When Words Are Inadequate

Abstract

Abstract This book is the first English-language, transnational history of modern dance written from and beyond the perspective of China. It contributes to the dance scholarship on the early to mid-twentieth-century global dissemination of modern dance, where China is typically missing, by recuperating the Chinese contributions to this movement. It also extends the horizon of China studies, where modern dance is largely missing, by rewriting the cultural history of modern China from a bodily movement–based perspective through the lens of dance modernism. The book examines the careers and choreographies of four Chinese modern dance pioneers—Yu Rongling, Wu Xiaobang, Dai Ailian, and Guo Mingda—and their connections to canonical Western counterparts, including Isadora Duncan, Mary Wigman, Rudolf von Laban, and Alwin Nikolais. Tracing these Chinese pioneers’ varied experiences in Paris, Tokyo, Trinidad, London, New York, and China’s metropolises and borderlands, it shows how they each contributed to, adapted, and ultimately reimagined the legacies of early Euro-American modern dance. In so doing, the book reinserts China into the multi-centered, transnational network of artistic exchange that fostered the global rise of modern dance and further complicates the binary conceptions of center/periphery and West/East. The book also explores the relationships between performance and representation, choreography and politics, and nation-building and global modernisms: by situating modern dance within an intermedial circuit of literary and artistic forms, it demonstrates how modern dance provided a kinesthetic alternative and complement to other sibling arts and participated in unique ways in China’s successive revolutions, reforms, wars, and political movements.