The lion, and the people under it.
NamYang Lion Dance Centre 南洋醒獅學院 — a Singapore troupe and teaching academy, founded in 2016.
We started with one head, one drum and a hall we had to book.
南洋 means the southern seas — the name Chinese communities gave this region when they arrived, and the name under which lion dance took root here. 醒獅 is the southern lion: the awakened lion. Putting the two together was the easy part. Everything since has been drums, bruises and Sundays.
A tradition only survives if someone keeps doing it.
Lion dance in Singapore is not a museum piece. It happens on a Monday morning outside a new bubble tea shop, in a corridor on the second day of the new year, at the door of a flat where a bride is waiting. The tradition lives in ordinary places, on ordinary days, for ordinary people. Our job is to turn up and do it properly.
NamYang exists to promote and preserve this traditional Chinese culture through the art of performing — and to pass it down to the younger generations who will carry it next.
And to teach it. A troupe that only performs has a shelf life. A troupe that trains has a next generation. NamYang is about fifty people now, the youngest nine and the oldest fifty-one, training together every week and twice a week before the new year.
“Once you step into NamYang, you forget everything outside.”A NamYang member, speaking to STOMP
Anyone can rent a lion. The pluck is the craft.
The greens hide a red packet. The lion takes it down, chews, and spits the lettuce back over your shop and your guests — the fortune is not kept, it is thrown to you. That thirty seconds is what people remember, and it is the part a troupe either does properly or does not.
A lion is not alive until someone wakes it.
Before the first drum, the lion's eyes are blank. Your guest of honour takes a brush, dips it in red, and dots them.
That is 点睛 — and it is the only part of the ritual the client performs, not the troupe. Your boss, your bride, your grandfather. We bring the brush, the cinnabar and the lion; you bring the person whose moment it should be.
Come and see us work.
The clearest way to judge a troupe is to watch one. Tell us your occasion and we'll tell you exactly what we would bring.