The lion dance was popular after introduced by Buddhism, which was added gong and drum as the side music in Sui and Tang dynasties, passed down from generation to generation, and normally performed in festivals. The lion dance has thick and tiny equipment, which are lion head, lion blanket and lion tail in the end of the blanket. The ancient lion dances consisted of non-actioned one and actioned one. Nowadays, it includes north lion dance and south dance. Anyhow, the dance postures are rich and different with sole dance, double dance and multiple-persons dance.
Lion dance usually emphasizes on skills, with fierce actions, which embody the lion¡¯s nature, such as leaping, snapping, climbing, swirling, spinning, stepping on the balls. Meanwhile it should show off the dancers who teased off the lion with cleverness, resolution, and agileness. Based on the collected and resorted folk lion dances, Chinese people has made it technical and standardized with competition rules. The jargons from the lion dance are coherence action, moving action and static action. In terms of actions difficulties, it consists of A, B and C types, which one has its own difficulty bench mark.
Lion dance is one of the sports items. In the competition, the south team will have 8 players, the north 10 players, including back-ups and drummers, and the game will be showed in the 20 m x 15 m rectangular flat ground. The team is free to choose the dancing routine. The competition time is within 10-20 minutes with drum or percussion music accompaniment. The highest pole among the pole matrices is 3 meters and the lowest is 0.5 meter, and the length of among the matrices is between 14 to 15 meters, the width is 0.5 to 1.5 meters, and the diameter of its pole quotation is 0.3 meter £¨¡À0. 02 meter£©. According to the bench mark, the total scores will be deducted by the defaults of actions and other defaults, then the rest scores will be final marks, and the highest one will be the winner.
