Corporeal Politics: Dancing East Asia ed. by Katherine Mezur and Emily Wilcox (review)

In Corporeal Politics: Dancing East Asia, Katherine Mezur and Emily Wilcox gather sixteen essays covering East Asia and the West which focus on Asian influences in the field of Dance Studies. With Mezur and Wilcox's sophisticated first-person experience in the field, this extraordinary book highlights movement universality, national attributes, and "Asianship." By juxtaposing the individual within the sociopolitical context rather than rephrasing non-western stories, Mezur and Wilcox offer a corporeal aesthetic for readers to "move" with the authors.

In part 1, "Contested Genealogies," the authors Bossler, Yeh, and Nan outline the trio "contests," a set of three contests that took place chronologically from the Qing dynasty (1644–1912) to the Republic of China (1912–1949), which evoke iconic names such as Mei Lanfang and Wu Xiaobang. By examining historical figures' career experience part 1 draws performative lines to present how art forms in early China connected with the notion of serving the nation through an analysis of the performance works as instruments orchestrated in social and political power. Bossler's chapter, "Sexuality, Status, and the Female Dancer: Legacies of Imperial China," meticulously dissects the trans-dynastic dancing doctrine of modalities, corporeal acknowledgment, and social icons of reordering, by using the word "mobility" to show how ancient female dancers staged themselves as social projects across history. In "Mei Lanfang and Modern Dance: Transcultural Innovation in Peking Opera, 1910s–1920s," Catherine Yeh explores Mei Lanfang's oeuvre with detailed tableaux analysis, panoramic bilateral cognizance, and transcultural insight. Yeh further provides evidence that Mei Lanfang's innovative works propelled socialist modernization and materialized "realness" in Peking opera art in China. In Nan Ma's article "The Conflicted Monk: Choreographic Adaptations of Si fan (Longing for the Mundane) in Japan's and China's New Dance Movements," Ma analyzes Si fan's political roles and social functions in trans-geographic, moral, and gender boundaries and demonstrates how the performer dwell in-between the "flesh" and "vitro," "performance world" and "ordinary world," and "modernity" and "tradition."

Part 2, "Decolonizing Migration," explores a dynamic trilateral dialogue in East Asian countries between China, Japan, and South Korea which traces postcolonial waves, "completeness" in choreographies, "Asianship," and settler land, consecutively. Rather than merely criticizing the historical problems, all four essays highlight the resurgence of bodily spirit and national identity, which shows how the individual reconstructs the epistemological. Ji Hyon (Kayla) Yuh reviews the entrenched color-based community web and class identity of "New South Koreans" in "Choreographing Neoliberal Marginalization: Dancing Migrant Bodies in the South Korean Musical Bballae (Laundry)." Okju Son's article, "Korean Dance Beyond Koreanness: Park Yeong-in in the German Modern Dance Scene," examines Korean dance heritage and national spirit and then raises what she terms "Asianizing" problems and answers through a theatrical method and emigrant lens. In "Diasporic Moves: Sinophone Epistemology in the Choreography of Dai Ailian," Emily Wilcox proposes the notion of "multiply-angulated critique" and shows how Sino-themed genealogical choreographies mirror Dai Ailian's bicultural ideology and dualkinesthesia, which reframe her "Chineseness" with keywords of territoriality, nationalism, and characteristics. In "Murayama Tomoyoshi and Dance of Modern Times: A Forerunner of the Japanese Avant-garde," Kazuko Kuniyoshi examines Murayama's dance images through lateral and transnational comparison betwixt eastern and western, expressionism and constructivism, and conventional and modern.

The third part of the text, "Militarization and Empire," portrays propaganda-oriented performances in Japan and China which served not only as political roles during the wartime, but also as bodily archives for readers to (re)member and (re)search the past. By analyzing three political-oriented performances, part 3 demonstrates the intricate relations between body and power and offers diverse ways in which the body is performed. In "Masking Japanese Militarism as a Dream of Sino-Japanese Friendship: Miyako Odori Performances in the 1930s," Mariko Okada uses multilocal analysis to explore propaganda and China Japan relationships in that time period. In contrast to...