In Revolutionary Bodies, dance scholar and dancer Emily Wilcox brings to light the richness and the complexity of stage dances of the People’s Republic of China (hereafter China) over an eighty-year period from the 1930s to the 2010s. This is the first North American English-language volume based on primary sources addressing the history of “Chinese dance,” the most widespread genre of the concert dance form in China and abroad. Wilcox offers a deep analysis of staged dance steps, costumes, props, and rhythm in different genres of Chinese dance. Her work, based on ten years of ongoing fieldwork and an impressive amount of archival material, film footage, photographs, dance reviews, and performance programs, is rich in biographical details and offers a close reading of Chinese dance material. By focusing primarily on its history and aesthetic developments, Wilcox wants to bring to light “a complex cultural phenomenon that transcends simplistic dichotomies between personal and collective, hegemonic and resistive, traditional and contemporary, or embodied and conceptual” (4). To achieve her goal, the author has separated her book into six chapters, each highlighting an important new development in Chinese dance.
Chapter 1 focuses on the beginnings of Chinese dance during the early socialist era and wartime, most specifically the Chinese Civil War (1927–1949) and the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945). In this section, Wilcox addresses the work and career of major dance practitioners who pioneered Chinese dance. For example, in Southeast China, Wu Xiaobang (1906–1995) developed “New Dance,” a genre that introduced and adapted Western modern dances via Japan. In the west and southwest, Dai Ailian (1916–2006), Qemberxanim (1914–1994), Liang Lun (b. 1921), and others developed “Frontier Dance,” or adaptations of regional forms of Han and non-Han dances from remote parts of China. Finally, in the northern parts of the territory, communist-affiliated artists and intellectuals formed a style called “New Yangge,” a form of folk dance from rural Han communities based on communist ideology according to which art had to be national in form but remodelled to the party’s ideology.
By 1949, a national dance movement emerged from the cooperative work of these choreographers after the first All-China Literature and Arts Worker Representative Congress. The combination of Frontier Dance and New Yangge formed the basis of a new dance form, simply called Chinese dance. Wilcox’s second chapter addresses the dance developments after the Congress. During this period, there were debates over whether ballet and modern dance vocabulary and movements should be included in the newly founded Chinese dance to represent Chinese revolutionary culture. The question of minority dance is also addressed in this chapter, as well as the institutionalization of dance and the dance pioneers’ rise to strategic cultural positions in China. As discussed in chapter 3, this allowed for the development of mega productions intended to impress audiences in China and abroad and for the development of a new embodiment of socialism, where ideology was slightly softened to let dance language explore new venues.
The profound schism between Chinese dance and ballet during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), and the re-emergence of Chinese dance, are examined in the fourth and fifth chapters. Wilcox shows how the first dance pioneers became stars of the regime and later lost all credibility and were subjected to denunciations and violence during the Cultural Revolution. This led to major restructurations in the dance field and, as the author demonstrates, it changed how dance looked on stage, as pluralism and older forms of national movements were rejected in favor of ballet. These changes also coincided with the presence of an important number of Russian dance teachers in China. After Mao’s death, the political rigidity was lifted and Chinese dance was revived by its old practitioners. Dance was once more reassessed into a new form of embodiment that represented national socialist bodies in post-Mao China.
This constant need to reconsider how national identity is performed on stage continued in the 1980s with the importation of American dance forms such as modern dance, disco, and hip-hop that put a new emphasis on individuality and contemporary experience. In this concluding chapter, Wilcox addresses the notions of tradition, adaptation, and innovation in three contemporary case studies that inherit traits from socialist dance. The first case study is based on the author’s research and participant observation. It examines the pedagogical dimension of socialist dance inheritance. Wilcox demonstrates how fieldwork, research, teaching, and choreography in China are closely interrelated. The two other case studies focus on innovation in contemporary Chinese dance, most specifically in the work of choreographers Chen Weiya (b. 1956) and Zhang Yunfeng (b. 1927).
Throughout the book, Wilcox makes clear that the search for self-definition within a socialist context was central to Chinese dance developments. Although the concepts of defining and imagining identity are central to her analysis, the problematics around what is “Chinese” are never fully addressed, arguably to sustain focus on the historical dance developments. However, it is clear from Wilcox’s work that national identity is not only perceived essentially as a geographic-specific phenomenon but also encompasses a cultural, political, and historical dimension. Furthermore, she demonstrates that identity, like Chinese dance, is dynamic and in constant evolution.
Paradoxically, Wilcox remains ambiguous in her perception of socialism and socialist realism, which she presents as immutable ideologies rather than dynamic movements that evolved in complexity over time, like identity and dance. For example, she associates socialist realism almost exclusively with themes like class struggle, the military, farming, or factories (80). Although these were indeed important themes to early socialist realism, the case of Soviet socialist realism showed that the artistic movement presented clear ideological lines but no distinct stylistic model. Therefore, socialist realism cultural production was not consistent and evolved too into several forms over decades, as new political rules emerged. Although Wilcox does not seem to take this aspect into consideration, her analysis of dances strongly supports that statement. With this work, she certainly demonstrates the complexity of Chinese socialist cultural production and the necessity to address it with a new framework.
Overall, Wilcox is able to produce a solid, accessible, and well-balanced volume which addresses both the dance enthusiast and the non-specialist. Her extensive research as well as her considerable knowledge of Chinese dance and culture are notable. I particularly appreciate her use of technology, which allows her to place some of her photographic materials next to associated QR codes leading to webpages that allow readers to watch videos of some of these rarely seen choreographies. Revolutionary Bodies offers rare and original insight into the study of Chinese dance, and its author certainly succeeds in demonstrating how rich and diverse this tradition is.
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[Review length: 1104 words • Review posted on November 4, 2021]