enter nor exit. There is also a sequence of which door to enter and exit. It was never explained to me why and I am not familiar enough with the i -jing (book of changes) to contemplate a guess. At one time I had the sequence of the doors and exits memorized, but the years have not been kind to my memory. I had an 8 mm film of this performance, but loaned it out some years ago and is now lost. In some way I am glad it is lost because I don't think we can ever be as good as what we keep in our memories. I do have notes, but will take me some time to find them. Probably will be easier to ask the Liang Kwang Kung Fu association in Taiwan.

To set the mood, the performance began with a Ba Kua hand set. a stark spotlight on the lone performer on a darken stage while the rest of the team set up the chengs. The 8 different trigrams of the Ba Kua were already marked on the stage floor. the 'doors' are actually between the trigrams (not thru the trigrams) and a cheng blocked each of the 7 entrances/exits. That evening the club performed the crab, centipede, snake under a basin, wine jug, "broken' bridge, high pole, and the high bridge chengs as the obstacles blocking the doors. after which Felix Yee (well know san Francisco lion dancer in the 50' thru the 70's) performed the crevasse cheng. The crab, centipede, snake and wine jug chengs are pretty routine. The broken bridge is traversed by the monk "connecting" the two ends of the broken bridge and the lion walked over his body to get to the other side. for the high pole, the head did a double decker then climbed up the pole. However, the more traditional (proper) way performed now by Yau Kung Moon Kung Fu Association is to have your strong guys brace one end of the pole and the lion head hangs on to the other end and then you fling the pole up along with the lion dancer in one motion. the high bridge was difficult because the "greens" was under the middle of the bridge (4" balance beam) so the head had to be dangled by the tail in order to reach the green (hard part was getting back up). The crevasse was created by using cinder blocks to build up 4 walls that met in the middle (forming a cross) with just enough space (crevasse) to trap (suspend) a lettuce around 4' below the top of the walls. It becomes obvious that the big lion head can not fit to get to the "greens" trapped in this crevasse. After being frustrated at a direct assault, the lion finally jumped to the top of the wall, reached down with one leg between the opening of two walls, with the foot under the lettuce lifted it out with one leg, stood up (on one leg) and the lettuce still on the top of the other foot, he then flicked the lettuce up in the air and caught it in the lion's mouth. Why these mazes/obstacles? Most people say the lion dance is performed to scare off evil spirits, but ask most dancers what are evil spirits, do they believe in evil spirits and how does this dance exorcise them, and you will not get credible answers. I believe that in the modern context here in America, I prefer William Hu's suggestion in the introduction to his "Chinese Lion Dance Explained" that lion dancing is a microcosm of life. The "chengs" are obstacles and challenges in life and the "greens" are our goals. That with discipline, training, endurance, courage, intelligence, organization, grounded with traditions and above all, team work, we can overcome obstacles and challenges to reach these goals. I believe all lion dancers who experienced the "high" of this dance will intuitively understand this. It is also a good life lesson and important message to convey to those that follow.

Historically, were the fighting lions the only lions allowed to fight? You know, the black beard Chang Fei ones? I don't think it would be very appropriate for the yellow-faced Liu Pei lions to fight (even if it's staged). The red Kwan Kungs sound like they would fight but I'm not sure.

Willy

My understanding is that the black lion is for protecting the rest of the lions against lions from other schools that might come to challenge you, but I am not sure about the fights when they are staged. My thoughts are that since it's not real fighting, then its ok that the other lions fight too.

Thanks again David for your great info. Would you or any other friends on the list have info on the lion dance champions in the last 20 years?

Someone just told me that one of my si-bak's was a world champion lion dancer in the 80's. His cantonese name is Lee Yun Fook, and I think he represented the Chan Hon Chung hung gar school from Hong Kong, possibly in 1986.

Thanks guys,
Paul

Date: Tue, 11 Apr 2000 08:26:12 -0700
From: Geoff Hudson
Subject: Re: [LionDance] Fighting lions

Hi all,

I just wanted to throw my $0.02 into the discussion (I probably told this before..) about a story my si-hing told me. About 10 years ago our group was invited to go back to my sifu's hometown in Tai San which is close to Guang Zhou. When they got there, sifu told the students that there was going to be a 'little' thing they had to do in the morning before the main performance. They started the dance on the sidewalk by the van, and there were just a few people around.. until they turned the corner to start towards some kind of arena they were supposed to go to. When they turned the corner, they were shocked to see something like 5,000 people lined down this enterance way to the stadium, with kids singing (my si-hing didn't know the song ;-) with flowers..etc.. They never had seen anything like that before! So, they just continuted down the path, had no idea what they were supposed to do, so played with the audience etc.. when they got to the end of the path, there were something like 10-15 lions from local schools, on their knees, bowing to our lions. My si-hing who was in the head, had no idea what to do, so he assumed you bow to the other lions.. which is right.. but like you said, Jason, you need to keep low and non-agressive, and we never had that experience of meeting other lions before, and he went up on one leg like we always do to do the bows. One of the other lions from the other schools jumped up and started challenging our lion and then kicking started.. etc. It also got to be a battle between the drummers between the schools (someone else mentioned the drum being the heart and soul of the group) too. Our sifu went over and talked to the other sifu and the other sifu took over the head from his agressive student and the situation was diffused. Now we all know that when you meet other lions, keep both legs on the ground when doing your bows!

Geoff

Date: Tue, 11 Apr 2000 08:28:23 -0700
From: Geoff Hudson
Subject: Re: [LionDance] Fighting lions

> bigger cities and in HK and China. Worst case scenario I've heard of
> involved a couple of clubs in open competition in HK about 45 years ago
. > Lots of lions got smashed and a few people got slashed with butterfly
> swords.

And you thought that hanging the two butterfly swords on the front of the drum was just to look pretty?? ;-)

g

Date: Tue, 11 Apr 2000 21:42:35 -0700
From: Geoff Hudson
Subject: Re: [LionDance] choy chang (oranges)

> I've never encountered a live snake, but i have come accross 8 live crabs.
> Like any other cheng, you'd approch it 3 times and on the third time you
> would eat it. the way I was taught to dismantle a live crab was like this.
> 1) rip the legs off
> 2) rip the shell off the main body
> 3) crack the body in half. If you look at the anatomy of a crab you'd see
> that it's easy to crack it vertically.

Wow.. I haven't heard of doing 'sushi' style lion dance before! We did a similar type of dance that you mentioned below with a man-made paper-mache (sp?) crab with the legs made out of wood. First we had to carefully approach the crab from behind, then jump onto the legs so it couldn't get the lion. First we took the eyes, I think. Then we jumped off and the other lion approached, jumped on the legs and took the pinchers off so it couldn't attack, then we took turns, repeating this until the crab's legs were all off. Then we flipped the crab over and ate the guts which contained an orange (looks like crab guts) and lycee. I was playing tail in the head lion, and when the head took off the legs, he passed them back to me between his legs. The teaser took the legs from the other lion and also passed them to the head and then back to me.. We went into a low 'ma bo' and then 'digested' the crab. I pulled out a yellow silk banner I had tucked under my belt and wrote out the character "zhu" (I don't remember what the cantonese is) with the legs.

> Speaking of writting sayings, We've also encountered like i had said, a
> water cheng where there was a big dish with water, lettuce, and coins. We
> had to spell something out with the coins, something to the same effect as
> "sang yee hing loung"... along thoes lines.

That's an interesting change from the typical 'water pot' lion dance!

G

(note: I added "prelude@slip.net" to the mailinglist ;-))

Date: Wed, 12 Apr 2000 01:12:33 -0700
From: Ninja B0Y
Subject: list

Hi guys Im new to the list. Well I'm gonna get right down to the point, since my knowledge on lion dancing isn't that great.

How do you jump higher? I can pretty much do 1 leg/2 leg standup or whatever you want to call it. What I would like to do is be able to jump high and land correctly. Currently, right before we jump, I compress my legs as much as possible that jump as high as I can then my tail grabs a hold of my sash comes under me and lifts me up. The problem is when I land, I kind of land too far forward.

What I noticed of alot of groups in the competitions is that they grab them just by the waist side. Also, what's a good way to suggest to my partner that Im ready to jump? Saying "Ready" while the music is playing doesn't seem to be too effective. Thanks all.

David,

Thanks for the great posts. We've learned a lot from your many years of experience! Unfortunatly, we don't get to see dances like this any more, due to the fast pace of society and the short attention span of the audience. My si-hing told me that some of my si-bak came to our hung ga school and taught him the traditional 'hung ga' lion dance which involved clay flower pots and took 45 minutes to perform. I would sure like to see it, but that may never happen. Obviously there are some people who want to see this more 'traditional' style of dance preserved and passed on, and there are those who are interested in the modern dance where high pole action is the name of the game. I'm not trying to judge which one is 'better' at all! But for those who want to pass the traditional style on, they also have to pass on the symbolism and the meaning of the dance so the audience can also be educated, or else it will die out, like other tradtions that are being lost because people don't know why they should continue.

Keep up sharing the great posts! If you know any of the stories behind the monk (teaser?), husband and wife etc, please pass them on when you have some time.

rgds
Geoff

>How do you jump higher?

Jumping higher doesn't always rely on the person playing the head. The tail plays a big role as well. One of the most important things the tail must do, is keep his hands on the sash of the guy playing the head. When you jump as the head, you have to think of it as being a spring. You have to crouch down all the way with your legs together, almost having your butt touch the floor. Jump and then extend all the way. This is where the tail comes in. The tail player should already have his hands on your sash. As you jump, the tail player should be following your momentum on your way up. Once you get to the peak of your jump, the tail player has all of your momentum and he should be able to extend his arms above his head. At this point you, the head, should have your legs tucked in. (almost like your knees to your chest.) There are many different variations of how you can jump or stack, it's just the matter of how you feel comfortable jumping and landing. for example, You can jump and the tail player steps up and you land on his thighs. 2, You can jump and lean back so you land on the thighs. or 3, you can jump and lean back and the tail player steps forward and meets you half way. Another inportant thing is syncronism and timing. You've gotta have good timing in order to land everything properly and for it to look nice.

>The problem is when I land, I kind of land too far forward.

Too forward meaning... your whole body is leaning forward?? there are a few possible reasons for this. 1, you're not jumping strait, but more with a forward angle. you should either be jumping strait up and down or maybe leaning back a little bit. Oh yeah, they best place to land on the tail's thigh is higher on the thigh muscle it self, almost near the hips.

>What I noticed of alot of groups in the competitions is that they grab
>them just by the waist side.

They're usually holding the sash. if you see the tail player's fingers around the head's waists, the tail player's thumbs are underneath the sash. There are different ways to hold the sash, but I find that way the most effective.

>Also, what's a good way to suggest to my
>partner that Im ready to jump? Saying "Ready" while the music is playing
>doesn't seem to be too effective.

What we usually do is, the head twitches his waist signaling the tail that he's ready to jump. The tail would respond by tighting his grip on the sash and twitching the head player's waist that he's aslo head for the jump. the tail player should have his hands on the sash most of the time, unless you're at the point of the routine where it doesn't require and jumping.) After the tail twitches the waist of the head, there is a "primer" jump (a jump strait up in the air before the actual jump). Then it is followed by the jump that's supposed to take place.

Hope this helps!

Jason.

In a message dated 4/12/00 1:35:24 AM, serhat@freud.et.tudelft.nl writes:
>Saying "Ready" while the music is playing
>doesn't seem to be too effective.

one common way is to do a small jump (actually not jumping at all) then the moment you land, the tail will know that you will do the real jump and will throw you up as you jump.

Dr. Doong Chang