Chinese Dance: In the Vast Land and Beyond by Shih-Ming Li Chang, Lynn Frederiksen (review)

Shih-Ming Li Chang and Lynn Frederiksen provide here a simple and easy-to-read introduction to Chinese dance and its history. Condensing 5,000 years of Chinese dance, from its shamanistic origins through the various dynastic periods, they show, for instance, how Confucian ideals endure physically across time in the precision of structured dance. The core of the book is built around seven interviews with seven Chinese women dancers working in the U.S., namely Lily Cai, Nai-Ni Chen, Lorita Leung, Yunyu Wang, Yin Mei, Jin-Wen Yu and Yu Wei. It is followed by a brief and wide-ranging chapter on how different dance is to this day in China, specifically in terms of why people dance and for whom, when and where, and concludes with an even briefer three-page chapter explaining the reasoning behind the annotated database of materials in hyperlinks available at the excellent website <www.chinesedance.site.wesleyan.edu>.

The website, partially password protected, provides access to a wealth of information including photographs, videos, interviews and other materials. The database even includes details such as the props and costumes needed, keeping in mind that not only are these highly codified but so is their precise use. As an evolving platform and archive to which readers are encouraged to contribute, it is an excellent model for building interactive multimedia educational resources in the study of cross-cultural dynamics.

The book begins with an impassioned foreword by Emily Wilcox titled “A Manifesto for Demarginalization.” There she argues that U.S. dance education programs need to more widely incorporate non-Western and nonelite dance forms. Her call for change is a strident criticism of cultural hegemony in U.S. dance culture and institutions as manifested in the “suppression” of minority dance. It deserves to be widely read. In that context Wilcox revisits the history of the reception of Chinese dance in the U.S. since the mid-nineteenth century and shows how there exists a repeating pattern in criticism of Western standards being inappropriately used to evaluate Chinese traditions [1].

Chinese Dance follows on two other scholarly books on the topic, namely Choreographic Asian America by Yutian Wong (2010) and Kinesthetic City: Dance and Movement in Chinese Urban Spaces by SanSan Kwan (2013) [2]. In looking forward to future publications on Asian dance, the photographs of dancers in performance context used in this book, such as those by Yu Gen-Quan, Shen Jin-Sheng, Rachel Cooper, Suling Chou, Carol Rosegg and Marty Sohl, deserve special mention for their visual excellence. Indeed, they are so compelling that a related book (or website) purely of Chinese dance photography would surely be in order. Finally, when one considers that the first modern state dance company in China was only formed in 1992 and followed by the first private dance company in 1999 one can best appreciate how far apart the Western and Chinese dance worlds are and how recent is this emerging field of study.

Li Chang and Frederiksen’s book should be used as a primer in an expanded field of dance education because it so effectively deals with the issues of cultural hegemony in dance and how to appreciate the fundamental differences between Western and non-Western dance traditions, in this case, Chinese. The book has been written with a far more general audience in mind than a purely academic one. It is so readable that it could equally be used as a high school text for the social sciences as for anthropology, theater or dance classes in college. For myself, the most interesting parts of the book are to be found in the lengthy and detailed notes. At that level, this book stands out as very different from Tomie Hahn’s Sensational Knowledge (2007), which provides an interesting example of a more theoretically complex discussion of Japanese dance [3].

Chinese Dance...