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When Words are Inadequate is a transnational history of modern dance written from and beyond the perspective of China. Author Nan Ma surveys the careers and choreographies of key Chinese modern dance pioneers and their connections to iconic Western counterparts, reinserting China into the multi-centered, transnational network of artistic exchange that fostered the global rise of modern dance in the twentieth century.
List of contents
- Introduction: The Chinese Case of Modern Dance
- Chapter 1: Traveling Princess and Dancing Diplomat: Yu Rongling, Corporeal Modernity, and Isadora Duncan
- Chapter 2: Transmediating Kinesthesia: Wu Xiaobang, Mary Wigman via Tokyo, and Modern Dance in Wartime China
- Chapter 3: Dancing Reclusion in the Great Leap Forward: Conflicting Utopias and Wu Xiaobang's "Classical New Dance"
- Chapter 4: Writing Dance: Dai Ailian, Labanotation, and the Multi-Diasporic "Root" of Modern Chinese Ethnic Dance
- Epilogue: Guo Mingda, Alwin Nikolais, and the (Anti-)American Link
- Index
About the author
Nan Ma is Associate Professor of East Asian Studies at Dickinson College. She conducts research on modern Chinese literature, film, visual culture, and dance and performance studies and has published articles on Chinese modern dance, ballet and film in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture (MCLC), China Perspectives, and the Journal of Beijing Dance Academy.
Summary
When Words are Inadequate is a transnational history of modern dance written from and beyond the perspective of China. Author Nan Ma extends the horizon of China studies 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, the book shows how their contributions adapted and reimagined the legacies of early Euro-American modern dance.
In doing so, When Words are Inadequate reinserts China into the multi-centered, transnational network of artistic exchange that fostered the global rise of modern dance, further complicating the binary conceptions of center and periphery and East and West. By exploring the relationships between performance and representation, choreography and politics, and nation-building and global modernism, it situates modern dance within an intermedial circuit of literary and artistic forms, demonstrating how modern dance provided a kinesthetic alternative and complement to other sibling arts in participating in China's successive revolutions, reforms, wars, and political movements.
Additional text
Adding to the growing literature that moves beyond Eurocentrism in modern dance history, Ma's book offers meticulous and compelling historical, cultural, and philosophical analysis of twentieth-century Chinese modern dance practices.
