The Lion’s Awakening: Interviewing the Lion Dance Club with The Star Metro

Jointly reported by:
Khoo Xin Yi Sr2ScA
Tan Hong Zher Sr1ScA

Photography by:
Ms Cynthia Chee (Secretary cum PR)

Dancing to the beat of tanggu (drum), cymbals, and gongs, the Lion Dance Club of Kuen Cheng High School has been ushering in the festivities of Chinese New Year celebrations for nearly 15 years. Led by their coach, Mr Ekson Eng, the club was honoured to be interviewed by Ms Grace Chen Pei Keng from The Star Metro on the 13th of January2023.

Ms Grace is a senior writer at Metro Central which covers community news in The Star. According to her, the objective of the interview was to get to know the Lion Dance Club as a whole, including how they train and perform. Under Ms Grace’s guidance, we, as the reporters of Kuen Cheng’s Newsletter Club, went along with the interview as well.

It was around 3:30pm when the Lion Dance Club started practising. Using wooden hoops as the rim of the lion’s head, the members danced to the beat of the drum, following with distinct hip, shoulder and knee movements.

With the first practice round over, the club members all sat in a circle with Ms Grace for a group interview. According to the Teacher-advisors of the club, Ms Ding Poh Ling and Ms Wong Ming Hui, the club was formed in 2009 following the addition of boys to what once was an all-girls school. However, for the first year, only girls seemed to be interested in joining before boys were slowly introduced to the club in the subsequent years.

With members ranging from ages 14 to 18 this year, the club was said to be interesting, cool, challenging, fun, marvellous, mysterious and so on, leading the members to have joined in the first place.

The 19th of January this year will be the first performance the club has done in 3 years, which was said to be nerve-wracking for the club members. Even so, those who had performed previously stated that once the performance is done, they always felt relieved, satisfied and motivated by the claps and cheers of the audience.

Mistakes do happen though, such as a wrong head turn or a miscounted beat by the lion head performer, but they’d always move on with the help of the lion tail performer, getting through the performance and finishing the routine.

Their performances last around 5 to 10 minutes with 2 to 3 difficult tricks per routine with many variations of cymbal chiming, which is the first thing new club members learn. They start off learning to clap to the different rhythms before being given the option to try something else. As for the rhythm variations, it all depends on the dancing of the lions, from the stages of the lions waking up, blinking their eyes, finding vegetables to eat, eating the vegetables and more.

After the group interview, Ms Grace proceeded with the individual interview with the club’s coach, Mr Ekson Eng who is the lion dance coach of 4 other schools as well including Catholic High School, Hin Hua High School, Kingsley International School and Sri KL International School. As a former competitor in lion dancing, Mr Ekson wishes to preserve lion dancing as not just a part of culture but also as a sport. He mentioned how lion dancing gained much traction due to a “High Pole” trick around the 1990s. However, as it’s a dangerous trick, schools aren’t allowed to practise it.

Mr Ekson found it harder to train and recruit members now than it was back before the pandemic, as the club members didn’t get much practice for the previous years, thus pushing them to practise harder this year. Their training sessions happen for 2 hours twice a week and are looking forward to performing more this year onwards.

Aside from that, the Lion Dance Club is also offering private performances, starting from RM688 per house from 28th to 29th January. For more information, please check following link: Lion Dance Club Private Performance Poster

As the interview sessions ended, Ms Grace directed us student reporters on how we should always take a look at the photographs taken by the photographer before starting the article as it could work as a guide for writing. She also mentioned the importance of including everyone in the group interview, even the quieter ones. Meanwhile in the individual interview, it was important to get to a more private area as more serious or personal questions may be asked that way.

After a quick group photo with Ms Grace, the interviews and reporting session officially came to an end. We would like to thank Ms Grace for giving us the opportunity to report alongside such professionals and the Lion Dance Club for going through with the interview. Wishing you all the best!