The above photo is of another dance team, the Eastern Ways Lion Dance Team

It had reached 100 degrees by 4:30 Sunday afternoon, and seven-year-old Caleb Mai disappeared beneath a massive red and black lion headdress the size of his body.

Moments later the drums began, and a line of lion dancers appeared on the stage, leaping and shaking beneath their bright costumes. They then each hopped onto the ground and scattered into the audience, standing on chairs and bobbing their oversized lion headdresses up and down. One lady laughed uncontrollably as a dancer shook its grinning masked face in front of her's. Every now and again Mai could be seen as he held the weight of the lion head high above his own and shook it wildly.

The drums stopped, and the dancers clamored back onto the stage. Mai's family stood from the front row to help him as he reemerged from beneath his costume.

This was the Diêu Quang lion dance team's first performance at the 17th annual Pacific Rim Street Festival in Sacramento, and Mai was one of several young dancers on the team. The festival's entertainment, stretched from the morning into the late afternoon, was divided among four stages set up in between Old Sacramento and Westfield Downtown Plaza.Along with Diêu Quang, it consisted of several performances exhibiting youth talent.

Chris Iwata, one of the performance coordinators and working board members of the event, explained that younger performers are common at the festival and their families enjoy coming each year to support them.

Aside from Diêu Quang, other new acts to the festival included the Hawaiian reggae group Koa Young and Friends, as well as Fijian Sanatan Youth Group.

Also new to the festival was the Green Valley Puppet Theater, which performed Bunraku, a Japanese form of puppet theater. The puppeteers, clothed in black from head-to-toe, unconventionally manipulated their puppets at waist-level on a table top, cleverly using a teapot, chopsticks, and white handcrafted figurines as characters in the story.

Sacramento Taiko Dan, a 20-year-old local drumming group and longtime festival participant, engaged the audience with a lively performance of coordinated Japanese taiko drumming.

The festival hosted a variety of other diverse performances, including dancing and music reflective of Filipino, Polynesian, and Hmong cultures.

By the late afternoon the crowd began to dwindle, and the lion dancers took to the streets for a final dance.

*AUTHOR'S NOTE: Accompanying photo borrowed from photo essay by Kati Garner*

    To view more photos from event, see her photo essay at the following link:

    http://www.sacramentopress.com/headline/7748/Paciific_Rim_Festival_fotos

To see a preview article written about the event, see the following link:

http://www.sacramentopress.com/headline/7597/Annual_Pacific_Rim_Street_Festival_on_Sunday