Should Old Acquaintance be forgot

I used to be sad when the Christmas and New year's season ended as a child. For some reason Chinese New Year seemed so far away and unconnected. I have tried in the past to connect Lion Dance and Chinese New Year with Western New Year and Christmas (though Chinese culture has its own solstice festival, which I never actually celebrated other than showing up to other people's celebration.
This year we did do a Lion Dance right after Thanksgiving and we will probably be doing some Chinese New Year gigs the week before Chinese New Year. This is actually becoming more and more normal, and I have been told that you can totally do this according to the old Chinese rules anyway, by having a celebration to wrap up the old year. But in America, where Santa Claus is a big feature right after Halloween, it makes its own kind of sense.

I have been in New Jersey for about a year now and I have observed the local State Culture a little more. I am not saying I understand it necessarily. But I can see that it is way easier to get your Lion Dance team to join in Festivals that already exist than to try and create new Chinese New year Festivals. This is not only in terms of logistics. But people will think more about Manhattan's Chinatown in NJ rather than say, a a vision of a huge event in Edison.

NJ seems to be full of people from NY or Philly. Even if they are the children or grandchildren of people from NY or Philly, it is part of the legacy to "go into the city" for celebrations events, mischief, crime, business, whether it is Tracy Morgan or the #2 guy for Madoff, the action happens in Manhattan or Brooklyn and NJ is as Morgan calls it, "the Fortress of Solitude" so whether you are a Wall Street Criminal or gangster or whatever and you are neighbors to such types, NJ is almost like a vacation place where you don't want to see any signs of this. Rules keep the area residential and quiet. Yes this is the opposite of what shows like Jersey Shore and other stereotypes in NY run media show, and of course there are raucous areas of NJ but it all seems to be compartmentalized by geography.

Long story short... this means some sort of Lion Dance parade is a foreign thing to people here. You can do it on a stage in a school or festival, or in a parade that already exists, but the store to store dance so common elsewhere is logistically quite difficult. There are hardly any sidewalks, and you can't cross the street. You will have to load up equipment and drive across a highway.


Not only that, but because the concept of doing lion dance like this is so foreign, even though i am working with the community in several overlapping organizations, pulling together enough people for a team, a real team, a team of adults and teens and kids and elderly that will play for an extended period of time and be really into what they are doing ritually, socially and traditionally, has been hard to make materialize. Yes I can do a school or library with my kids and some students anytime, even a "formal" or "serious" performance... but that feel of a Chinatown Lion Dance or a Chinese Village Lion dance....which is less performance and more ritual, where the difference between the audience and the participants is actually not that clear, and where the beginning and the end of the celebration is not as clear, where the dance lasts the whole day or even seems to carry over several days in a dream like floating world that ties you to the traditions and spirit of people past that you know, even though you have never met them and don't even know their names or stories.


That type of dance is more difficult to bring about it seems.