Malaysia Has Turned Lion Dancing into a Gravity-Defying Extreme Sport

I just clicked on the video and... holy cow, there are two grown men inside a giant, heavy, furry, lion costume, jumping from pole to pole, many feet high, while being able to look only through little holes in the costume, surely with zero peripheral vision.<p>If someone had told me people would do this <i>as a competitive sport</i>, I would have said, &quot;no way... why would anyone risk their limbs doing <i>that</i>?&quot;<p>Reality is indeed stranger than fiction.

Those double stack moves are incredible. Two people pulling that kind of leap of faith in such a synchronised way while not being able to see anything takes a lot of practice and trust. I’ve never seen this before, and I’d pay to watch it in real life.<p>This reminds me of so many lesser known extreme sports and traditions that are endemic of different parts of the world. For instance the castells (human towers) from Catalonia: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;SQM4qbwyxCM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;SQM4qbwyxCM</a>

It would be 10x more interesting to me when the lion mimic cute animal behaviors instead of jumping on poles. Things like scratching ears, walking&#x2F;running&#x2F;jumping (legs movements), showing emotions (ears, eyes, tail), etc.<p>All of the lion dances I have seen in the past are all trying to impress viewers by doing dangerous stuff: climb, jumping on high poles, split fire,... I mean that is a lot of work, but not that impressive, as I can clearly see 2 grown ass man under the cape most of the time.<p>If anyone have a good lion dance video as per the description above, please send me, I really appreciate it.

To me dragon dancing has always been oriental idiosyncratic thing I thought I would never understand. But geeze, nobody could not appreciate the strength and skill on display in that video. They were tossing each other in the air while the pole they were balancing on was wobbling, all while making the damned thing blink for christsakes. The theatrical element added by the costume was icing on the top.<p>Well done, Malaysia.

:( This year Lion Dancing was banned for CNY in Singapore to prevent gathering, because it&#x27;s crazy fascinating to watch in person.

I saw some of these people last lunar new year in KLM, just performing on the street in front of a pretty large (spontaneous) crowd.<p>The acrobatics were really impressive. The performers looked like young teenagers who were having much more fun than I did at their age. Looked pretty dangerous though!

What I&#x27;ve learned from a misspent youth watching way too many kung fu movies is that all Asian art forms boil down to who has the best kung fu.

They fall off at 4:50

I know we&#x27;re not supposed to complain about website behaviour. But why, in this community, that seems to be sensitive about privacy, do we allow posts from a site that simply forces users to accept their cookie policy that has no opt out to view their content.<p>And to be honest their content is a blender full of re-regurgitated chum drawn from wikipedia and other sources rather than original material.