Lion Dancing and Sparring

Last night we were working on our lion dancing and Sifu Brinker said something that I had never really thought of before, he said that lion dancing is a great way to develop our sparring and application skills. At first this made sense, then it didn’t, and then it did again. 

Initially I thought about the usual ways lion dance can supplement and strengthen my kung fu in general, it improves my stamina, and my stances. But then I realized he specifically mentioned sparring and applications which confused me, but thinking about it more tonight I think I see one facet of what he was talking about and it all clicked because of what he added at the end of class, that sparring relies heavily on empathy, and the lion dance specifically can be a tool to develop this. He was talking about how we perform the lion dance, how we need to adopt the personality of the emotions we want our lions to portray, and how this same idea happens in sparring where you are “performing” what you want your opponent to see (side note: my sparring skill is not yet developed enough to where I can start doing this physiological warfare-what level-are-you-playing-at-one-level-higher-than-you, but I understand that’s where I’m trying to get to) as one more means of control during a match, or application. 

But I was thinking about this idea in terms of the lion and the drum. 

I need to improve my reaction time so I can hit the beats perfectly, I need to understand the cues from the drum, in real time, just like how I react to the strike of my opponent in sparring. I need to send them signals, (sparring is communication!! It’s a two way dialogue! ) And I need to do this all at high speeds and mostly on instincts. I can see how the areas that need the most work in my sparring, are similar issues I need to work of in my lion dancing, those fast combinations of reactions that stack onto each other, how the context of how I finished the previous thing sets me up for either success or failure for the next thing, and how committed some techniques are. I am hoping that this bridging of understanding will allow me to allay the lessons of each, so that as I develop my lion dancing further, my sparring and realism in my techniques improves, and as my sparring skill grows, my lion dancing will progress with it. This is giving me a whole new perspective on “don’t silo your training”. It’s not just that the ideas are connected, it’s that they can directly impact each other!

Current Total

Push-ups

2949

Sit-Ups

2324

AOK

67

Km

189

Blogs

4

Sparring

5

Hand Form

71

Weapon Form

46

Repair Relationship

0


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