Chinese Dance: In the Vast Land and Beyond

Abstract

Chang and Frederiksen's book is a welcome contribution on a much underrepresented topic. Chinese dance remains little encountered or researched outside Chinese-speaking parts of the world, despite there being distinctive and interesting folk traditions, such as yangge, which was transformed through the political campaigns of the mid-twentieth century. Other Chinese dance traditions have more recently become sustained and reshaped through China's remarkable efforts at restructuring intangible cultural heritage in the twenty-first century. Then there are imported genres like ballroom, ballet, and modern dance, each with a fascinating history of adoption, adaptation, and social impact (see further, Wilcox 2019). Ballroom is tied intimately to the colonial past, ballet references historical proximity to the Soviet bloc and is featured prominently in the Cultural Revolution's set of model works, and experimental modern dance enjoys a more recent following among the globalized urban elite (Taiwan's Cloud Gate Dance Theater is probably the best-known example). Newer explorations in Chinese dance range from imaginative reconstructions of court dances of the various imperial periods (now often but ambiguously called “classical dance,” gudianwu, a genre that is heavily represented in the present book) to the communal social-and-fitness routines of contemporary guangchangwu (plaza dance).Since this is a vast area, the authors can only point to some of the key features of the subject. Specialist researchers will note a lack of nuance (and some stark historical leaps and oversimplifications) in the opening history of Chinese dance. The fourth chapter—“Why Chinese Dance?”—is similarly flat. There is writing elsewhere that explores the rich and fascinating complexities embraced in and around Chinese dance, for instance, Mueggler's (2002) account of the politics surrounding festivals for the dances of ethnic minorities, Chen Juan's (2020) article on the operations of masculinity in the working lives of migrant male dance hosts in contemporary urban China, or McGuire's (2015) writing on the interplay of martial arts and dance movement in a Toronto lion dance club. Chang and Frederiksen cite some of this work, but they use it mostly in their endnotes rather than taking up the models offered by such studies as inspiration for their own approach. The result is a book that could work well with new undergraduate readers seeking broad-brush guidance. Such a readership is likely to be enthused by the book's warmth and given heart by its direct delivery. Moreover, the book is supported by a companion website where Chang and Frederiksen provide links to examples and brief contextual discussions of many of the dance types mentioned. Although the first couple of video clips I watched were set to rather cheesy and overamplified music tracks that I found distracting, seeing examples of the dances themselves is obviously a huge benefit for those new to the topic (and the use of such backing music is hardly confined to Chinese dance contexts).As someone long interested in biography and the telling of life stories, chapter 3’s compilation of interviews with seven Chinese dance artists based in North America was a highlight of the volume. The dancers selected are all prominent representatives of Chinese modern dance, and the interviews follow their various pathways from professional life in Taiwan or China to that in the United States or Canada, primarily exploring their efforts as choreographers and organizers of dance ensembles. The interviews are essentially sympathetic—the consultants are encouraged to describe matters as they wish, apparently without direct challenge—and the result is worthy and full of interest: the interviewees express themselves engagingly, they offer telling accounts of their diasporic dance experiences, and the assemblage of multiple voices provides moments of counterpoint and convergence that hint toward broader patterns and developments within the cultural ecologies in question. Another author might have added an incisive analytical synthesis and so contributed more directly to the ethnography of dance as transnational labor (as, say, Srinivasan 2011, has done for Indian dance), but the chapter works well on its own terms.Overall, Chang and Frederiksen's book successfully shares plenty of knowledge and practical insight as it progresses. Its primary target is that of raising the profile of its subject among general readers in and around North America's dance programs, and it approaches this by giving dance tutors enough confidence to include a look at Chinese dance in their introductory surveys should they wish to. I was initially struck by the book's concentration on Chinese modern dance and the genre of gudianwu (and, within that, on the perspectives of choreographers as opposed to the many other professionals who also play key roles in that same world). I had taken the book's title (and the coauthors’ expressed aims within the book itself) to suggest a more ambitious account of Chinese dance, dancers, and dancing. The title selected and the book's frame come close to erasing numerous other forms of Chinese dance, as if gudianwu is the only kind that needs in-depth discussion (and the unmarked presentation of North America as the entirety of the “beyond” leaves interested readers like me deep in terra incognita, beyond the beyond, as it were). Ultimately these are significant limitations, but I feel that Chang and Frederiksen wrote the book they set out to write, and it's a book that might very well inspire researchers from the next generation to provide more searching accounts within this much underrecognized subject. Chinese Dance should help stimulate greater visibility and appreciation for Chinese modern dance in North America, and that is already an admirable contribution.