Dancing Modern China

This paper puts dance at the pivotal centre of the transcultural exchange characteristic of early modernism. I argue that modern dance in the West was essentially a transnational art form, emerging directly from encounters between Asia and the West and that the geographic migration, multidirectional travelling, and reciprocal exchange of modernist cultural expression in the early 20thc was made visible by dancers in perhaps the most literal iteration of Hayot and Walkowitz’s description of ‘modernism as a particular kind of response to a modernity defined as a novel experience of the globe’(7) Yu Rong-ling, daughter of a Qing diplomat posted in Paris, in 1902 studied under Isadora Duncan, pioneer of American modern dance.On her return to China she performed her own hybrid dance creations at the court of Empress Cixi.