Lion Dancers | Review

Lion Dancers
Writer/artist: Cai Tse
Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers; $13.99

Chances are you’ve seen a Chinese lion dance somewhere before, wherein a pair of dancers under an elaborate puppet-like head and a draped costume perform as if they were a stylized lion. If you’ve ever wanted to know more about the practice, then Simon & Schuster has the perfect book for you: Lion Dancers, an original graphic novel by cartoonist—and lion dancer—Cai Tse.

Though it contains a lot of information about the lion dance, the dancers, and exactly what goes into bringing the art form to life, including a page at each new chapter explaining a component of the dance, Lion Dancers also has a story to tell, a sort of coming-of-age drama about a young person learning to be himself and the true value of teamwork, something that is, of course, absolutely vital when two individual people attempt to come together to portray a single entity like the lion in the dance.

That young person is Wei, whose father was a famous champion lion dancer, his team winning competitions in which the lions would perform difficult, dangerous stunts like moving from elevated pole to elevated pole and executing jumps.

As a child, the relatively small and lightweight Wei dreamed of following in his father’s footsteps, working as the head part of a team with his bigger, stronger friend Hung, who danced as his tail (size and weight are important, as it is the tail’s job to lift the head when the lion needs to jump). Sometime after Wei’s father died, however, Wei and Hung had a bitter falling out, the origins of which will be explored throughout the book, and Wei quit lion dancing.

Years later, the two former partners are still classmates in middle school but no longer on speaking terms. Wei finds himself isolated and out of place at school; despite the fact that his grades are top-notch, he’s the last one picked in basketball, used to riding the bench and not feeling welcome among his peers.

A chance encounter with a mysterious man with a lion head logo on his t-shirt leads Wei to a local lion dance team, however, and he finds his interest in and passion for lion dance reignited. He wants to join, and the team wants him to join, given how talented he is. The only one who objects? The junior team’s vocal star, Hung, who has moved on from his days as Wei’s tail to perform as a head.

Over Hung’s objections, Wei joins the team, and the two become rivals, struggling under the weight of their past together while enduring the punishing schedule of lunar new year performances and looking forward to the team’s choices to represent them in a championship. Both will need to face the mistakes they’ve made, their assumptions about one another and about lion dance.

Tse’s art is bright and open, the artist showing a special aptitude for character design and acting, as well as for rendering the at times complex and precise actions of lion dance in easily intelligible, highly readable sequences. It’s always a challenge trying to adapt one medium into another, and attempting to translate a form of dance into comics seems especially so, but Tse excels at it.

A charming, even compelling sports/performance narrative tied to the story of a young person finding himself, Lion Dancers is a highly rewarding read about an interesting subject that has never really been explored in comics … or Western pop culture in general.

Filed under: Reviews