The martial arts is steeped in traditional gender biases.

Sara Lai here tells her experience of being a female lion dancer. Thank you for sharing, Sara.

Following a quite nagging and painful Achilles injury from running, I felt it was best to not further aggravate it with wushu. I have been doing more running and have set a goal of running the San Francisco Half Marathon in July.

I go for longer runs on Saturdays and have been using Sundays (normal wushu day) as a rest day. Further, since earlier this year, I have been going on longer runs on Thursday evenings as well and thus have been also missing Thursday’s wushu class. This past month has probably been one of my least wushu involved months in years. With that in mind, I have started to de-prioritize wushu.

I will continue to focus on running for the time being. When Ryan returns to wushu practice, I will make the effort to go and hopefully get in some lion dance practicing.

Are there such things as practice lions, that are made for practicing lion dancing? How does a lion become a “practice” lion? I’ve been wondering about this for some time.

As you can see from our training videos, we usually just practice a bunch of stacking. There are just a few videos where we actually practice with with Ryan’s lion. This is because there’s not really a practice lion to use. So we’re lucky when Ryan has the time and is able to transport his lion to practice.

I ask Ryan about his all the time. He says that basically there are new lions, which are performance lions. These are new and beautiful and people don’t like to get them beaten up by practicing with them. Then, as these performance lions get worn down over the course of their performance lives, they gain sentimental value with the owner/dancer. If something breaks, it is fixed. Over time, the lion may even be put through a restoration process if things get bad. Because they have sentimental value and memories attached to them, they are not sold when they are old, get worn down, or after restoration. They are retired and stashed away as a keepsake.

I guess the only time people get to practice with actual lions is when someone is generous enough to let you use their lion to practice with or if you happen to find an old lion for sale, which I hear is rare. Or maybe you can try to make one to practice with? Either that or you bite the bullet yourself and get a new lion to practice with. Or perhaps, you go with the laundry basket or chair method for practicing lion dancing.

I mean, dragon boaters don’t practice in the bath tub and then get into a real boat on race day. So how do you people do it? I think the answer here, as with most things, comes down to money. You pay for a lion to practice with.

So I’m wondering if there are lions made out there that are are made specifically for practice purposes. No need for paint, fur, or decorations. As long as the mouth and eyes work and the weight is right, it’d be a good practice lion. Or maybe there are lions made that have imperfections. You know, like the Belly Flops of lion dance lions. Or perhaps the poorly manufactured ones that are more affordable? Where do you get those? Anybody know?

Ryan brought his lion to practice today. Ryan has been absent from practice for some time due to his school work load.

Ryan showed some of the wushu youth how to hold the lion, shoot the lion’s head, and some stance positions. I think the youth are interested in learning more. Heck, lion dancing is fun and is a change from the usual wushu basics that we do every time.

We worked on a few new things today. We worked on the intro of picking up and getting under the lion. We never really do this at performances because we usually always enter the audience area already underneath the lion. But this is good to know, in case we do a different intro where we’re outside the lion to begin with.

The intro we devised is simple, has a salute, a few empty hand movements, including a jump inside. Then we skip over the lion and pick it up. The head pick up involves a lift with the foot, which is pretty neat. We’ll need to practice this more.

The second new thing we tried today was a body turn in the lion. This is where you see the dancers momentarily as the lion’s head and body is spun in one direction. Similar to how a lion roll is (where you side roll on the ground), except we’re standing.

We’ll have to get some footage of these new moves in the future so you can see. Overall, a fun practice! 🙂

We’re excited to welcome everyone to LionBlogs.com!

This site is managed by fellow lion dance teammates, Ryan Au and Alex Ng.  We will be posting our lion dance experiences here as part of our training blog.  We will also be adding in lion dance resources and articles to help promote and spread the art of lion dancing.

So keep posted for new material coming real soon! 🙂