Artistic Lion Dance

Artistic Lion Dance

Nominating Unit: Heshan Municipality, City of Jiangmen

Heshan Artistic Lion Dance is an important branch of lion dances in south China. It was created at around the end of the Qing Dynasty, by Feng Gengchang from the Dalang Village, Shapingyue of Heshan Municipality. Feng borrowed the techniques and artistic features from Shaolin martial arts and South China martial arts, together with Foshan Lion Dance, and created the Heshan style lion art. He himself was a master of lion dance, and used to be called “King of the Lion Dance in Guangdong Province”. Heshan Artistic Lion Art is now mainly distributed among many townships in Heshan municipality, such as Shaping, Gulao, Longkou, but is also practiced among overseas Chinese communities in Singapore and many Southeast Asian countries.

Heshan Artistic Lion Dance created its own style with its unique lion-styled cat walk. The performance combines the lion’s style and characters with the agility of a cat. It fully reveals different emotions of a lion, such as joy, anger, fear, content, suspicion, drunk, sleeping and awake, and vividly displays its psychological characteristics, such as suspicion on everything it sees, joy when seeing green, fear when seeing red, biting at every pillar, pulling every tree it sees, playing with water whenever it sees it, and testing and examining back and forth every flight of step it sees before it confidently climbs on it. It also includes such lively cat moves as mouse catching, playing, bird catching, high place walking, crawling, jumping and rolling over, making the lion’s image really lifelike. A whole sequence of dancing moves is formed based upon these with unique characteristics.(https://www.daowen.com)

Heshan Artistic Lion Dance is also special because it portrayed the lion in great details and is story-telling. In each of the four dancing routines such as “coming out of the lair”, “four gate dance”,“stepping onto the terrace”, and “big-headed Buddha picking up Lingzhi”, great efforts are made to portray the details. For example, when the lion is coming out of the lair, there are detailed and amusing movement portraits of it washing his face, washing his mustache, cleaning his eyes, washing his feet, washing the corner of his mouth, etc. Furthermore, there are also many story-telling lion art programmes such as young hero fighting dual lions to save an axman, a naughty boy playing with a lion after he’s got a ball, the God of Joy fighting the male lion. These programmes are very interesting and special.

For the accompaniment, Heshan Artistic Lion Dance features a special strong-rhythm Seven-Star drumming to build up the atmosphere for different stages of the performance. It has strong supplementary artistic effects, and has become the most commonly used drumming technique for the lion dances in Guangdong Province.

Heshan Artistic Lion Dance has an important place in the history of Guangdong Province lion dances, and it has unique artistic values. However, the traditional lion art is experiencing a crisis in its heritage due to many factors, and urgent and effective supporting measures need to be taken immediately.