Why Do We Dance?

Last Saturday the stars aligned and I was able to make it in for open training! Sidai (S) Csillag had offered to work on some lion dance stuff with me and towards the end of our practice I made a connection while practicing my “throwing the lettuce” section that I wanted to explore and document in a blog. 

As we started integrating lion dancing in our classes at the school I would hear instructors justify to students why it was part of our curriculum. The explanations I heard the most were variations on this idea: There is Kung fu in our lion dances, so we practice the dance to strengthen our Kung fu. I would hear this and take it a very surface level, there are Kung fu stances in the dance: cat, open-x, low-back, etc.. As I thought about it more I thought I was taking it deeper by thinking that the same lessons we stress in our forms can be found in the dance: intensity, engaging the eyes, adding a snap to the end of your movements, but a new layer clicked for my on Saturday: Kung fu is a system that teaches us how to maximize power transfer, and our training is how we teach our bodies to feel and generate that power (I.e. training our eye for detail and developing our skill) and those same ideals are found in the lion dance!! 

When we practice a form we are training our bodies to move in a way which generates maximum power transfer and when we practice the lion dance we are training our bodies to move in a way which generates maximum power in almost the same way. When I do the “throwing the ball” technique in Lao Gar III it is almost the same motion as when I do the throwing the lettuce technique in the lion dance. The vector of the power transfer (I.e. the application) is slightly different but the idea behind how you shift through the technique, where that power is generated from, and how that power is transferred is identical! 

As I was working with Sidai I was tweaking my timing and some of my technique but I was primarily focused on the ending and what was happening with my arms, it wasn’t until I started thinking about my STANCE and how I was TRANSITIONING into that stance that I started to make more solid progress with the motion, and that’s when I made the connection to the similarities within our forms! Which also has a lesson about cause and effect in our forms and how I often need to go back in time and look at everything that happened before the problem to try to find the true root of it, if I only ever focused on the end of the move I would have only been able to tweak it to be slightly better than it was, rather than fixing the true issue.  

Current Total

Should Be At

Push-ups

20405

34869

Sit-Ups

22300

34869

Hand Form

232

646

Weapon Form

229

646

Other Forms

186

226

Sparring

382

646

AOK

469

646

Steps

1762

1001

Repair Relationship

3

8

Me and White Supremacy

6

16

12 Applications

2

8

1-on-1's

19

32

Kung Fu Art

1

8

Blogs

23

32

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