Lion Dance and the Sublime Art

Seeing all of the different schools perform their own unique brands of lion dance at the competition that Brown so graciously hosted got me thinking about what lion dance inherently means as an art, and whether we're losing that semblance of our tradition as an art form when all of our performances are so commercialized, standardized, pieced together depending on the needs of our clients rather than finely crafted from the ground up as unique works of art.

Perhaps my thinking's changed a bit since I started engaging in more "street art" esque endeavors. For when one does street art, there's a certain beauty in the effect of the sublime: when viewers pass by their art, and see it in action, they inherently understand the art as art, and their unique experiences and interaction with art in a totally unpackaged, unprepared, spontaneous environment define a special and superlative artistic connection. It's perhaps this aspect of self-discovery that makes this art so great: audience members have no expectation going in, discover the art for themselves, have their own unique interactions and experiences, and yet come out with no doubt of the artistic merit at hand.

Take for example, my current project, where I place pinwheels inside the New York Subway system. It's a completely unexpected installation for most of the viewers, and the first reaction will be: cool, what's that? Suddenly, the train comes into the station, and the backdraft from the fast moving train blows all of the pinwhels, and it becomes immediately clear what the pinwheels are there for--suddenly, something as simple as a few pinwheels inspires an awe, a eureka, an unspoken understanding: a feeling of the sublime.

Or take for example a light bulb exhibit, by the name of Little Bomb (if I recall correctly) I saw at Brown's Liss building, right after eating dinner with Brown's and Worcester's troupes. Here was an entire room with different lamps and lights with different lampshades sitting on a grass covered ground, all of them connected to a couple of power strips in the off position. Maybe the exhibit wasn't active, which is why they were off--I'll never know. What I do know, is that when I turned them all on--when I tripped the "little bomb", the room bursted forth into an explosion of lights and colors. That art, and now my own unique experience with it, that too inspired a feeling of the sublime.

Perhaps this, too, is why I was so inspired by my dream about Penn Lions. This was a rather ridiculous, crazy dream probably in part brought about by my general lack of sleep and by the fact that I had just fought a hard battle with exhaustion on a long drive back from Rhode Island, but yes, I did have a dream where I watched Penn's lion dance troupe perform. If you want all the details, feel free to contact me personally, but a big part was they somehow spontaneously transformed rice cakes into noodle soup, and then proceeded to serve this noodle soup to all of their audience members. Impossible, yes--for sure. But to be watching a lion dance, where suddenly food spontaneously generates before your eyes, and then you eat it? What could possibly be more sublime?

Can we do this with actual lion dance (and not just the lion dance of my dreams, hah)? Certainly the answer isn't in commercialized, standard shows in a client-oriented environment. Not that those shows are inherently bad, but they lose out on what I think of as the utmost pursuit of and achievement of, the pinnacle of art--you can't really have a sublime lion dance show when the expectation is set, when you have a contract written, when everything is stipulated clearly between parties.

Or can you? What exactly is the limiting factor here? Is it the contractual obligation in the first place? Given that pretty much none of our clients limit us in any way with performance restrictions, should the artist-client relationship here be limiting at all? Isn't this exactly the situation that I exalted in my earlier post, "Haircutting the Artist-Client Relationship"?

The impact is twofold. Either a contractual obligation inherently preempts and detracts from sublime art, or in my laziness I have allowed the art form that I so dearly love devolve, and what I'm doing is losing those aesthetic qualities that make it great art. Most likely a bit of both--but of course it's the latter that is so scary.

Perhaps all is not lost here. After all, the audience's collective gasp of surprise at the exploding lettuce, completely unanticipated, even by some who are aware of lion dance tradition--is that not a sublime moment present in all of our shows? The unique interaction--indeed, it is no stretch to call it a unique story that the lion forges with each audience member during the "play with the audience" portion--are those not some of the most sublime moments in art, in the most distilled sense? So it must be possible, then?

I ask all of you, then: what is it that would, for each of us, represent the utmost success, the pinnacle of lion dance, not just from a technical perspective or even an emotive one, but a purely artistic one? Given that we hope to pursue the sublime in our art form (which itself could be debatable too), what kind of project could that be? And I mean, I'm not trying to downplay any of our achievements as lion dance groups thus far. I'm merely asking, apart from technique, given our current abilities, what can we do to maximize the artistic value of our tradition? How can we engage with our art form, and our audiences, in a new, novel, and yes, sublime way?

Well, we got what, 5 weeks to do it, so let's get cracking!

Blood, toil, tears, and sweat

Well, after this weekend, I can finally cross that first one off the list of things that lion dance has had to offer - oh, it's offered a lot of that first one last weekend, for sure. I certainly hope future lion dancers who get in that lion, affectionately "The Red Commie Wagon", don't mind that I was bleeding profusely in it. If anything, it adds to the character and history of that lion, eh?

And so, my last lion dance competition as an undergrad member of Columbia University Lion Dance comes to a close. Though I could not bring home to New York the title, I am eminently satisfied with how the weekend proceeded. I mean, I went to Brown, did tons and tons of lion dance, met many new people through an activity that I love, and enjoyed a meal with new friends and our genial hosts. Oh, and plus the Canadiens spanked the Bruins, and we still had 7 hours of the car left to go joyriding. Ah, c'est la vie!

Thinking back to the very first lion dance competition that Columbia hosted recalls quite the fond memories. I was but a freshman then, forever an upstart, incessantly bothering, goading for us to set up a competition. After all, what else would we do with all the time after our regular lion dance season? Actually work on getting better? Pshaw! I fondly remember constantly bothering our president at the time to go and contact other schools, preferably via phone or even in person (as she did end up doing with Cornell!), but with all of the doubt in the world as to whether this would work. Will other groups come? Could such an event succeed?

We were so focused on the planning and the organization, and so pleasantly surprised at just how many people ended up coming, that we didn't even think to work on practicing our welcoming set--and boy, did it show. Nevertheless, I will be forever happy that the event was a great success, forever thankful for all of the schools who came out to perform, forever proud that a broad, collegiate lion dance community could, and would exist. I will never forget Yale's tiny contingent, who couldn't manage to bring anything but themselves and needed to borrow all of our equipment and yet then proceeded to wow us all with a forward roll--something that back then, based on our collective reactions, none of us had ever seen before. Still to this day, we call our method of switching head and tail the "Cornell Switch," a nod of respect to the school that taught it to us.

And I will always point to that competition as a watershed for our own group, too, in terms of what we thought we were capable of. My captain turned to me, her usual smiling face both clearly filled with excitement and nervousness, and said, "Wow, every group here besides ours can do headsits and supertowers!" We held on to our fiercer, more traditional style, and broader, larger movements, on to our organization and origination of the event and our lack of practice time, but those badges of pride and these excuses could not hide my inner feeling that our group was being outclassed.

It wouldn't matter for long, though, as it soon became evident, through the group workshop segment of the competition, that many of these tricks were things that we were capable of, that we just never even thought to try. I landed my first headsits and shoulder stacks that day, both with traditional Columbia partners and with performers from other schools. I even completed my first forward roll with a Yale performer, as the Yale guys not only showed us how to do it but graciously offered to try it with us, with someone they've never practiced with before and only met on that day. I learned why every group had sashes besides ours--you kind of need them to actually do tricks--and thus sashes quite quickly became an important mainstay of our equipment bag. Seeing all of these other groups execute all of their fancy acrobatics, and then learning quickly that these were things we, too, were capable of, pumped all of our collective adrenaline, made us so excited for lion dance, so excited to bring our performance to the next level, so excited to practice all that we had learned that day, and then some.

My biggest regret in this regard is not hosting this event again in 2011. Those old enough will remember there was a gap year, there, before Penn then hosted the competition again in 2012. I really didn't think much of it before, but looking back: why didn't we host it again? Why didn't I, personally, fight for that competition, like I did freshman year? I certainly hope it's not a sign that I'm losing my willingness to goad, to bother, to incessantly upstart--I better not be losing my edge. In any case, I am very thankful that Penn decided to bring back the competition in 2012. Looking back, I could not be prouder.

Now, I look at this last competition through a different lens than the first: 3 years ago, I looked forward to all that I'd learn and improve upon in my coming years as a lion dancer. 3 years later, I can only reflect on what lion dance means to me: what the art has had to offer, what the people have to teach, what the community has that makes it special. I can only think about what will happen next: how my relationships with all of the people that I met will grow, how I can continue to embrace the tradition even after life makes it more difficult to do so, how I can truly connect with lion dance as an art, and share that art with all those around me.

I'll have more to say about that in the next post. For now, let me continue to reflect and reminisce, and, as I get in the lion dance head for the final weeks of my time as a Columbia university Lion Dancer, let me embrace the final, fourth item on that list that this great art has to offer.

Sweat? Absolutely. Toil? No question about it. Blood? In quite profuse amounts. Tears? Well, as the end of the year approaches, so they will come.