Transmediating Kinesthesia

Abstract

Abstract Chapter 2 examines the life, career, and choreographies of Wu Xiaobang in Tokyo, Shanghai, and beyond in the 1930s and 1940s and his strategies to adapt the central European modern dance he learned in Japan into “China’s new dance.” The chapter leverages the conception of kinesthesia in modern dance, which refers to the contagious nature of bodily movement. The significance of kinesthesia in wartime China lies in its potential of transforming spectators offstage into quasi-participants of the performance onstage and thus blurs the distinction between the active performer(s) and the passive audience, which had political and practical implications for the role of modern dance in an age of total war and mass mobilization. Moreover, early modern dance often promoted kinesthesia as a bodily means to challenge the hegemonic system of language- and representation-based paradigms. However, Wu did not pit kinesthesia against language or narrative, but instead incorporated elements of these, along with properties of other artistic mediums, into his dance. This strategy of transmediation, called “reverse integration” here, was partly caused by the status of modern dance being a “latecomer” in the Chinese field of other more well-established modern art forms. It was also the result of the somewhat conflicting dual goals of modern dance in China—to position itself as a legitimate and independent urban high art on the one hand and, on the other hand, as a useful tool for mass enlightenment and mobilization during a time of national crisis, revolution, and total war.