Chinese Customs

Chinese people love excitement, and Chinese New Year and other traditional festivals are times of special celebration and joy. Singing and dancing are everywhere. Many fold customs and performances are incorporated into the festival celebrations and competitions held on Chinese New Year. The most common of these are perhaps the dragon dance and lion dance.

The dragon dance was already a popular activity by the Sung dynasty (960-1279 A.D.), and has continued to be so up to the present. The dragon mask and boy used for the dance may be gold, green, variegated, or firey red. The dance may be performed in the daytime or at night. If performed at night, it is usually preceded by someone carrying a blazing torch to illuminate the procession. The length of the dragon varies from nine to 24 sections long, each section measuring from about five to six and a half feet. The procession moves with the momentum of a tidal wave, and is a lifelike portrayal of a celestrial dragon.

The lion dance also has a long history among the people. Because fewer participants are required, and because the lion head and body are easier to make, and since only a small dance area is required, performance of the lion dance can be seen just about anywhere you look on Chinese New Year. The lion is usually controlled by two people: one to manipulate the head, and one for the tail portion. Sometimes a third person, carrying a silk flower ball, or wearing a mask of the laughing Buddha and holding a banana leaf fan, leads and teases the lion into action, adding to the fetive atmosphere.

There are innumerable other kinds of festive fold performances, such as "riding in a boat on land," walking on stilts, "carrying a youth piggyback," the clam spirit dance, and so forth.

The boat used in the "riding in a boat on land" performance is usually made of woven bamboo branches covered with colorful cloth or paper. The boat has no bottom, and one man, who is dressed as a young female passenger, carries the boat, and another plays the part of the rower. The poling and rowing motions, and interations between the two characters make for a hilarious and entertaining stage show.

Two wooden poles with footstops are used in stiltwalking. The stilts may add from 12 to 20 inches to the stiltwalker's heights. The stilt walker "dances" to various tunes or opera songs. Stiltwalking is not just a folk art and local musical art form, it is great outdoor fun.

In "carrying a youth piggyback," a young woman straps a head-to-waist wooden mannequin of an old person to the front of her body, giving the appearance that an old person is carrying her piggyback. This portrayal of two persons by one is performed as a burlesque pantomime.

In clam spirit dance, a young woman puts on a clam shell woven out off bamboo strips. In one sketch, the clam spirit opens and closes her shell in response to a fisherman casting and pulling in his net, but who each time gets nothing in return for his efforts. In another, a snipe tries to peck out the clam's tasty flesh for a meal, but instead gets his beak stuck in the clamshell. This performance inevitably draws side-splitting laughter and roaring applause from the audience.

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