Double Dragon Dancing in Vancouver - First Practice - Feb 6 & 7

My taichi centre is doing a very interesting thing for Lunar New Year in conjunction with the Olympics. The centre apparently owns the largest Chinese dragon in Canada, so it was invited to do a performance and taichi demonstration that will be performed in the O Zone performance area in Richmond.

I was thinking to myself, the Olympics? But then, I realized that Richmond is the "Asian" part of Vancouver, "Hongcouver" if you will, and it would be a great opportunity to get some authentic tasty Asian food and possibly enjoy a fun Chinese New Year party. (Whooo!)

The first weekend was a practice weekend where the majority of it was spent in a dusty warehouse working on moves with the dragon. There are actually two dragons that will be performing. One that needs 20 people to carry it (the "baby") and the other one needs 50 people to stretch out to an impressive 300 ft.


I played around learning as much as I could. I think I'll be working with the small dragon as it is more playful than the bigger one and requires a lot of running around, swooping and special moves. One of the moves I liked a lot was the Pretzel where the head and the tail go under the midpart and the middle people at the end have to flip the dragon over. I believe that's going to be my job!

Another move that we worked on is the Spiral where everyone curls up the dragon and drops the leg poles and the head sticks up - kind of like a snake coiling up. It will be for when the dragons finish moving around and watch the taichi demonstration. That will be a bit difficult because we'll have to stand there in between the dragon for like 20 minutes. Ah well.

Anyways, this weekend will be the real deal - I'm looking forward to it!