Members of the Grant Avenue Follies, a senior cabaret dance troupe based mostly in San Francisco’s Chinatown, collaborated with rapper Jason Chu on the Lunar New 12 months tune “That Lunar Cheer.”
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Members of the Grant Avenue Follies, a senior cabaret dance troupe based mostly in San Francisco’s Chinatown, collaborated with rapper Jason Chu on the Lunar New 12 months tune “That Lunar Cheer.”
IW Group
A cabaret dance troupe of elders from San Francisco’s Chinatown has launched a rap observe and video celebrating ​the Lunar New 12 months.
That Lunar Cheer, a collaboration between the Grant Avenue Follies and Los Angeles-based rapper Jason Chu, hippety-hops into the 12 months of the Rabbit with requires meals, household and enjoyable.
“We have been by way of a pair difficult years and we need to want all people a cheerful new 12 months in addition to ensuring that it will likely be a peaceable and wholesome new 12 months. That is essential to us,” Follies co-founder Cynthia Yee informed NPR. “We’ve customs that must be adopted, akin to cleansing the home earlier than New 12 months’s Day to comb away all of the unhealthy luck and welcome the brand new.”
The video was was funded by the AARP, a nonprofit curiosity group specializing in points affecting these over the age of fifty.
No strangers to hip-hop
The 12 members of the Follies, aged between 61 and 87, may be steeped in faucet dance and the songs of the Fifties and ’60s. However they’re no strangers to hip-hop.
That Lunar Cheer is the group’s third rap observe so far. The Follies’ tune protesting violence towards folks of Asian descent, Gai Mou Sou Rap (named after the rooster characteristic dusters that Chinese language mother and father historically use across the residence, and likewise use to spank naughty youngsters), has garnered almost 90,000 views on YouTube since debuting in Could 2021.
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Follies founder Yee stated she feels a connection to the hip-hop style.
“What higher technique to specific ourselves is thru poetry, which is a tune with rap,” she stated.
Their dedication to the artwork kind impressed rapper Chu, who wrote That Lunar Cheer, and has a robust background in group activism in addition to music.
“These women are sturdy and feisty and inventive,” Chu informed NPR. “Attending to collaborate with them is precisely the sort of artwork I like making — one thing that highlights tradition and group in a approach that is enjoyable and empowering.”
Yee added she hopes the tune exemplifies the values of the 12 months of the Rabbit: “Principally very quiet, very lovable, very fuzzy-wuzzy, and naturally all about having a lot of household,” she stated. “The 12 months of the Rabbit is about multiplying the whole lot, whether or not that is youngsters, grandchildren or cash.”