Contemporary Dances in China_By Dr.Jiang Dong

Contemporary Dances in China
By  Dr.Jiang Dong
(China)
 

The Question
When talking about the contemporary dances in China, we in fact have a different definition than those outside of the nation.

In China, if we mention this term “Contemporary dance”, we don’t refer to “modern dance”, which in foreign counties usually is of a similar meaning. The argument in China of what is “contemporary” or what is “modern”, arose approximately around 90`s of last century and there were no clues of any results after these confusing discussions. Nevertheless, in all China’s professional dance competitions (China is a nation believing in all kinds of dance competitions and it is a competition-dominated society in dance or other arts areas for the promotion of these art forms), “contemporary” and “modern” are under different competing categories, which suggests  that they should have a difference not only in concept but also in expressing styles. Yet, the question of what is “contemporary” and what is  “modern” still exists. It not only confuses the audience of these competitions but also puts the academic culture  of dancing at a loss. Many dance scholars have expressed their views toward it, and many have even borrowed the definitions from overseas. This has even weakened the original definition in China since the situations in Europe or US are quite different from the one in China. Even inside the western world sayings about these terms are somehow different from each other. Thus, the definition of “contemporary” and “modern” remains a key question for the dance field worldwide. Few dance critics still couldn’t clarify it soundly enough to the dance world and the public, which has made the situation worse both in terms of defining these two terms and in the practice of dance itself. . It happens often ironically that one entry comes for a cuertain category, but the board of judges thinks it should belong to another one, which shows that the participants don’t know at all what they are doing and what standard they can rely on.

Before we discuss this special and messy situation in China further, we need to know some fundamental deeds about the basic development of contemporary Chinese dance for the past several decades. From it, we might get a reason, if not an answer.

The Development
China is an old country with a civilization  lasting over thousands of years. Yet, unlike neighboring nations such as  Korea, Japan, and India, we don’t have a strong traditional influence in the area of dancing. So, by the end of 19th century, there were no traces of dancing in the mainstream frame of the cultural society, whereas the rich tradition of previous dynasties’ dancing factors had been assembled into the Chinese traditional operas like Kun Qu,  and Peking Opera. So, the new ideas of contemporary Chinese dancing were greatly influenced by the outside world.

Right at the entrance of 20th century, the first Chinese contemporary dancer – Miss Yu Rong-ling went to Japan and France with her diplomatic family to study the new forms of dancing such as ballet, modern dance, and Japanese classical dance. After she went back to the Qing Dynasty’s imperial court, she was appointed as the royal dancer to entertain the royal family. She not only danced those new forms she had learned abroad, but also choreographed several pieces by her own with some Chinese features. Since she worked for the old court in an old era, her new art of dancing could not be seen by the public. So, her influence to the contemporary society was very weak as a result. That is the reason why the Chinese dance field did not take her and her experiences as a proud achievement according to a certain academic view.

Then came the achievements. By the late 30`s and the whole of the 40`s of the last century, two great figures changed the dancing atmosphere in China completely with their unprecedented efforts. One is Mr. Wu Xiao-bang and the other is Mme Dai Ai-lian.

Mr. Wu Xiao-bang
Wu Xiao-bang (1906-1995) is regarded as the pioneer of contemporary Chinese dance.

Wu was born in Jiangsu Province which is very close to Shanghai. He was brought up during a specific period when China was experiencing a social change with a new cultural movement ongoing, namely the “May 4th Movement”.Wu Xiao-bang’s young brain was also affected by the new movement. In 1929, he went to Japan to study in Waseda University in Tokyo. He did not expect his life would change completely because of this trip. One day, in a campus showcase, he watched a modern dance named “A Host of Demons”. He was profoundly shocked by it and felt curious that why the strength of a dance could be so powerful. He decided at once to study dance and hence made up his mind to lead a career of dancing as an artistic tool to express his attitude towards his views upon Truth, Goodness and Beauty. His teachers in Japan were Ma-sao Takada (高田雅夫)、Takaya Eguchi (江 口隆哉) and Miako Miya (宫操子).The style of dancing he followed was Mary Wigman’s from Germany, so we in China call his style a German Style.

Mr. Wu Xiao-bang went to Japan three times successively for his further dance studies. Coming back from Japan, he first established a dance institute in Shanghai and engaged in promoting the new dance culture in this strange land which had forgotten what dance was for a long time. His very eminent accomplishments  of the time were found in two dance recitals entirely created by himself, which were composed of over twenty new dances. These dances were of the first group of new dancing styles in contemporary China for the public. They, no doubt, enlightened the society about this new career. During 1930s to 1940s, Mr. Wu Xiao-bang performed more than one hundred pieces with this new style, most of which possessed in-depth social meanings. Anti-Japanese invasion’ themes during the Anti-Japanese War, like “Hungry Fire” , “The March of Volunteers”  and “The Song of Guerrillas”  are among the best-praised ones. His images of dancing appeared in many big cities like Shanghai, Guilin, Chongqing, Chengdu and some areas in Canton, and his dancing style had a big influence in the whole society at that time. He was regarded as a progressive symbol in the revolution of the nation and his dances were highly valued. After 1949, the year of setting the New China, he was elected as the leader in the dance scene of the young republic.

So, to us, Wu Xiao-bang is the real promoter of the new dance movement in contemporary China. By choreographing the new works, he established a realistic (not an abstract) way of dancing as a choreographic method, which is in fact the solid foundation of  contemporary Chinese dance. His method has educated and influenced a large group of professional dancers in China for the last several decades. Thus, he learned “modern dance” from Japan, but created a method we in China call a “new dance form”, that symbolizes the main stream of contemporary Chinese dance.

Mme Dai Ai-lian
Another important figure lying in the development of the new dancing style is Mme Dai Ai-lian.

Mme Dai Ai-lian (1916-2006) was born into an overseas Chinese family in Trinidad of Central America. At the age of 14, she went to London to study ballet with Anton Dolin and later the modern dance with Kurt Jooss. She is not only capable of ballet and modern dance teaching, but also practices Labanotation. So, unlike Mr. Wu Xiao-bang’s career of taking European tradition through Japan, Mme Dai Ai-lian learned dance directly in Europe.

At the end of 1939, she returned back to China for the first time ever which was under the fierce situation of Anti-Japanese War. Dai Ai-lian is a patriot. When this 24-year-old dancer set her feet on the soil of her motherland, tears flowed over her face since she had dreamed it and planned it for a long time. Soon, she began to devote her dancing talent to the nation’s liberating career creating and performing many dance pieces like “The Dong Jiang River” , “The Song of Guerrillas”, “Thinking of Hometown” , and  “Air Raid”. Most of her new dances depicted average people’s’ life, so the audience enjoyed watching her dances and gave her a very warm welcome.

Different from Wu, Dai’s eyes were quickly attracted by the Chinese folk dances in the rural areas. She studied in the folk places and used this rich resource to serve her choreography. Soon, the new dances with strong national tastes appeared, including: “Yao People’s Drum Dance”, “Jia Rong Feast”, “Ba An Xuanzi”, and “Xinjiang Dance” , all of which earned her a title of “Master of Folk Dances”.

The unbelievable dance piece she created after the founding of New China in 1949 was the famous “Lotus Dance”. With this piece, she used the folk form but expressed her idea of wooing peace and harmony. And, this piece is also regarded as a masterpiece in the contemporary history of Chinese dance.

Both of the above pioneer provided strong influences for China’s dance culture today. We can find out that, though they learned the abstract modern dance forms abroad, yet what they promoted and developed was quite different from the abstract form of dancing in the West. At their time, the abstract form of dancing like modern dance in fact had not even a trace in Chinese dance, because they were seen as a symbol of the “notorious western imperialism”, -- “a bourgeois thing” at the time.

Talking about the abstract forms of modern dance, it seems to me that I need to mention someone else here ---- Mr. Guo Ming-da.

Guo studied in the US in late 40`s and early 50’s of the last century mainly with Alwin Nikolaise. He came back to China by the late 50’s but met a tragic fortune since at that moment China was controlled completely by an extremely leftist ideal, and his fruit of learning – the abstract form of modern dance – was not appropriate at all for the society. His knowledge only found its use after 1980’s since the nation took its “Open Door” policy. So, what I want to tell is that we do have someone who learned the US style of modern dance in China, but no one paid any attention to it at that moment.

That was the first wave of foreign new dance influences in  Chinese society.

The Second Wave
By the late years of the 80`s of the last century, the second wave of learning foreign modern dances started. That time was right after the “Great Cultural Revolution”, and the dance people were eager to follow the new forms of modern dance in the West so as to solve their new choreographic problems and to enrich their minds and methods.

In 1988, Ms Yang Mei-qi in Guangdong Province (Canton) established a training class of modern dance with the help of American Dance Festival (ADF). ADF selected 6 modern dance teachers from all corners of the US and taught  20-students in this class for three years. This action was really new and risky since “modern dance” still had a bad reputation then, which for many leaders and people was still taken as a cultural symbol of a western bourgeois form. Yet, with three years’ training, this class progressed very quickly, and that changed many people’s views toward the abstract form of “modern dance”. From this class, we have witnessed several brilliant modern dance students like Wang Mei (the current professor in Beijing Dance Company to teach modern dance and also a representative idol of this career in China ), Jin Xing (currently in Shanghai with her modern dance company) and Shen Wei (in New York with his modern dance company), etc. And Wang Mei after returning back to Beijing Dance Academy opened a first class to train the first-ever group of modern dance students with another colleague trained in Hong Kong called Zhang Shou-he in this so-called “most authoritive” dance academy in China, which was viewed as the significant change in the social attitude toward “modern dance”. Their students formed, later, the main bodies of in the companies such as Beijing Modern Dance Company, LDTX Dance Company and Beijing Contemporary Ballet Theatre, which are currently the three main forces in Beijing  promotinge the art of modern dance.

The Current Status
So right now, Beijing, Guangzhou and Shanghai have formed the main status of developing modern dance in China like a triangle. In Beijing, there are mainly three companies have attained their good reputations like LDTX Modern Dance Company with Willy Cao from Hong Kong acting as the director; the Beijing Modern Dance Company and the newly-established Beijing Contemporary Dance Theatre with Wang Yuan-yuan as its director and choreographer. In Shanghai, Jin Xin’s modern dance company is operating smoothly. And in Guangzhou, the first modern dance company – Guangdong Modern Dance Company is also under the direction of Willy Cao (he now is the director for three companies in Beijing, Guangdong and Hong Kong). And with the nations’ political, economical and cultural systems being reformed, many individual modern artists appeared with a grass-rooted background. They usually work and perform in a free-lance occasions and several of them have already attracted the eyes both from home and abroad such as Wen Hui, Shi Jing-xin and Tao Ye.

Beside the usual format of Chinese Classical Dance, Folk Dance and Ballet, modern dance appeared and was listed as the fourth role in the professional dance competitions  around the last years of the last century. , This has provided a strong confidence to many modern dancers in the whole nation.

The Definition and the Dispute
Then, new problems in the dance competitions happened. Apart from modern dance which has been already completely accepted, people find it’s hard to clarify and define another new dance form – the form is new but it is not modern dance. These works normally employ the new ideas of domestic and foreign choreographic methods, yet they are not abstract, which many people enjoy. Obviously we could not neglect their existence since more and more pieces followed suit. So, if we allow these dances to enter the competition, then in which category do we put them? So, new challenges have appeared to test our sight and wisdom.

Some people, thus, suggested a new category called “New Dance” with a kind intention to include all the dances in new forms. But soon some others disagreed with that. Finally, the term of “Contemporary Dance” was brought to table, which was gradually accepted by the majority. Though there were still some disagreements going on,  “Contemporary Dance” has been named as a formal category ever since, which has made the Chinese professional dance scene into a five-style situation.

Thus, “contemporary dance“ in China isn’t equal to “modern dance”. Contemporary dance in China means the modernization of the choreographic method. It shows some aspects of modernity, but it’s completely unrelated to modernism. So, it is very different from “modern dance” in China which is the symbol of modernism.

What I am giving  you is simply a current view of the general situation of the contemporary development of dances in China. So, when we talk about “contemporary dance” in our context, it is not the same meaning as “contemporary dance” in the outside world. Because the outside world’s term of “contemporary dance” approximates our term of “modern dance”, this causes frequent confusions in many occasions in our culture.

 

The Feature
I have to say, the development of modern dance in China is still very weak, compared to the strong bodies of Chinese Classical Dance, Folk Dance, Ballet and Contemporary Dance. There is not a modern dance company fully supported financially by the government, though the subsidies have started to appear due to these free-lance modern companies havinge acquired better and better international fame, and also, more and more larger and larger audiences want to pay for this new form. Even so, the status of the current situation is not very ideal.

According to the topic we are gathering here to discuss, I should say, no Chinese modern dancers have ever declared that what they have developed is a dance style with an “Asian Feature”. They prefer their art to be described as “Chinesea” , not “Asian”. Unlike the places of Singapore and Malaysia (“truly Asia” as in their advertisement), where people have a very strong sense of using “Asia” as a sign, the Chinese usually do not pay much attention to this term. Of course we are in Asia, yet that is rather a concept of geography than of culture to us. We believe even inside of Asia, the cultures of different nations are greatly divers. It’s impossible to name a feature for all cultures inside of this continent. And, even heavily influenced by the Chinese traditional culture,  China’s present culture has a big difference with current cultures in Korea and Japan. Maybe, that is one reason why we never think of the question through this angle.

Yet, though we do not think from an angle of using “Asian” as our feature, the Chinese modern dancers stressed a quite strong belief to promote the style with a “Chinese Feature”. From the beginning to today, this has been an unstopped effort covering the whole path of developing of this young form. In my view, this was rather a strategic plan at first, since to put a foreign foot on our soil you need courage and wisdom to let it be alive. So, taking the slogan of “Chinese Feature” can soften many people’s cautions against this “bourgeois” dance form. So, I don’t think at first this intention of a “Chinese Feature” was very natural and instinctive. However, after some successes of the last twenty years, especially after these modern dancers performed abroad, they have simply found out that “Chinese Feature” is a rich and valuable resource for their creations. New efforts have been made to let their works become highly stylized in a typical Chinese cultural background and context. And this effort, I believe, is reliable and aesthetically comfortable. So, today, we can see many Chinese modern dances are very inventive along this dimension .

And, a new tendency has also appeared . Some mature modern dancers have started not to care whether their dances are modern or not, but only care whether they can fully express their own ideas. Like Prof. Wang Mei in BDA, she recently made a dance called The Story of (Goddess ) Luo Shen and with this whole-evening piece she hopes only to express a man and his pathetically tragic experiences. The dance was a real hit into the dance world in China and everybody was overwhelmed by the powerful and creative messages in her choreography. Yet, when being interviewed, she said it doesn’t matter to her whether her dance is modern or not, but it matters a lot to her whether she has spoken out her own words. So here, the “Chinese Feature” is not a big issue to her at all as a fully-expressive artist, but her own feature counts. And we can also see this tendency in Taiwanese dancer Lin Hwai-min’s dances. Whereas, though these dancers don’t say they are promoting Chinese features, yet to the audience whether they are foreign or domestic, all value these dances for their typical Chinese flavors and characteristics.

The Asian-ness
I don’t know whether there is an Asian-ness in contemporary dance, thought I do notice there is some difference between Asia and other parts of the world in this art. Even I can tell without difficulties that from which part of Asia some modern dances are, because they all have their strong national flavors.

So, I might not give any answers, but still bear some questions as follows:
1, Why is Asian-ness in modern dance is a discussable issue for Asians? Is the “Chinese Feature” an “Asian-ness”? How can we define the term “Asian-ness” logically? What is the core and quality of Asian-ness?
2, What could the Asian-ness in modern dance contribute to the world’s modern dance scene? Does the modern dance scene in the world need this?
3, Could we obtain a common feature such as so-called “Asian-ness” in modern dance in Asia? Even if we could, is that something we need?

Thank you!