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!