[serene music]
- Corey Chan: The Chinese New Year or the Lunar New Year
is based on cycles of the moon.
It's not the Gregorian calendar.
And Chinese New Year is celebrated for two weeks,
so growing up in San Francisco, Chinese New Year was my,
it's my favorite time of the year
because it's Christmas that lasts for 15 days.
We get together with family, eat gigantic meals,
all the traditional foods in the New Years,
and of course, they have lion dances.
[energetic drums and cymbals]
The stories represented by the lion dance,
they go back thousands of years in history.
They talk about filial piety, loyalty, being righteous.
These are the stories
that Chinese people tell their children,
"This is why you're Chinese."
[audience applauding and cheering]
- Jeff Lee: The lion is seen as a harbinger of happiness,
a harbinger of good fortune,
bringing auspiciousness to an occasion
where you want to celebrate,
you want to bring that auspicious energy
to the occasion.
The lion dance is a martial art, in the way you move,
in the way you blink at the right time,
in the way you move the mouth at a certain time
and how you move your body to make it look animal-like.
The eyes are made of wood, painted wood.
The insides are made of bamboo bound with paper
and then covered with paper as papier-mache,
and then there are strings to pull the eyelid shut.
You operate the mouth with your hand.
When you look at something
that's done traditionally in this manner,
you can tell that a very deft hand did it.
- Travis Lum: We wanted to be good stewards of this art form.
We take in these lions and we repair them
and restore them to what they used to be
or you know, something even better.
- Thomas Chun: This lion I'm currently restoring,
it's been crushed on one side,
and pretty much what I do
is I take a lot of bamboo strips and I create splints.
I take first aid tape, which is relatively cheap,
and I just create that splint,
and sometimes it's easier to get inside the lion.
I go over it with the glue to keep it together
and solidify that.
- Travis: This lion's 20 years old now.
If we didn't rescue it, it would be burnt at a temple.
That's one of the traditional ways
that lions go back to heaven.
They get burned and the spirit is released
and it goes back up.
I'm reinforcing the spine of the lion head right here.
Oftentimes, the lion breaks right across the spine.
I build up the papier-mache layers.
Really, really make it tough to break and easy for us to paint.
- Jared Young: What we like to look for is blending.
Blending is the use of two colors,
and how the one color will fade directly into the other.
So examples right here in the eye socket,
the black to the white.
This is the most nerve-wracking part
of painting lion heads because if you're not careful,
you can end up with solid black or white
or too much black or too much white.
- One specific thing from long ago till today
is that the nose is still always green
or at least has some kind of green on it
'cause green symbolizes benevolence.
- These are the original ears that came with this lion.
Today I'll be affixing the black goat fur
to the underside here.
I think it's plenty.
It's an honor to be entrusted
with passing down the art to the next generation
because there's many, many people
that have kept the art alive this long for us.
And we must not drop the ball.
[energetic music]