By: Tianyou Lee, Staff Writer

In January and February of 2025, the Mills Dragon Dance Team will be performing at the Millbrae Lunar New Year Festival and San Francisco Chinese New Year Parade as their first out-of-school events since their pandemic hiatus.

The team practices the traditional Chinese art of the dragon dance, which involves a long puppet of a dragon held up with poles by a line of dancers. The performers run and move the dragon’s body in waves to make it look like it is chasing a pearl, another prop consisting of a rod with a large sphere on top. 

The dragon dance first became a Mills extracurricular in 1995, in large part due to the advocacy of Mills’ former international relations teacher Wayne Phillips. After the team’s formation, members would go on to regularly perform and win awards at the Millbrae and San Francisco Lunar New Year events until 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic forced them to temporarily disband. With the help of Phillips, advisor and Chinese teacher Kali Chong, and former alumni (including history teacher Tara Donohoe), the Dragon Dance Team resumed activities in the 2023–2024 school year, where they largely focused on in-school rallies and assemblies.

In their second year back from the pandemic, the Dragon Dance Team will return to their standard Lunar New Year city events, performing at the Millbrae Lunar New Year Festival on Jan. 26 and the San Francisco Chinese New Year Parade on Feb. 15. The team secured their Millbrae performance from an agreement with the Millbrae Cultural Committee, their sponsor; for the San Francisco event, the coaches registered the team and officially received an invitation last month.

The San Francisco parade is especially well renowned, frequently referred to as one of the largest Lunar New Year events outside Asia. This year, it was also voted as the sixth best U.S. cultural celebration in the 2024 USA Today’s 10Best Readers’ Choice Awards. Kelly Deng (11), one of the team’s four co-captains, describes being able to perform the event as “one set goal” of the team.

“The San Francisco Lunar [New Year] parade is really important,” she says. “It’s just a great opportunity to be there, I think. And we just want to make sure our team members have fun and get to go there.”

The Dragon Dance Team will be marching down the San Francisco parade route from 2nd and Market Streets to Kearny Street & Columbus Ave, which spans 1.3 miles. With multiple loops, the team is expected to run at least three miles, according to Coby Chen (11), another co-captain.

To prepare their members’ endurance for these performances, the Dragon Dance team will start practicing in their weekly meetings when they get back from winter break. “We’re planning to start around Jan. 11 and condition our members to be able to handle these long-difficulty runnings that we’ll do in our performances,” Chen says. “Especially the San Francisco one, because that one you’re probably running [for] like an hour.”

In their upcoming performances, the team will be using a dragon puppet constructed and sewn by students from previous years. Members, who currently count around 50, will be split into six roles: pearl, head, neck, body, tail, and music, with the majority of dancers manipulating the body. Deng is leading with the pearl, while Chen is coordinating the head.

For the team as a whole, Deng believes a large part of what the group wishes to achieve is rooted in the cultural aspects of the dragon dance. “We’ve always had that kind of general goal of just wanting to be inclusive and promote this traditional Chinese dance and the Chinese culture that we embody.”