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Slither on over: Chinese Cultural Center celebrates the Year of the Snake
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Since 1992, the Chinese Cultural Center has celebrated Lunar New Year with a variety of dances and demonstrations to wow audience members and to immerse Albuquerque in the experience.
This year, the cultural center plans to bring in the Year of the Snake with another celebration from 1 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 1.
Slither on over: Chinese Cultural Center celebrates the Year of the Snake
Lunar New Year is a celebration that follows the lunar calendar and begins with the first new moon of the lunar cycle. This year, Lunar New Year begins Jan. 29 and ends on Feb. 12. Traditionally, celebrations go on throughout the duration of Lunar New Year and typically end with a lantern festival.
Hosted at Albuquerque’s oldest martial arts school, the Lunar New Year event celebrates the best of Chinese martial arts, including tai chi, kung fu and bagua forums, and long-held traditions to bring in the new year.
“In the last five years we’ve been joined by a group called the Albuquerque Chinese Folk Dance ensemble, and they have an incredible repertoire of Chinese folk dances that they put on with these gorgeous, eye-popping costumes,” said Bill Doleman, artistic director of the event. “It’s a really colorful event that adds a lot to our performances for the celebration.”
“We’ll have at least an hour and a half of tai chi, kung fu and dancing, plus the things that are very common when the Chinese get-together and that includes lion dancing and a ribbon dance,” he added.
One of the most important parts of the Lunar New Year tradition — lion dancing — features a show where lion dances defeat an evil spirit, an ode to the Lunar New Year idea of removing all negatives from a person’s life to allow for more positivity and a better year. At the end, audience members can feed the dancing lions with cash donations, which the Chinese Cultural Center uses to pay for the annual event.
Other animals, like a thirty-foot dancing dragon, make an appearance at the beginning and end of the performance in celebration of some of the animals represented in the Chinese zodiac.
“We finish it all off with a traditional long string of fireworks,” Doleman said. “We’re talking about 20 feet worth of fireworks ending in a big boom and the whole string burns. It’s a performance and celebration for people to watch and enjoy.”
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The performance is done regardless of weather and each year, a crowd between 100 and 500 people join to celebrate. Doleman said in the past, guests have come during blizzards and dancers have performed against the raging snow, shoveling the ground in between each performance.
“We rent out 300 chairs and put them out and people will get there early enough to get a chair because otherwise they stand during the show,” he said. “It’s usually a pretty big crowd.”
During the event, guests will be able to purchase food and drinks from local food truck Umami Moto, whose menu will feature items like kimchi, street noodle curry, Korean burritos and more.
“We work really hard on this and we usually start in August or September and have practice every other week and really want to share Chinese culture and this is a way of continuing the mission to do that,” Doleman said.
