This study centers on the Chinese martial arts (kung fu) lion dances in New York City's Chinatown where these performances are central to the public celebrations of the community's ritual life. There are no cultural performances in Chinatown that generate the widespread public interest and high degree of local participation, nor the dramatic tension and spirit of anticipation that are present in lion dancing, especially at the lunar New Year festival.;Lion dancing is a particularly illuminating performance system to study because of the high degree of cultural knowledge that is required for performance and the extent of community involvement in maintaining the tradition. The persistence of lion dancing--its quality and quantity--is directly influenced by changing community values, economic, social, and political relationships yet there has been negligible research done in this area.;Through the method of participant-involvement that spanned seven years, I studied the principal players, sponsors, and regulators, the structure of the martial arts organizations, audience evaluation, and the experiences of individual participants in the context of what performance theorist Richard Schechner has identified as "the whole performance sequence." By expanding the scope of performance to include the processes of training, workshop, rehearsal, warmup, the performance proper, cool-down and aftermath, this study concerns lion dancing at the juncture of the social and the performative.;Although Chinatown has been characterized as an enclave immigrant community, its native performances reach a wider audience and also attract participants from outside the culture. Recent trends in lion dancing show that it has moved out of its socio-religious ritual frame and has been fashioned into fixed performances that are choreographed, scored, rehearsed, and showcased in venues where it reaches audiences that do not necessarily share the same Cantonese martial arts cultural roots as the performers.
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