Kowloon Son

 I had had a long and difficult journey with what I have been teaching and especially the relevance of what I am teaching given the current climate of attacks on Asians etc. However, this is not necessarily something that the kids I am teaching will have to deal with... then again maybe they will. 

In any case, I am sort of excited because I am creating a new dance that will hide self defense techniques in the movments. Why am I doing this? Well I guess first and foremost as an artistic expression. But secondly, I had made a ton of Kei Lun esque heads over the Pandemic and this new dance, where the animal is just one person holding the mask.. .maybe even without a tail... will give me something to do with these masks. For various reasons it will be easier to teach a group, especially if we are social distancing. And while it is in the tradition of Kung Fu and lion dance, I am excited that it is its own thing. My Si Hing suggested that I should create a new name for this creature as the Kei Lun and the Kei Lun dance is a very specific thing. If I am creating my own thing, I should have my own name. 

There is an oral tradition that the Kei Lun is one of the sons of the Dragon and that the Dragon had nine sons. Looking on Wikipedia there are a few written traditions of this but there are often different creatures attributed to being the sons.. but there always seems to be nine. 

As I began to teach my kids I noticed that  when I tried to teach them the movements I was going for.. a variation of Kei Lun Bo, they each did their own motion. So while I first thought that I was going to call this the SachiHoko dance. The Japanese term for one of the sons of the dragon tat was a Dragon Fish or Tiger Fish... I figured, if I have Nine students and they each have their own personality and own dance... why not go with that? After all the Dragon's sons each have a different personality. Since the Nine mountains facing the Peak in Hong Kong are called Nine Dragons or Gau Long or Kowloon...I think I would like to go with that as a dance. Especially since that spelling is really a reference to a time that is no more and will probably no longer be used. 

So far the dance is this. You pick up the mask and do what comes naturally to you... with some suggestions by me.. but besically bam! everyone already knows their own dance. They can develop it further but they don't need to learn it per se. 

However, following that, their will be some choreographed movements that are simple self defense drills form various places... or at least references to them. The performance will be the kids just doing these drills. The music.. I  think... will be me hitting tea tins. And of course the masks are things I have made... or perhaps the mass produced plastic green faced lions in storage which number 40 total... if for some reason I get that many students. now 40 is more than 9. But hey... the sons of the nine sons.... and the grandsons.... right? would be a lot by now. 

The Bow

The Bow is going to be two "front walk By" self defense exchanges and then a "rear Attack" so three bows.  basically, Face(Eyes) and then knee to the groin. Then do the same thing on the other side, then the third bow is the attack from the rear. Then they will pose facing each other a la Chinese Operatic weapons fighting forms from the North. When I show these moves I will show the application. But since I don't have a suit we may just hit pads. In theory, if the heads or masks are made strong enough... we could hit the heads... and maybe we will have heads for hitting and heads for performance... but I also had an idea where the dance would be done human vs. creature... and the human would be the agressor. In the end I think I am going to go with two creatures playfighting basically. 

Ground and stand

So the various drills don't even have to be in order. In fact before a drill I guess the cretaures can actually circle each other and work on that sort of movement. But ground and stand is one creature will go to its back, legs facing the other creatures. The other creature will try to get around and step on or eat the creatures face.... but since it is a dance, "try" is a relative term. They will go easy so as not to damage the heads. After they get better at this they can just do the real drill I guess. But with Covid and insurance issues... maybe its better to go through this creature dancing phase first. 

Ring to Ring and Shoulder to Shoulder

This can be like push hands and stand up grapling. What's cool is the shoulder to shoulder can be done and the masks will be a barrier. It's not the same as being able to grab the legs etc... but it will help with working on stance. 

Weight Bearing. 

This one is a little tricky to teach. Not with the suit... but in this context... yes could be tricky. But we can still show the motion and kicking from the ground which will then go back into the ground and stand drill. The kicks can just be done super slowly.  I guess we can do weight bearing stuff too but that gets tricky with the heads, which might actually cause injury too. This part might be able to be shown purely as self defense and not even performed. Not that it is secret. But its just awkward. 

In this way we have a whole dance and a performance... with not that much material in terms of performance moves to remember. But we have drills that are engaging and fun for the kids and will have real world application that is appropriate for our society. Not to say Kung Fu isn't. The plan would be they would do this stuff until the Lunar New year performance. Perform it, and then we would move on to forms and fighting for a few months. 

The final stage would be drumming and knife fighting, using the sticks as knives. But the drills would be slow and similar to what is above to be honest. Some of the kids already learned various stick fighting from me and they would just continue that. The end of the year alwyas gets kind of sporadic in terms of attendance anyway.