Folk Dance in China: The Dance Pioneer Dai Ailian, 1916–2006

Abstract

The founding of anthropological studies to China in the 1920s introduced the cultures of the countryside and its villages to the urban elite and helped to create a more complex definition of Chinese culture. The ability to study, collect, and reproduce dance specifically, as opposed to religious ceremonies or music, truly began only with the arrival of a dedicated pioneer who had an unusual range of skills and training to bring to the task. This was the remarkable Dai Ailian (1916–2006). She was born of Chinese ancestry in Trinidad and received dance training in England from 1931–1937 when both ballet and modern were just being explored in that country. Both chance and purpose brought about her first important work in folk dance when she arrived in China in 1940, during the anti-Japanese War. The unoccupied parts of southwest China were rich with the dance of minority peoples, and she set to work learning and propagating with great energy. This paper examines Dai's work in folk dance at this time and sets it against the trajectory of folk as it developed in the next seventy years.