Writing Dance

Abstract

Abstract Chapter 4 investigates the origin of (modern) Chinese ethnic dance in relation to modern dance by examining the life, career, and choreographies of Dai Ailian, the Trinidad-born Chinese dancer who collected and adapted ethnic dances in China’s southwestern borderlands in the mid-1940s. In existing historiography, Dai’s experiences are subsumed within a narrative of “homecoming” and “root-searching” through dance. Consequently, the account of the origin of Chinese ethnic dance has become a nationalist and nativist one, predicated on a coherent “Chinese” identity. To challenge this narrative, the chapter recasts Dai’s experiences into a framework of “multi-diaspora” along the geopolitical borders between “empires.” Dai’s multi-diasporic anxieties and aspirations, as an undercurrent, rode on the nationalist mainstream and vice versa, but with diverging momentums. This suggests that the emergence of Chinese ethnic dance was not just a nationalist response to China’s political imperatives, but an outgrowth of the extensive global circuit of intercultural exchanges conditioned by the world colonial hierarchy. Moreover, dance per se turned out to be inadequate in addressing the precarity of Dai’s multi-diasporic experiences. Ethnic dances, in Dai’s case, must be (trans)mediated by labanotation (developed by Rudolf Laban) to enter her negotiation of gender, racial, and national identities on both domestic and international stages. That is, Dai’s adaptation of ethnic dances was informed and mediated by the theory and symbols of modern dance, and by distributing Chinese ethnic dances in Labanotation on the international stage, Dai expanded Laban’s vision of “a literature of dance” into “a world literature of dances.”