Yellow Earth theatre

Yellow Earth are a company making work based on East Asian traditions of theatre. They're producing a show that will tour early next year around the celebrations for Chinese New Year. The show is called 'Why the Lion Danced' and features a fantastic traditional Chinese lion costume. This thing was incredible - glitter, rabbit fur, neon paint, foiling, and best of all, little slippers with red lame 'claws'. On Tuesday I headed over to Chinatown to take some photos for press and publicity. 

Details from the Yellow Earth offices - I love those waving cats.

Director Kimiko Mendl in conversation with performer Olly (aka the front end!) 

Detail of the head part of the costume

One of the really interesting things was the way that passersby interacted with the whole thing: they stopped to take photos and have photos of themselves taken with the lion, and one man who was delivering boxes of supplies to the restaurants kept shouting out the music which is traditionally played as part of the Lion Dance and shouting 'get moving, get moving'.

My favourite shot - the background is desaturated so that the lion really 'pops'.