Traveling “Princess” and Dancing “Diplomat”

Abstract

Abstract Chapter 1 follows Yu Rongling’s international travel in the early 1900s from Paris to the late Qing court, where she transformed Isadora Duncan’s “Greek dance” into its Chinese counterpart under the auspices of Empress Dowager Cixi. It shows that, on the one hand, Western early modern dance incorporated the “Oriental body” within itself, rather than simply treating it as some exotic other. On the other hand, Yu’s “Chinese dance” cannot be understood as some “invented tradition” created by the local as some “old” way to resist the “new” way imposed by colonial powers, because it exposes and exploits the paradox inherent in dance modernism: modern dance is, in Yu’s words, “both inventing the new and reviving the old.” The chapter demonstrates that this paradox is caused by a particular mode of corporeal modernity underlying early modern dance, which is characterized by the blurred boundaries between the past and the future, the universal and the national. This corporeal modernity enabled early modern dance and the cosmopolitan women performing it to cross various borders of race, culture, nation, and time. However, it can also be appropriated and re-articulated by the local to handle anxieties about perceived differences that sprang from all these border-crossings within a global colonial hierarchy. Therefore, this chapter contributes to the rethinking of the origin of modernism and feminism as global and multiple, instead of exclusively Western, in nature and of the evolving late Qing court as part of global modernity, rather than simply a “backward” and “reclusive” monarchy.