Huishan Ancient Town is a good place to enjoy traditional performances during the Spring Festival holiday. [Photo/jstv.com]
In celebration of the Chinese New Year, a variety of events featuring Chinese intangible cultural heritages and folk art were organized in Wuxi's scenic areas.
The Chinese New Year, the Year of the Tiger in the Chinese calendar, officially falls this year on Feb 1.
Spring Festival is the most important festival for all Chinese and regional customs and traditions concerning the celebration of the New Year vary widely. People in modern China still prefer traditional ways of celebrating the holiday, including decorating windows and doors with red paper-cuttings, writing couplets with wishes for good fortune and happiness, wealth, and longevity, wearing red and eating dumplings.
The popular lion dance performance in Huishan Ancient Town were upgraded to be more exciting and interesting.
The most exciting part of the show is when performers display their circus skills by stepping and moving on five wooden stakes, called quincuncial piles in Chinese kungfu, accompanied by the sound of gongs and drums in complex rhythms, showcasing the emotional changes of the lion such as being happy, angry, sleeping and shocked.
A family hangs out in Wuxi during the Spring Festival holiday. [Photo/wxrb.com]
Nianhuawan scenic area invited hundreds of craftsmen to spend three months making special lanterns in celebration of Spring Festival. Visitors also tried making their own paper-cuttings and wood-carvings, and even bows and arrows.
Exhibitions of Wuxi Zhima (a type of wood engraving) and traditional Chinese paper-cuttings have also been mounted at Wuxi Library. As one of the Chinese traditional folk arts, paper-cutting enjoys a longstanding history and is favored by people from home and abroad.
