Kicking off the new year

Daniel Havlat ’25

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Every year, Connecticut’s largest celebration of the Lunar New Year, known as Lunarfest, takes place on Whitney Avenue in New Haven near the Yale campus. On February 1, participants rung in the Year of the Snake with the traditional lion dance and other performances, including an appearance by the Yale’s wushu team. Coach Brendan Lam ’28PhD, a graduate student in psychology, says wushu is “a combination of  martial arts, gymnastics, and dance” featuring “kicks, punches, flips, and jumps.” (Arthur Lam, another of the team’s coaches, is shown at right executing a wai bai lian, or “jumping outside” at Lunarfest.) Wushu is a club sport at Yale, and the team faces off against other college teams. Brendan Lam says the Lunarfest performance was “a great opportunity to celebrate Chinese culture.”