The dancefloor is now open: A dispositional analysis of the glocalization and sportification of Chinese DanceSport

Abstract

In recent decades, the political, economic, and social environment in the Peoples’ Republic of China has opened up to inflows of commerce and culture from around the world. Consequently, the physical cultural practices within China have undergone a double-dialectical shift—whereby performing bodies now influence, and are influenced by, a shifting body politic (e.g. sport and physical activity practices opening up to global markets and brands, transnational trade, and post-socialist political alignments, etc.) and also where the body politic has mutated as a result of, and to constitute, inflows and outflows of global capital, culture, and polity (e.g. cosmopolitan consumer culture, Westernization, etc.). In this article, we examine this double dialectic as a form of government within the performances, aesthetics, choreographies, and administration of Chinese DanceSport. DanceSport, a competitive and structured—arguably “sportified”—form of international dance, has in recent years supplanted traditional Chinese dance as the most popular form of dance in the Peoples’ Republic. Using Foucauldian Discourse Analysis, we examine the operational and administrative discourses within the sport to explicate how organizational and governing bodies have constructed regimes of conduct through which dancers and dance performances might conform to, and negotiate, prevailing glocalized cultural physicalities. The results invite further analysis into how Chinese DanceSport has become increasingly, and perhaps paradoxically, more regulated and codified with respect to how “the West” is performed on the dance floors of China.