You might remember that the Chinese do lion dances for the Chinese New Year (I recommend that last link, but only after the 5th minute). Saturday ended the two week celebration of CNY. For those two weeks, there were lion dances everywhere. There was one in my building at work...three times...there was one in the middle of Raffles Place...at least twice...they were near our house, they were in shops, they were EVERYWHERE. Twice. They are supposed to bring a good year, prosperity, and all of that other good, Chinese New Year stuff.
Lion dances take a lot of people - they have drummers, two people for the actual animal, the people who set up and probably more. They usually all ride around in the back of a truck. It looks really colourful and really quite fun.
Let's say there are 50 lion dance companies (assuming there are multiple performances by one troop per day), and let's say that it takes 20 people per lion dance. That's 1000 people employed by lion dancing.
Since there are so many lion dances performed, and it takes so many people to make a lion dance, it made me think...what do all of those people DO during the off season? This is considering the off season is 50 of the 52 weeks of the year.
Their skills include dexterity and dancing for the lion people (which is probably a gross minority of the people, since it only takes 2-4 people per dance), drumming for the drummers, set up, tear down, and logistics. I know that there is a lot of drumming for Chinese funerals/wakes, so I was wondering if the same drummers can also drum at funerals. What if a lot of people die during Chinese New Year, though, and all of the drummers are off lion dancing? How can the demand be supplied? Logistics, set up, tear down could probably all work on road shows, expo centre activities and things like that. I suppose that just leaves the lion dancers themselves. What could they possibly do? I hope they have other skills.
No comments:
Post a Comment