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This book examines the history of concert dance in China from 1935 to 2015, with a focus on Chinese dance and its relationship to revolutionary performance culture in PRC history. The book argues that Chinese dance, not revolutionary ballet, was the primary legacy of Maoist dance research and innovation. Showing the relationship between dance and politics, it discusses dance developments during the War of Resistance Against Japan, the Chinese Civil War, the Korean War, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the post-Mao era, and the period of One Belt One Road. The book emphasizes transnational exchange and highlights the contributions of immigrant and ethnic minority women, such as Chinese Trinidadian dancer Dai Ailian, Korean dancer Choe Seung-hui, Uyghur dancer Qemberxanim, Bai dancer Yang Liping, and Uyghur dancer Gulmira Mamat. It discusses the history of dance schools and companies such as the Beijing Dance Academy, the China National Opera and Dance Drama Theater, the Central Nationalities Song and Dance Ensemble, and the Xinjiang Arts Institute. Dance film is an important subject of analysis. Aesthetic experimentation is another key theme. Dance styles examined include Chinese classical dance, Chinese national folk dance (including ethnic minority dance and Han folk dance), Chinese military dance, New Dance, New Yangge, national dance drama, Dunhuang dance, peacock dance, and ballet. The book argues that kinesthetic nationalism, ethnic and spatial inclusivity, and dynamic inheritance are lasting features of Chinese dance.

This book examines the history of concert dance in China from 1935 to 2015, with a focus on Chinese dance and its relationship to revolutionary performance culture in PRC history. The book argues that Chinese dance, not revolutionary ballet, was the primary legacy of Maoist dance research and innovation. Showing the relationship between dance and politics, it discusses dance developments during the War of Resistance Against Japan, the Chinese Civil War, the Korean War, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the post-Mao era, and the period of One Belt One Road. The book emphasizes transnational exchange and highlights the contributions of immigrant and ethnic minority women, such as Chinese Trinidadian dancer Dai Ailian, Korean dancer Choe Seung-hui, Uyghur dancer Qemberxanim, Bai dancer Yang Liping, and Uyghur dancer Gulmira Mamat. It discusses the history of dance schools and companies such as the Beijing Dance Academy, the China National Opera and Dance Drama Theater, the Central Nationalities Song and Dance Ensemble, and the Xinjiang Arts Institute. Dance film is an important subject of analysis. Aesthetic experimentation is another key theme. Dance styles examined include Chinese classical dance, Chinese national folk dance (including ethnic minority dance and Han folk dance), Chinese military dance, New Dance, New Yangge, national dance drama, Dunhuang dance, peacock dance, and ballet. The book argues that kinesthetic nationalism, ethnic and spatial inclusivity, and dynamic inheritance are lasting features of Chinese dance.

Under state socialism in the People's Republic of China, dancers' bodies became important sites for the ongoing negotiation of two paradoxes at the heart of the socialist project, both in China and globally. The first is the valorization of physical labor as a path to positive social reform and personal enlightenment. The second is a dialectical approach to epistemology, in which world-knowing is connected to world-making. In both cases, dancers in China found themselves, their bodies, and their work at the center of conflicting ideals, often in which the state upheld, through its policies and standards, what seemed to be conflicting points of view and directions of action. Since they occupy the unusual position of being cultural workers who labor with their bodies, dancers were successively the heroes and the victims in an ever unresolved national debate over the value of mental versus physical labor. In the case of socialist realist epistemology, dancers were called upon to use their bodies and their experiences to generate realistic depictions of a world that was, according to official ideology, always in a process of being formed. In their embodied expressions of regional, cultural, and national identities in the making of new "Chinese" dance forms, dancers contributed to the affective and aesthetic strength of state-supported worldviews, even while recognizing that these views were often "real" and "true" only because they were politically correct. The understanding of "Chinese traditional culture" applied by dance practitioners in the making of Chinese dance forms in the People's Republic of China applies a dialectical epistemology drawn from Chinese socialist realism, Chinese postcolonial nationalism, and indigenous Chinese aesthetic theory. In this dialectical epistemology, Chinese traditional culture is understood as something that can be investigated, inherited, and remade through dance practice envisioned as a form of cultural research.

This article investigates the ways in which discourses and experiences of health and healing have shaped the development of contemporary dance in France. It confronts the problem of how to situate contemporary dance in relation to other dance genres and suggests Robert Desjarlais' concept of the 'aesthetic of experience' as a helpful framework for understanding the ways in which technique and virtuosity operate differently in contemporary dance than in other dance forms. The article is ethnographic and historical and attempts to create a dialogue between dance studies and medical anthropology. The ethnographic and historical material has three parts. First, I offer an analysis of the cultural idiom of illness as blocageand argue that contemporary dancers in Aix-en-Provence experience their work as a form of healing or dÈblocage. Next, I show how two historical and political events in France led to the promotion of dance as a means of social reform: (1) the Situationist art movement of the 1960s and its idea of 'awakening' society through public art; and (2) the renovation of the French Ministry of Culture in 1982 and its subsequent promotion of contemporary dance in state-funded community outreach projects in the 1980s. Finally, drawing on rich narratives from fieldwork interviews, I define awareness, expression and presence as the primary technical elements of contemporary dance in Aix-en-Provence, France, in 2002, and explain their relationship to the notion of 'dance as l'intervention' that has grown out of the historical context of contemporary dance in France.

This book explores dance and choreography as sites for the articulation of new theoretical and historical paradigms in inter-Asia cultural studies. It covers a range of dance works, artists, genres, and media, from Kathak to K-pop flash mob dance, Cold War diplomacy to avant-garde dance collaborations, and festival dance to dance on screen