stuff I like: Ryumai - Dragon Dance‏

On Saturday I took part in a dragon dance. We were invited to come along as there were some special activities in Kyoto´s Movie Land Theme Park (kind of theme park where they film movies, has replica streets from different historic moments) and a dragon dance was one of them. Really had no idea what this was going to entail, turned out we were to actually perform...

First we had to dress up like this.... and put on these shoes....

The "rehearsal" involved seeing of we could actually lift the dragons... they are quite heavy and a bit tricky to manage to move around in a dragon-like fashion.

And after a little while it was time for the show.

The actual show was with two dragons, two teams, which we interchanged the holding of the dragon - otherwise you would get too tired! A woman was also involved, she had some fireworks and seemed to set them off at various points....

I suppose the performance was depicting a story, but I´m still a little confused about that.... nevertheless, it was a fun experience and not just a little crazy.

At the end we had a short time to take a look at movie land - that day there were so many people dressed up - cosplay - like their favourite manga characters. Some of the costumes were really well done and they were really in character.