Tucked away in the Honors Village Commons multipurpose room, senior in physics Yang Ho bounces and bobs about in the shrouds of a lion costume.
Ho performs this ritual Sunday afternoons along with other students as part of Lion Dance Troupe, an organization he co-founded with Peter Vu, a senior in chemical engineering, in order to educate the community about China’s traditional lion dance.
The dance coordinates rigid movements of kung-fu along with a little freestyle to the beat of a drum and several gongs, according to Ho. Southeast Asia popularized the dance, which started off as a tradition in the Chinese martial arts school.
“The lion dancing symbolizes a lot of things that the tiger symbolizes in China, which is actually kind of interesting, because tigers are much more prevalent in Asia than lions are…but it really symbolizes power,
good fortune, strength, wealth,” Ho said. “If one school has a lot of lions, that school is seen as very good, very rich, very prestigious.”
Dancers perform stunts while dressed in elaborate lion costumes consisting of two parts: the head and the tail, held together by a blanket-like canvas, Ho said. The dancer inside the head of the lion acts a puppeteer, who winks the lion’s eyes, flaps its ears and opens its mouth while the dancer inside the tail helps lift the head.
“I’m in the back basically hunched over down at 90 degrees hanging on my hands to Yang’s waist,” said William Garrison, a club member and junior in chemical engineering and international studies.
Originally, performers used big, powerful stances in their movements to mimic the power of a menacing lion, a style known as futsan, according to Ho. Later as the dance evolved, the tamer hoksan style took center stage.
“The way of hoksan originated when one of the prominent practitioners of futsan was just kind of observing this cat and then he kind of realized that the lion dancing didn’t look anything like a lion or a cat…so he modified the style to make it look more modern and playful, and so a lot of the movements are a lot more joyful and softer, so it looks more like a small cat or kind of like a puppy…” Ho said.
The third style of dance, fukhok, creates a middle ground by combining elements from both styles, according to Ho.
The percussion instruments then dictate the pace and direction of the scene, Ho said.
Since people stationed in China and Southeast Asia make the lion heads by hand, its cost ranges anywhere from $600 to $1,000.
“It’s very intricate,” Ho said. “In general they use bamboo for the frame, the basic structure of the head, and they kind of use like a paper-maché type thing to get the coloring. For some of the fuzzier parts or the fur, people use bristles or yak fur.”
Mithi de los Reyes, senior in physics, secured the funds for the club to purchase their very own lion head, according to Ho. Before, they would always borrow the head from the Triangle Area Chinese American Society of North Carolina, meaning they had limited time to learn head movements during practice.
Ho said he danced with both TACAS and the NC Kung Fu Center before coming to the university and misses the hobby, since TACAS catered towards high school students. He said time constraints did not favor a return to the Kung Fu Center.
“I wanted to keep doing lion dance as much as I can, and I just figured an easier way instead of having to drive all the time would just be to start a club here, so that way I could continue on, and also help to just bring more awareness to the dance,” Ho said.
Garrison said he joined the group, which started in spring 2013, after he befriended Ho, who lived on his hall freshman year and helped Garrison with his Chinese classes.
“A lot of the new members, most of them haven’t really
heard of lion dancing, or they don’t have any experience doing it, and so it’s pretty exciting to see that, that there are people interested in learning this style of dance,” Ho said.
Garrison started off learning the movements without the costume, since the lion tail limits his visibility to the floor beneath him, he said.
“It was an unorthodox, but also physically demanding way to explore that culture,” Garrison said.
Few universities host a lion dance troupe for students, making the group “unique” according to Ho. UNC-Chapel Hill’s lion dance group did not last, while the organization at Duke University limits its performances to university- sponsored functions unlike NC State’s troupe.
“I do walk around with the lion head for performances, and people are interested,” de los Reyes said. “A lot of times Asian culture gets reduced to a certain stereotype when it’s actually a lot more than that.”
Due to the small size of the club, the future of lion dance at NC State looks shaky.
“I think we’re all afraid that after we graduate there won’t be anyone to carry on that tradition,” de los Reyes said.
Fortunately, Ho said, the dance only requires a handful of dedicated students (two in the dragon suit and a few on percussion) to carry on that tradition.
If you would like to join Lion Dance Troupe or learn more about this group, send an email to Yang Ho at yho@ncsu.edu.