CMA and community involvement

[Octavius]

I have noticed something interesting recently. It seems that most of the CMA schools that go out into the community around their neighborhoods and demonstrate and "show off" their arts (i.e. Chinese New Year demos, lion dancing, etc) are mostly schools that teahc arts that can be classified as external. Meaning, they are predominantly Hung Gar, Choy Li Fut, Northern Shaolin, Praying Mantis, etc. I hardly ever see a Hsing-I or Ba Gua school go out and do much demos on their own, unless they are part of a larger festival or show. Of course there are always exceptions but I am describing a general trend. Why is that? Is there some cultural or historical tradition or precedent for external schools being more...expressive of their arts? I am not including Tai Chi in this category much becasue I have seen so many bad TC demos, geared as "health exercises", so I don't want to start on that topic right now.

[fei]

Hi,

The schools that usually go out to demo during Chinese New Year, are generally southern styles (as you have mentioned a few above).
Why you ask? That's because in southern styles they have the traditional southern lion dance. The lion dance is symbolic to Chinese New Year by performing a show and grabbing the lettuce and spitting it back out as a gesture of good luck to the store/mall/etc...

Most often you'll find external styles out there because they either have southern lion dance in it, or they are out to promote during this time of the year.
Northern Shoalin in my opinion are always trying to get more people involved anyway.

In my praying mantis school, we also learn Hung Gar, so we have Southern Lion Dance as well.
As for internal styles, from the demos I do and see, tai chi is demoed not in a seminar/excercies manner, but just like any other external style.

Chinese Lion Dance has long been a tradition for Chinese New Year.

We have a tai chi demo team which performs two or three different forms and also have tai chi application demo as well.
I find that when you have both internal and external arts performed at the same demo, people are more attracted because external is easier to attract than internal.

External arts are more showing in the sense that everything is fast, quick, and pretty much you can even say flashy sometimes.

It's hard for the public to see what internal arts are really about.
All they think is "oh it's just slowed down movements, doesn't look so hard... or this is boring...I like the fast exciting stuff..." stuff like that.

People don't understand until they really try it. So i would guess it's tougher to demo internal arts because of the attention span of the public.

Well that's my opinion on the internal matter.

[NorthernMantis]

Well you have to rember that to the public hsing yi or ba gua aren't as eye pleasing as styles that lean more to external forms.In other words think of the chics man the chics;) That one is for you Kristoffer.