Lunar New Year is prime time for The City's lion and dragon dancers

“Right now, I’m just tired,” he told The Examiner while driving to a performance at the Genentech offices in South San Francisco, one of roughly 200 shows the company is putting on across the Bay Area and Las Vegas over a five-week span.

Lion and dragon dances — staples of Lunar New Year celebrations — are two of the most popular and historical forms of Chinese entertainment.

Companies like Lau’s are annually booked for hundreds of acts around the region during Lunar New Year, whether for parades or corporate events, which means Lau’s days have been filled with changing in and out of heavy lion and dragon dance gear, performing intense stunts and hustling from one event to the other.

The art of lion and dragon dancing

Richard Ow is shifu — Chinese for master — of Yau Kung Moon San Francisco, a kung fu studio with locations in both Chinatown and the Sunset district.

Kung fu serves as the base for dragon and lion dancing, which are electives at Ow’s school.

The martial art is vital for the performers — including the drummers who accompany them — because both lion and dragon dancing rely on the horse stance, a common position in Asian martial arts in which the feet are spread wide apart so the thighs are parallel to the ground and all ten toes are pointed forward. Most dragon and lion dance movements originate from that stance.

“If you don’t know how to do the basics of horse stance, you won’t be able to do lion dancing,” Ow said.

The main difference between dragon and lion dancing, which are practiced with similar choreographic elements — acrobatics amid loud drumming in vivid and eye-catching colored garb — is the size of the costumes and the number of people it takes to perform the routine.

Dragons are usually operated by at least nine people, sometimes dozens for the largest versions. More than 100 puppeteers man San Francisco’s Golden Dragon, which is more than 250 feet long.

Lions, on the other hand, are supported by two people — one who controls the head and the other the tail — and have the flexibility to do more acrobatics.

Both Ow and Lau said the vast majority of requests are for lion-dance performances. Still, Lau said he teaches dragon dancing first because the art builds camaraderie and team spirit.

“It requires you to follow the person in front of you,” Ow said. “We perform with the nine-person dragon, which has a head and tail, and some people in between in the pearl. So when they do it, they’re following each other, and they coordinate with each other. And, when one person falls or one person trips, it affects everyone else.”

“The sets of lion and dragon dances are pretty similar, although there’s different kinds of dragons that can perform different things, but you’re limited because they’re so long,” said Chinatown historian David Lei.

Lion dances tell a story about the animal overcoming an obstacle to obtain a prize — often red envelopes containing money. Dragon dances are celebratory routines that traditionally call for rain.

Ow said each studio has a unique spin on both art forms.

“Every school is right,” he said. “Every school has their own way of doing it.”

History of the arts

Chinese dragons, whose presence in Chinese motifs and murals dates back to Neolithic times, are portrayed as spectacular, heavenly beings representing power and good fortune.

But Lei said the creatures are misrepresented by being called “dragons” in English. The Chinese name for dragons, “lóng,” doesn’t translate neatly into English. According to Lei, the reason the beings are called dragons in English is because they bear a resemblance to the common dragons in Western culture, evil mythical beasts that breathe fire and torture communities.

Given their importance in Chinese culture, dragon dances are traditionally the grand finale of large Chinese celebrations or gatherings, including the famed Golden Dragon, which annually concludes San Francisco’s Chinese New Year parade.

The tradition dates back to the Han Dynasty (206 B.C. to A.D. 220), when the emperor would entertain foreign guests with several animal dances but always ended with a dragon dance, which Lei said was the “most spectacular” of the performances and represented China.

That’s because the composition of the dragon-dance costume is an amalgam of the best parts of different animals that hold significance in Chinese culture — the eyes of a rabbit, the antlers of a stag, the mouth of a camel, the head of a horse, the body of a serpent, the scales of a carp, the whiskers of a catfish, the talons of an eagle and the legs of a tiger.

Lei called it the most powerful mythological animal in the Chinese zodiac.

“What does [the dragon dance] tell us? The power of diversity,” he said. “If you’re accepting of different cultures, and you borrow the best, you’re the most powerful ... it represented the Emperor, the bringing of rain — but in reality, it always was a symbol of diversity that we need to borrow the best from all the cultures.”

Similarly, lion dancing has roots dating back to the Han Dynasty, though the form it takes today started around the mid-1800s, Lei said.

The dance and outfits originated from lantern and papier-mache makers in Foshan, China, located 45 minutes outside of Guangzhou, the center of Cantonese opera. The dance was started as a way for the Cantonese opera school to make money, Lei said.

The designs of the head were based on what lions symbolize to the Chinese. For instance, the lion heads have horns attached to them because the Chinese believe lions transform into phoenixes when they grow old. The mouth is always wide open with a tongue sticking out; the Cantonese word for tongue is “lei,” the same as the word for profit.

“You want to see the tongue because you want to see big profit,” Lei said.

An ode to Chinatown

Lau and Ow’s family histories have deep roots in San Francisco’s Chinatown, which informed their decisions to pursue lion and dragon dancing careers.

“I think I was just fascinated that it looked like you can do a lot of things that could be very acrobatic, and I like to jump,” said Lau, who began training at nine years old at a family association youth group in Chinatown his father started in 1986.

“I’m a very physical and active person. So I feel like that was something that was very unique and special that I was drawn to.”

LionDanceME has received national acclaim, performing at the biggest hotels in Las Vegas, including the MGM, Bellagio and Aria. One of the troupes also made it to the quarterfinals of America’s Got Talent in 2012.

Lau, whose parents remain firmly involved in Chinatown, performs with LionDanceME on Grant Avenue every Saturday and Sunday at 3 p.m. But he said that no matter where he’s dancing, he always brings a part of Chinatown onstage with him.

“I feel like we’re creating a bigger impact by being a huge representation of our own Chinatown community,” he said.

Ow was raised in an apartment on Stockton Street in the heart of the neighborhood. His parents owned a bakery on Washington Street. When he was young, a family friend brought him into the studio.

“That’s where I’ve been ever since,” he said.

Ow teaches classes at Yau Kung Moon on the weekends when he’s not working full-time as an AT&T engineer. He took over the studio started by his uncle Bill Lee, the owner of Far East Restaurant, more than two decades ago.

“I just wanted to keep the tradition going,” Ow said. “That’s why I still maintain the lion dancing ... it’s important to keep that culture and tradition going to our next generation.”