Title: Revolutionary Bodies: Rethinking Contemporary China's Dance Culture

Speaker: Emily Wilcox

Organizer: Office of International Exchange and Cooperation

Co-organizer: Dance Academy of Sichuan Normal University

Time: 9:00 am, 21^st May

Venue: Zoom App

Bio:

Emily Wilcox is Associate Professor of Modern Chinese Studies in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan, USA. She is a specialist in Asian performance, with a focus on dance in the People's Republic of China. Her articles appear in China Perspectives, positions: asia critique, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, The Journal of Asian Studies, Asian Theatre Journal, Journal of Folklore Research, TDR: The Drama Review, Wudao Pinglun (the Dance Review), Body and Society, and other venues. Her book Revolutionary Bodies: Chinese Dance and the Socialist Legacy (University of California Press, 2019) won the de la Torre Bueno Prize from the Dance Studies Association. Dr. Wilcox is also co-editor of Corporeal Politics: Dancing East Asia (University of Michigan Press 2020).

Abstract:

In this talk Wilcox will discuss her recent book, Revolutionary Bodies: Chinese Dance and the Socialist Legacy, the first English-language primary source–based history of concert dance in the People’s Republic of China. Combining over a decade of ethnographic and archival research, Revolutionary Bodies analyzes major dance works by Chinese choreographers staged over an eighty-year period from 1935 to 2015, examining connections between socialist thought, cultural institutions, and transnational exchange as they relate to dance creation, education, and theory. Using previously unexamined film footage, photographic documentation, performance programs, and other historical and contemporary sources, Wilcox challenges the commonly accepted view that Soviet-inspired revolutionary ballets are the primary legacy of the socialist era in China’s dance field and instead presents the contemporary practice of Chinese dance as the era's major creative project. Revolutionary Bodies is available Open Access at https://www.luminosoa.org/site/books/10.1525/luminos.58/.