Fourteen international students recently experienced China's time-honored dragon and lion dance culture during an immersive exchange event at Fudan University in Shanghai, where they learned basic dragon dance, lion dance, and ribbon dragon moves under the guidance of student members of the Fudan Dragon and Lion Dance Association.
Held on Aug 27, in partnership with the Confucius Institute Frankfurt, the workshop left participants both exhilarated and physically exhausted — a feeling that Dustin Shahan, one of the visiting students, described as unforgettable.
"I love the design. It's so colorful and neat. It's completely different from everything I have experienced in Germany. Beautiful, elegant and amazing," Shahan says after hours of practice. Though the training proved extremely tiring, he called the experience "really cool".
"The most challenging aspect is probably capturing the right feeling — that you are a lion who is excited for the future and fortune ahead," he adds, admitting that the physical coordination required was far more difficult than he had anticipated.
Founded in 2014, the Fudan Dragon and Lion Dance Association has grown into an interdisciplinary cultural hub with 70 active members, ranging from first-year undergraduates to doctoral candidates across fields including humanities, computer science and life sciences.
"It starts with dragon and lion dancing, but it does not end there," says Guo Jingrong, a graduate student from the Department of Chinese Language and Literature who performs as the lead dragon head. "The cross-disciplinary friendships, cultural insight, and shared passion for storytelling are what truly endure."
As more international students enroll in Fudan's summer programs, the association has stepped up its global outreach efforts. In July, it hosted more than a dozen workshops that introduced over 400 international visitors to traditional dragon dance.
Huang Zheng, an undergraduate history student and captain of the men's dragon team, recalls feeling anxious the first time he led an international session with a carefully scripted English speech. He soon realized that physical movement could easily bypass language barriers.
"Language barriers exist, but the joy felt when moving together in rhythm is universal," Huang says. He still remembers the moment he helped a visiting student in a wheelchair navigate and perform a ribbon dragon dance, highlighting the traditional art form's inclusive spirit.
To ensure sustainable international outreach, the association has developed a standardized bilingual instruction framework covering cultural history, safety guidelines and step-by-step technique tutorials. The program has attracted a growing number of international students fascinated by Chinese culture, including Justus Jonas Otto.
"I have been learning Chinese for two and a half years. I like China and the people here, and I have made a few Chinese friends. When I heard about this exchange activity, of course I wanted to come and try it," Otto says.
Linda Lize Putane, another participant from the Confucius Institute Frankfurt, says she was eager to experience something truly distinct from the cultural landscape she already knew in Europe. "I was already familiar with many things that exist in Europe, and I wanted to learn something truly foreign to me, something I was genuinely interested in because it is so different," she says.
The association originally focused on high-intensity competitive athletics in its early years. A key shift took place around 2022, when the Chinese dragon and lion dance sports association introduced the "creative dragon dance" category to encourage interdisciplinary integration.
Recognizing that Fudan's elite academic students brought deep grounding in literature and history, Zhu Junpeng, the Fudan association's faculty advisor from Department of Physical Education and a former Dragon and Lion Dance world champion, reoriented the troupe's development path. Instead of competing solely on physical strength, the team began blending classical poetry, historical narratives and contemporary theatrical staging into their performances.
At Fudan's spring sports event in May, the campus sports field was transformed into a serene lotus pond. Performers wielding lotus-shaped props swayed to represent water lilies, which smoothly locked together to form a majestic nine-section-long dragon guided by a performer depicting Song Dynasty (960-1279) poet Li Qingzhao (1084-1155).
"We audited university courses on Song Dynasty poetry to capture the precise emotional nuance of the female poet's life," Guo explains. "Dragon dance becomes more than physical exercise — it becomes a living embodiment of classical literature."
Today, the association's digitized teaching materials, simplified music edits and tailored instructional kits are being adopted by local elementary and middle schools, helping revitalize this traditional cultural practice at the grassroots level. Deng Zitong, a sophomore majoring in artificial intelligence, is currently working on an "AI + Sports" program to develop a computer vision application that provides real-time motion analysis for dragon dancers.
Ma Tan contributed to this story.
