Members of the Grant Avenue Follies, a senior cabaret dance troupe primarily based in San Francisco’s Chinatown, collaborated with rapper Jason Chu on the Lunar New 12 months track “That Lunar Cheer.”
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Members of the Grant Avenue Follies, a senior cabaret dance troupe primarily based in San Francisco’s Chinatown, collaborated with rapper Jason Chu on the Lunar New 12 months track “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 l. a.-primarily based rapper Jason Chu, hippety-hops into the 12 months of the Rabbit with requires meals, household and nice.
“we have been through a pair difficult years and we want to want everyone a contented new 12 months as properly as to creating constructive that it is going to be a peaceable and healthful new 12 months. that is important to us,” Follies co-founder Cynthia Yee informed NPR. “we have customs that ought to be adopted, reminiscent of cleansing the residence earlier than New 12 months’s Day to comb away all of the dangerous luck and welcome the mannequin new.”
The video was was funded by the AARP, a nonprofit curiosity group specializing in factors affecting these over the age of fifty.
No strangers to hip-hop
The 12 members of the Follies, aged between sixty one and 87, may even be steeped in faucet dance and the songs of the Nineteen Fifties and ’60s. however they’re no strangers to hip-hop.
That Lunar Cheer is the group’s third rap observe to this point. The Follies’ track protesting violence in direction of people of Asian descent, Gai Mou Sou Rap (named after the hen attribute dusters that chinese language dad and mom traditionally use throughout the residence, and in addition use to spank naughty youngsters), has garnered almost ninety,000 views on YouTube since debuting in might 2021.
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Follies founder Yee acknowledged she feels a connection to the hip-hop style.
“What elevated different to particular ourselves is through poetry, which is a track with rap,” she acknowledged.
Their dedication to the artwork type impressed rapper Chu, who wrote That Lunar Cheer, and has a sturdy background in group activism as properly as to music.
“These women are sturdy and feisty and ingenious,” Chu informed NPR. “attending to collaborate with them is strictly the variety of artwork i actually like making — one factor that highlights tradition and group in a method that is nice and empowering.”
Yee added she hopes the track exemplifies the values of the 12 months of the Rabbit: “principally very quiet, very lovable, very fuzzy-wuzzy, and naturally all about having a quantity of household,” she acknowledged. “The 12 months of the Rabbit is about multiplying every part, whether or not that is youngsters, grandchildren or money.”
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