TUGUEGARAO CITY – The Year of the Snake in this Chinese New Year 2025 was meet with cheers here as a thousand of people watched the gyrating sways of dancers garbed with costumes of lions and dragons at the SM Downtown and City malls on Sunday night here.
Student performers swayed like real lions and dragons as they presented the traditional dance, a common event in Chinese culture and other Asian countries in which performers mimic a lion’s movements in a costume, apparently to bring good luck and fortune.
Performers of lion and dragon dances strutted their stuff in their colorful attires.
The Chinese lion dance, which is performed by two dancers, one of whom manipulates the head while the other moves the rear end. To show the courting and mating periods, two lion heads performed during the affair.
On the other hand, the dragon dance is performed by several people who hold the long sinuous body of the dragon on poles. It is played by a team of experienced dancers who manipulate a long flexible giant puppet of a dragon using poles positioned at regular intervals along the length of the dragon. The dance team simulates the imagined movements of this river spirit in a sinuous, undulating manner.
By VILL GIDEON VISAYA
