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Home , Carmen de Lavallade, Cloud Gate Dance Theater, Concert dance, Expressionist dance, Free dance, Gemze de Lappe

Taiwanese Eyes on the Modern:

Cold Diplomacy and American Modern in , 1950–1980

Dissertation

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy

in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

By

Tsung-Hsin Lee, M.A.

Graduate Program in Dance Studies

The Ohio State University

2020

Dissertation Committee

Hannah Kosstrin, Advisor

Harmony Bench

Danielle Fosler-Lussier

Morgan Liu

Copyrighted by

Tsung-Hsin Lee

2020

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Abstract

This dissertation “Taiwanese Eyes on the Modern: Dance Diplomacy and American Modern Dances in Taiwan, 1950–1980” examines the transnational history of American between the and Taiwan during the Cold War era. From the 1950s to the 1980s, the Carmen De Lavallade-, José Limón,

Paul Taylor, , and dance companies toured to Taiwan under the auspices of the U.S. State Department. At the same time, Chinese American choreographers Al Chungliang Huang and Yen Lu Wong also visited Taiwan, teaching and presenting American modern dance. These visits served as diplomatic gestures between the members of the so-called Free World led by the U.S. Taiwanese audiences perceived American dance through mixed interpretations under the Cold War rhetoric of freedom that the U.S. sold and disseminated through dance diplomacy. I explore the heterogeneous shaping forces from multiple engaging individuals and institutions that assemble this diplomatic , resulting in outcomes influencing dance histories of the U.S. and Taiwan for different ends.

I argue that Taiwanese audiences interpreted American dance modernity as a means of embodiment to advocate for freedom and social change. Taiwanese dancers received American modern dance as representations of freedom through the dance tours under the Cold War rhetoric. By practicing modern dance of their own, Taiwanese

ii choreographers and audience members repurposed American freedom rhetoric to resist the censorship of the in Taiwan. Since then, the idea of the modern, for the

Taiwanese, has taken the name of freedom: free to explore, free to express, and free to advocate. These ideas do not only happen verbally, but also within the body. This dissertation in this sense provides a fuller picture of U.S. postwar dance diplomacy from

Taiwanese perspectives than American views and also shows Taiwanese choreographers’ agencies reacting to American cultural exports and fighting against the Taiwanese government’s social control.

This dissertation project takes a mixed approach of archival research, oral history, and performance analysis to illustrate this transnational history of American modern dance’s footprint and after-life in Taiwan and the circulation of dance between East and the U.S. I analyze archival documents, Taiwanese dance reviews, and news reports, as well as American modern dance pieces that toured to Taiwan, and Chinese American and Taiwanese choreographers’ dance works. I situate the Taiwanese reception of

American modern dance in the historical context of the Global Cold War and local society, to explore heterogeneous ideas of freedom and dance modernity that Taiwanese audiences perceived. I also display the similarities of choreographic methods and dance aesthetics circulated within these works. In this way, I connect American and Taiwanese dance histories through the global circulation of American and Taiwanese modern dance during the Cold War era.

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Dedication

For Mom

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Acknowledgments

This journey of writing the dissertation would not be able to completed without all the support from my dear human beings, as well as institutions.

First, I thank my committee for guiding me throughout the process of writing my dissertation. To my advisor, Dr. Kosstrin, I deeply appreciate your clear and generous guidance, and also your encouragement throughout the process. You advised me on my research and writing, as well as on being a scholar distributing thinking about social justice. You gave me a great role model, as an enthusiastic scholar, as an inspiring adviser, and as a kind human. To Dr. Fosler-Lussier, your knowledge about cultural diplomacy widened and deepened my thinking in this project. To Dr. Liu, you inspired in me an alternative perspective to think about interactions in various scales. To Dr. Bench,

I thank you for jumping in at the last moment. Also, I appreciate your comments directly pointing out the weakness of my writing and clear directions for revising.

In addition to this committee, I am indebted to Amy Schmidt, Susan Hadley,

Melanie Bales, Valarie Williams, and Daniel Roberts. Thank you, Amy and Susan, for your administrative support in many ways, from warm greetings to solutions regarding financial support. To Melanie, I deeply appreciate your empathy associated with your own experience studying in a second-language environment. I also thank you for editing my dissertation with helpful comments about English writing. To Valarie and Daniel, I

v thank you for your warm encouragement that helped me overcome anxiety and frustration during the process.

I am also grateful to many faculty mentors who provided support and guidance in multitudinous ways, from casual conversation to inspiring assignments during coursework and beyond. I express my deep appreciation to Dr. Melanye White Dixon, for serving on my committee and mentoring my work until your retirement, to Dr. Dorry

Noyes, for your inspiring classes and for serving on my candidacy committee, and to Dr.

Emily Wilcox, for mentoring my research project and beyond.

To my cohort on the journey of my graduate program, I am grateful to you for giving me hugs, greeting me when I sat in my semi-isolated office area, and sharing your tips of writing applications. I thank you, especially Janet Schroeder, Lyndsey Vader, and

Benny Simon, for supporting me in the process of coursework and dissertation writing.

Thanks also to Fenella Kennedy, Steven Ha, Kathryn Holt, Rohini Acharya, Mihwa Koo,

Kim Wilczak, Dian Jing, Eric Kaufman, and Alissa Elegant.

This dissertation would have not been possible without support for research trips and dissertation writing in the form of archival services, and also in the form of scholarships and grants. Thanks to the members who helped me access the archival materials at the Dance Division of the Public Library for the

Performing Arts, the National Archives at College Park, Maryland, the Music Division, the , the David W. Mullins Library at University of Arkansas,

National Library of Thailand, National Diet Library of Japan, and National Central

Library of Taiwan. I thank Ohio State University’s Mershon Center for International

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Security Studies and the Alumni Grants for Graduate Research and Scholarship, the

Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, the Ministry of

Education of Taiwan, and Taiwanese Oversea Pioneers Grants, for generous research and dissertation writing funding.

I thank Cheng Su-gi, Xie Hui-Rong, Yang Mei-Rong, Ho Hsiao-Mei, for sharing with me your stories about Taiwanese modern dance in the researched era.

I also thank the contributors of professional organizations for facilitating idea exchanges in the field which inspired me in various ways. These organizations include

Dance Studies Association, Performance Studies international, and North American

Taiwan Studies Association.

I thank my family and friends who supported me in many ways. Thank you, my mom, for being an open-minded parent, a kind friend, and a generous supporter to me.

Thank you, Becle, my dear brother, for taking care of all the things in Taiwan and allowing me to pursue me dream without worry. Thank you, Fen, Wesley, Bruce, Jack,

Wei-ting, and other friends in Columbus.

Finally, to my dear partner, Benz, thank you for your remotely yet long-standing company.

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Vita

2005 B.S. Psychology, National Taiwan University

2013 M.A. Dance Criticism and Culture Studies, Institute of Dance, National University of the Arts, Taiwan 2016-2020 Graduate Teaching/Administrative Associate, The Ohio State University

Publications

Lee, Tsung-Hsin, and Chieh-hua Hsieh. “Seeking Communitas in Universiade.” Journal of Aesthetic Education, 226 (November 2018): 26-32. Taipei, Taiwan: National Taiwan Arts Education Center.

Fields of Study

Major Field: Dance Studies

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Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii

Dedication ...... iv

Acknowledgments ...... v

Vita ...... viii

List of Figures ...... x

Chapter 1: Introduction ...... 1

Chapter 2: Freedom Reflected in Taiwanese Eyes ...... 52

Chapter 3: The Cultural Markings of American Modernity ...... 128

Chapter 4: American Dreams, Chinese Moves ...... 191

Conclusion: In the Name of Taiwan ...... 254

Bibliography ...... 262

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List of Figures

Figure 2.1 A Scene of Mountainway Chant—Eagle Dance ...... 85

Figure 2.2 A Scene of Mountainway Chant—Fight Scene ...... 85

Figure 3.1 “Festival” in Lin Hwai-min’s Legacy in 1985 ...... 129

x

Chapter 1

Introduction

My dissertation “Taiwanese Eyes on the Modern” examines the transnational history of American modern dance between the United States and Taiwan during the

Cold War era. From the 1950s to the 1980s, American modern dance companies’ tours to

Taiwan under the auspices of the U.S. State Department served as diplomatic gestures between the members of the so-called Free World led by the United States. American modern dance history has been entangled with various ideas of freedom. American modern dance was a concert genre developed in the United States since the late nineteenth century to, roughly, the mid-twentieth century. American dance modernity refers to the ideologies that the American modern dancers and choreographers expressed through their discourses and embodiments of American dance modernization. Taiwanese audiences perceived American dance modernity through mixed interpretations under the

Cold War rhetoric of freedom that the United States sold and disseminated through dance diplomacy. These Taiwanese interpretations ran counter to social control over speech and the official Chinese that audiences simultaneously experienced under martial rule during this period in Taiwan, what is known as the White Terror (1949-1987). This dissertation in this sense provides a fuller picture of U.S. postwar dance diplomacy from

Taiwanese perspectives and shows Taiwanese choreographers’ agencies reacting to 1

American cultural exports and fighting against the Taiwanese government’s social control.

I show how heterogeneous shaping forces from multiple engaging individuals and institutions assemble this diplomatic history of dance, resulting in outcomes influencing dance histories of the United States and Taiwan for different ends. While U.S. agencies and sponsored dance companies played a certain role, Taiwan’s social and geopolitical context and the ’s contemporary life experiences are key to understanding the outcomes of these diplomatic dance events. By analyzing these forces from the United States and Taiwan, this dissertation examines this transnational history of American modern dance’s footprint and after-life in Taiwan and the circulation of dance between East Asia and the United States.

This dissertation begins with a concern about American perspectives in English- language scholarship to build a multi-perspective approach to U.S. postwar dance diplomacy, informed by the vantage point of a Taiwanese student fluent in Chinese pursuing a doctoral degree in the United States. As musicologist Danielle Fosler-Lussier asserts, top-down and bottom-up examining perspectives provide different pictures of cultural diplomacy.1 Taiwanese colonial experiences centralize nationalism in Taiwanese perspectives on diplomatic events. Political scientist Bruce Jacobs, who lived in Taiwan in the 1970s and 1980s, argues that a succession of six colonial regimes, including the

Chinese Nationalist Party, or the , from , have been manipulating

Taiwan since the 17th century. Starting with political historian Benedict Anderson’s influential concept of the as an imagined community,2 I define nationalism as

2 discourses through which members propose and advocate for their imaginations of the nation. I consider that the Taiwanese have been struggling for a shared imagination regarding the membership and geography of their (our) nation. This imagination about the nation became a critical perspective in Taiwanese audiences’ readings of American dance modernity through Cold tours. My knowledge about Taiwanese history, especially that of dance, in this sense, provides an access to a jigsaw puzzle piece among others to complete a fuller picture of U.S. Cold War dance diplomacy in Taiwan.

This dissertation traces the history of U.S. State Department-sponsored dance tours in East Asia with a focus on Taiwan, along with resulting Asian American choreographers’ transnational migrations between Taiwan, China, and the United States, and their resultant influences on Taiwanese and U.S. dance histories. I analyze the similarities between American modern dances presented on these tours and Taiwanese choreographers’ works in their wake to show possible circulations of dance vocabularies and choreographic methods and political and social ideologies that these American and

Taiwanese dancers deliver. By attention to the influences of American modern dance tours, however, I do not intend to make an assertion that eliminates the Taiwanese choreographers’ efforts to create their own dances. On the contrary, I discuss Taiwanese intellectuals’ and choreographers’ heterogeneous reactions to American modern dance to show their active anticipations in artistic creations and social change. Their efforts further resulted in Asian American choreographers’ transnational migrations and circulations of dance aesthetics between East Asia and the United States In this dissertation, I argue that

Taiwanese audiences, including elites, dancers, and choreographers, connected to the

3 nation or performed the nation by harnessing or taking control of experiences as a result of the dance tours to challenge the White Terror, thus loosening the social control and contributing to efforts to democratize Taiwan.

Taiwanese audiences’ reception of American modern dance was entangled with the idea of Cold War freedom. Initiated by the U.S. State Department to strengthen the

U.S.-Taiwan relationship, American modern dance companies’ East and Southeast Asian tours modernized dance in Taiwan with a rhetoric of “freedom” that the United States was selling to the world. As American historian Eric Foner points out, this idea of Cold

War freedom circulated between political, social, and economic ideologies.3

Internationally, the United States led the anti-Communist campaign and politically labeled its alliance as members of the Free World.4 The idea of free enterprise, or the consumer capitalism premised on private ownership, shaped the development of these societies in relation to the United States’ leadership. In Taiwan, the government of the

Kuomintang used the term “Free China” to distinguish themselves from Communist

China led by the Communist Party and to emphasize the Kuomintang’s alliance with the

United States. On the other , Taiwanese intellectuals advocated freedom of speech to fight the authoritarian rule of Chiang Kai-Shek, the leader of the Kuomintang.5 In this sense, freedom had two meanings in postwar Taiwan: free world membership led by the

United States against communism and freedom of speech for Taiwanese political advocates. Both meanings were entangled within the local reception of American modern dance diplomatic events, and local intellectuals strategically adopted both to go around censorship while advocating for social change.

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This introductory chapter presents the problematic of how American dance shaped East Asian dancing bodies by simultaneously serving U.S. propaganda of American (capitalist) modernization and providing the local dancers new options in expressive forms to react to the construction of nationalism under the

Kuomintang. I first sketch Taiwanese postwar history, especially related to the import of

American modern dance. I situate this history within Global Cold War history to address the interconnectivity of American and Taiwanese dance histories. I then dialogue with existing scholarship to display how dance and dancing bodies reiterate social ideologies about national consciousness to shape the societies. By telling the story of American modern dance companies’ tours in postwar Taiwan, I demonstrate how Taiwanese choreographers repurposed American dance modernity by using their dancing bodies as a means of social intervention to loosen the strict social control under and, as a result, contributed to the democratization of Taiwan.

Taiwan in the Global Cold War

Taiwan participated in the Global Cold War through its negotiations with the two superpowers—the United States and the Soviet Union. The Cold War, a competition between two sets of social ideologies and modernizations proposed and led by these two blocs, had a significant impact on modernization history in all aspects in Taiwan. In the strict definition, the Cold War indicates an ideological competition between communism and capitalism after II. After the , the separated the two states of China and Taiwan. In 1949, Kuomintang General Chiang Kai-

Shek’s army and the Kuomintang government retreated to Taiwan. At the same time, the

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Chinese Communist Party established the People’s Republic of China (P.R.C.). The tension between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait has framed the Taiwanese postwar history through its entanglement with the international Cold War ideological competition.

Cold War historian Odd Arne Westad proposes the idea of the Global Cold War to refer not only to the globally ideological competition between two champions led by the

United States and the Soviet Union, but also to a third party, which were Asian and

African countries that the two superpowers competed to convince.6 To compete against the rival ideologies of their social orders, the United States and the Soviet Union exported knowledge and technologies to modernize other countries, especially in Africa and Asia.

On the other hand, these countries sought to balance between these two modes of modernization to reap maximum resources for their own development. As historian

Hsiao-ting Lin asserts, the Kuomintang government sent emissaries to commute with the

P.R.C., negotiating with and, sometimes, disobeying the U.S. government, though it stood with the United States on the face of the Cold War competition.7 Clearly, the Cold

War was not a matter between two actors; it was an ongoing process of multi-angular negotiations on the global stage. Taiwan, named as Free China against communism then, engaged in this Global Cold War competition as a third party.

Taiwan’s postwar history is different from others in the region due to its history of successive colonizations. While other Asian countries strived for independence, the

Kuomintang retreated from to Taiwan in 1949, four years after the island was returned from Japan’s fifty-year colonization. For the next forty years, Taiwan was under the Kuomintang’s martial law rule. Since the early 1950s, General He Zhe-hou (何

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志浩) announced a series of cultural policies to de-Japanize and re-Sinicize Taiwan according to Chiang’s demands. These policies aimed to nationalize cultural practices from Mainland China and devalued and even prohibited local Taiwanese languages and cultural activities. These policies formed specific values and aesthetics that highlighted specific forms of dance and performing arts while oppressing the local and even the

Indigenous cultural practices.

The Kuomintang’s re- of Taiwan and later anti-communist policies enacted strict social control over speech, especially voices that might lead to interpretations of anti-government and pro-communism.8 Under these policies, censorship became a key issue for Taiwanese artists to deal with. However, the rule of the Kuomintang’s censorship policy was vague and left room for the officials to interpret.

For example, in 1964, the Kuomintang government censored a popular song, He Ri Jun

Zai Lai (何日君再來), meaning “when are you coming again?” for the reason that jun

(君), meaning “you,” in Chinese Mandarin is pronounced the same as jun (軍), meaning army, and might be interpreted as “when is the communist army coming again?”9 The

Kuomintang government censored many songs and artistic works, especially those in

Taiwanese local languages, for similar reasons as for He Ri Jun Zai Lai. In this sense, ambiguity of this censorship policy forced Taiwanese artists and intellectuals to find ways to go around it. As I display in this dissertation, Taiwanese choreographers adopted

American dance modernity as the United States’ support and as strategies to avoid censorship for their creations.

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The United States’ support was also significant for people’s migrations to Taiwan for two reasons: 1) the Kuomintang’s monitoring people’s activities; and 2) air transport . The Kuomintang’s strict social control affected not only people’s speech but also cross-border migrations to monitor who entered Taiwan. Foreign critics who had contacts with anti-Kuomintang persons could be blacklisted. For example, the

Kuomintang blacklisted U.S. missionary Milo Thornberry for his help to Peng Ming-min

(彭明敏), a blacklisted pro-independent scholar.10 Moreover, it was nearly impossible to fly to Taiwan if not for official or religious missions during this time. During the postwar era, Civil Air Transport (CAT), formerly the Civil Aviation Transportation established by

U.S. veteran Claire Lee Chennault and later owned by the U.S. Central Intelligence

Agency (CIA) and Taiwanese government, offered the majority of international flights to and from Taiwan.11 In this sense, CAT enabled various official missions for both the

United States and Taiwan. CAT also served for international travels and for CIA- assigned missions in Southeast Asia.12 In the early 1960s, American modern dance companies entered Taiwan via this decommissioned military airbase since there were barely commercial flights. A photo shows the De Lavallade-Alvin Ailey company holding a banner in 1962 announcing “Welcome Lavallade Ailey Tour, Civil Air

Transport.13 In this sense, the United States’ state sponsorship facilitated American dance companies’ tours to Taiwan during this martial ruling period.

In addition to the Kuomintang’s re-Sinicization of Taiwan, American military and financial aid impacted the postwar social development of Taiwan. After the Kuomintang retreated to Taiwan, Republicans in the U.S. Congress viewed the government as a

8 bulwark to prevent the growth of communism in East and Southeast Asia. Initiated in

1948 and later revived in 1951, the Economic Cooperation Administration invested in fundamental construction projects in Taiwan under the Mutual Security Act that the U.S.

Congress passed in 1951 to replace the Marshall Plan, including in military, transportation, and agriculture.14 These U.S. aids further modernized postwar Taiwan by mobilizing infrastructure and economic developments, and positively framed the

Taiwanese perception of the United States.

U.S. cultural exports to Taiwan further contributed to the Taiwanese perception of the United States. The United States Information Service (USIS) set up several offices in

Taipei, , and southern Taiwan to introduce American society and cultures to facilitate mutual understanding between Taiwanese and Americans through magazines, radio, education programs, and films. In this way, American Cold War cultural diplomacy influenced the Taiwanese development in various fields. Taiwanese historian

Ena Chao points out that the U.S.-Taiwan educational exchange under the Fulbright Act of 1946 and United States Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948, which aimed to enhance foreign understanding of the U.S, improved their confidence in the

U.S.-led anticommunist alliance and fostered pro-U.S. elites.15 Sociologist Hsiao A-

Ching shows Taiwanese attraction to American cultural practices and education through oral history of the postwar generation.16 Literature historian Chen Chien-Chung illustrates that USIS-sponsored journals enhanced the fashion of modernist literature in

Taiwan of 1960s and 1970s.17 These scholarly works show that the United States’ postwar cultural diplomacy shaped the Taiwanese perception of the United States and

9 also formed the fashions to accept U.S. modernization in various cultural aspects. Indeed,

U.S. postwar interventions solidified its dominance in Taiwan.

American Circulations through Postwar Taiwan

The expansion of U.S. influence in other countries through economic and cultural means has been criticized as American imperialism. Postcolonial scholarship has revealed and criticized American ambitions to export modernization and to expand its political and economic influence over the world as neocolonialist hegemony.18

Specifically, in postwar East Asia, the U.S. government aided East and Southeast Asian countries with military and financial support, especially South Korea and Taiwan. These aids strengthened American political and cultural power. Postcolonial criticism of the

U.S. wartime and postwar influences on other countries provides critical reflections on the United States’ expansion and power.

However, overemphasis on American imperialism suppresses the potential for empowerment of the colonized. Sociologist Rob Kroes reminds us that “Americans and non-Americans have all contributed to this collective endeavor, making sense of the new country [outside of the United States] and its evolving culture.”19 Overemphasis on the

U.S. may distract our attention from the local people’s reactions and strategies to use the interventions from the dominant power for their own ends, and in this sense forms a misleading image of lacking subjectivity hinting that local people fully accepted

American power without a second thought. In other words, examinations that only focus on American imperialism without discussing the local people’s reception seem to deny the subjectivity of the colonized. To counter to such a danger, this dissertation examines

10 the Taiwanese receptions of U.S. dance diplomacy to emphasize their active participation in and after the U.S.-Taiwan diplomatic events.

Prior to American modern dance companies’ tours in Taiwan, several American and folk groups had visited Taiwan. and Dance Jubilee, an

American group led by Rod Alexander, performed in Taiwan in the late

1950s.20 These events were selected by the American National and Academy

(ANTA), sponsored by the U.S. State Department, and hosted by Eastern Art

Management, a management company founded by music amateur Chang

Chi-Kao (also known as Adam Chang), as a part of U.S. postwar cultural diplomacy.

These dance groups presented American artistic achievements and also contributed to

U.S.-Kuomintang ties. For example, a United Daily article introduced that Dance Jubilee presented “the best features of American peasant music and dance for the past seventy- five years.”21 Another advertising report framed San Francisco Ballet as the best representative of American passion in the arts.22 In addition to purveying American artistic achievements, these events also had diplomatic significance between the United

States and Taiwan. While Dance Jubilee visited Taiwan, the of Free China,

Soong Mei-Ling (宋美齡), as the president and the founder of the Anti-Russia League of the Republic of China (R.O.C.), held a banquet to welcome the dance artists.23 These dance tours thus strengthened official ties between the two governments.

However, these visits did not attract Taiwanese audiences as much as they did the

Kuomintang government. Unlike later responses to American dance touring events, there was no review or further discussion about these dances after their staging folk and

11 popular dances (mostly from African American and Anglo-American folk traditions, including , , rock’n’roll dance) and ballet.24 One reason is that these dance genres were not new to the Taiwanese audiences. During the Japanese colonial period, Taiwanese dancers trained in Japan introduced European to the Taiwanese audience, and it became the main practice in dance studios. The dances that the San Francisco Ballet presented displayed American achievements based on a

European-originated dance genre. Besides, the folk and popular dance genres that Dance

Jubilee presented also circulated in Hollywood films. Last, but not least, the Taiwanese newspaper introduced Dance Jubilee and San Francisco Ballet as merely American, featuring white American dancers, not mentioning the African American origin of some of the dance genres they performed.25 Therefore, they presented a homogeneous

Eurocentric American image with an American style of popular entertainments rather than American so-called “high” arts. The Kuomintang government prohibited these entertaining dances activities in postwar Taiwan because it considered entertainment unpatriotic at this time.26 In this Taiwanese sense, these dances were completely Western and could not relate to Taiwanese life experiences. Taiwanese audiences more readily accepted American .

American modern dance provided the Taiwanese a model to represent Taiwanese contemporary life experiences through embodied expressions. In 1962, the De Lavallade-

Ailey American Dance Theater presented Taiwanese audiences their first experience of

American modern dance. Following this engagement, José Limón Dance Company, Paul

Taylor, Martha Graham, and Alwin Nikolais also toured Taiwan under the U.S. State

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Department’s support. These American modern dance companies attracted Taiwanese audiences to a new vision of dance in an environment where the local government encouraged minzu wudao (民族舞蹈), or Chinese ethnic dance, to promote . The minzu wudao movement, which I will further introduce later in this chapter, was the dance movement the government officially encouraged to re-create

Chinese ethnic dances to represent the multiple ethnic groups in Mainland China.

However, because their life experiences were detached from Mainland China, Taiwanese choreographers found it difficult to gain inspiration from these Chinese ethnic cultures.

As a result, their creations became more and more fixed in terms of styles and movement vocabularies that felt disconnected from actual life experiences in Taiwan. To seek new inspirations and meanings of dance, the Taiwanese drew upon the “modern” in these

American modern dances to experiment with and pursue their own artistic expression and reflect their own contemporary life experiences.

The significant impact of American modern dance in postwar Taiwan affects how

I articulate the implications of national consciousness and identity through one’s dancing body. This transnational story has a personal side for me, especially in understanding the role of American modern dance in Taiwan. I took my first dance class in the summer of

2004. It was a summer program organized by the student-led National Taiwan University

Modern Dance Club. A former Taiwanese dancer of the José Limón Dance Company,

Hsiang-Hsiu Lin (林向秀), gave me my first modern dance experience. In the studio, we plié-ed in a wide second position. Lin demonstrated how to open our to the side, rotated slightly inwards and initiated from the back. We then swung side to side to fall on

13 the ground. I learned American modern dance technique, specifically Limón technique.

In the following fall, the instructor Christopher Chu (朱興朗) gave me a series of classes of Cunningham technique, which he learned from Grace Hsiao (蕭靜文), a Taiwanese dancer who used to dance at The Studio in New York. I shared my experience practicing these American modern dance techniques with other Taiwanese dancers. In one of the leading dance schools in Taiwan where I completed my Master’s degree, the Dance Department of Taipei National University of the Arts, students are required to take the Martha course in their first three years of the seven-year program. American modern dance has been living in Taiwan since its first modern dance diplomatic events of the 1950s.

Not only American state-sponsored tours but also Chinese elites who migrated between Asia and the United States during this time carried out the international transit of

American modern dance. During the same period, Chinese-American choreographers Al

Chungliang Huang and Yen Lu Wong, who were trained in American modern dance, performed in Taiwan. In 1967, invited by Taiwanese choreographer T’sai Jui-yueh (蔡瑞

月), Huang and his wife Suzanne Pierce gave a “modern dance” workshop to Taiwan’s dancers, with the support of the Ford Foundation. In the following year, Chinese Theater scholar Paul H.C. Yu invited Wong to give a workshop on Martha Graham technique and present her works in Taipei, which included the dance-drama White Snake (1968) based on the Chinese story Legend of the White Snake. These two in-depth visits further transmitted American modern dance techniques and aesthetics to Taiwan.27

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Huang’s Ford Foundation-funded and Wong’s private visits, in turn, also contributed to the circulation of dance from East Asia to the United States. They inspired many Taiwanese dancers to travel to the United States to study American modern dance.

For example, Hsueh-Tung Chen went to New York, studied at the Martha Graham Center of , The , and , and later founded Chen Dance Center and his company H.T. Chen & Dancers in New York’s

Chinatown. Tina Yuan (later, Tina Yuan Lem) went to New York to study ballet at Zena

Rommett Dance Association, at American Dance Center, and modern dance at the

Martha Graham school. Later, she joined Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Lin

Hwai-min went to the University of Missouri and University of Iowa to pursue an M.A in journalism and M.F.A in the International Writing Program, where he encountered

Martha Graham technique and later enrolled in the June Program at the Martha Graham

School for two years. Some of these dancers stayed in the United States, some went back to Taiwan, while others traveled frequently back and forth between the United States and

East Asia. Huang’s and Wong’s visits in the late 1960s turned over a new page for

Taiwanese history and also contributed to American dance history by facilitating the

Taiwanese dancers’ migrations. In short, this transnational Chinese identity shaped

Taiwan’s dance history.

On the other hand, these Taiwanese/Chinese-American dancers and choreographers’ transnational migrations also shaped American dance history. As dance theorist Yutian Wong (2010) argues, Asian-American dance is American dance; in other words, researching Asian-American dance history provides a fuller picture of American

15 dance history. While Wong focuses on Asian American choreographers in the United

States, I connect Taiwanese dance history to American dance history. In Chapter 4, I tell the migration stories of Chinese/Taiwanese dancers to illustrate the circulation of dance between East Asia and North America during the Cold War era. In this way, I draw a picture of global dance within political contexts of Cold War competitions between the two blocs from a bottom-up perspective. I argue that their transnational migrations contribute to the imaginations of modern bodies and identities in East Asia. They adopted

Chinese transnational practices, narratives, and body aesthetics to address their Chinese identity in East Asia, but further merged multiple East Asian cultural practices to transmit

Asian American images to U.S. audiences. In this sense, their transnational bodies, migrating geographically and culturally between East Asia and America, influenced and were influenced by the national and racial consciousness in Taiwan and in the United

States.

Various ideologies emerge through dancers’ transcontinental travels and their interpretations by foreign audiences. To discuss how Taiwanese audiences read American modern dance, I draw upon anthropologist Anna Tsing’s concept of frictions to trace global connections. Tsing defines frictions as “the awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference.”28 By addressing awkwardness,

Tsing’s idea of frictions rejects assumed complete transmissions and embraces differences between the two ends of these connections. By addressing inequality and creative qualities, it also reveals power hierarchies and at the same time empowers the powerless in transnational events.29 Diplomatic events include not only the imperialist

16 intervention of the powerful but also the mobilization of the powerless. It is the unequal relationship between the powerful and the powerless that facilitates mobility. The U.S. postwar dance diplomatic events in Taiwan, in this sense, mobilized the Taiwanese dancers to advocate for change. Therefore, acknowledging the U.S. government’s military and financial interventions in Taiwan, this dissertation accounts for how

American dancing bodies moved Taiwanese dance history.

It is necessary to look at how the local people are empowered with diplomatic frictions, the unequal but creative qualities of connections between the sponsoring and the host countries. I focus on how these American modernist and liberal values were delivered through dancing bodies, and how they were interpreted by foreign audiences through their imagined-to-be-shared corporeal experiences as dancers. Such an intersection of American modernist and liberal values under the rhetoric of freedom within Chinese nationalism in Free China centers in my analyses.

Taiwanese heterogeneous receptions of the rhetoric of freedom framed their perceptions of these U.S. dance diplomatic events. Taiwan’s alignment with the United

States-led bloc gave Taiwanese people hope for social experiences like freedom of speech, but that was not a possibility since the Kuomintang strictly controlled all public behavior through military rule. Conversely, the Kuomintang advocated for the people’s freedom through following their cultural codes. The rhetoric of freedom in the postwar context signified multiple meanings for different ends. As dance historian Gay Morris argues, the postwar American modern dance companies sought economic freedom through gaining a large audience and mixed sponsorship from the U.S. government and

17 private patrons.30 The Taiwanese local understandings of freedom transformed the economic freedom under which American modern dance companies toured with the U.S.

State Department sponsorship and became the Taiwanese people’s advocates for cultural and expressive freedom. As I show in the following chapters, the Taiwanese elites and dancers utilized the rhetoric of freedom to call for their artistic freedom of speech and their free advocates different from the official Kuomintang nationalism. They turned their attention to the local cultural elements and the contemporary experiences of life in

Taiwan instead of the projected imagination toward the lost Mainland China as the minzu wudao movement promoted. They expressed their imaginations regarding the future of the nation-state to respond to the national crises and the collective anxiety that these crises caused. In this sense, the first meaning of freedom as membership in the free world saved these artistic advocates from the Kuomintang’s opposition, which allowed the development of the artistic freedom of expression to flourish through dance.

American Cold War Dance Diplomacy

My dissertation traces how these transnational forces affected local experiences with national and transnational identities. The identities relate to the representatives of these American modern dancers in the state-sponsored tours, the Taiwanese audiences’ relationship to Chinese and , and to Asian American transnational connections. They also include the racial and ethnic identities that these American modern dancers embodied in their work, and the ethnic identities regarding Mainlanders and Islanders for dancers and audiences in Taiwan. These identities influenced and were influenced through these touring events. In this sense, national identities, with their

18 implications for gender and race, played various roles in these diplomatic events and further shaped the outcomes. Through examination of Taiwanese reception of and reactions to American Cold War dance diplomacy, I show how national and transnational identities played out through dancers’ and audiences’ corporealities.

The operations of U.S. cultural diplomacy are not unidirectional. The United

States’ Cultural Presentation program involved multiple U.S. agencies. The U.S. State

Department requested the Dance Panel’s recommendation regarding full or partial sponsorship to tour abroad, the United States Information Agency (USIA) and USIS helped with information distribution, and the U.S. embassies collected local responses and made requests about preferred genres.31 In this multi-unit operation, the Dance Panel, composed of dance professionals and critics from the private sphere, recommended artists and artistic works, based on various considerations, such as professionality, receptions in the United States, an artist’s to the host countries, and local audiences’ familiarity with a certain dance genre. The members of the Dance Panel changed over time and, as a result, so did discussions on recommendations. In this sense, the factors within the Dance Panel and across agencies all shaped their decisions regarding who they sent where.

The Dance Panel’s discussion on exemplifies multi-directionality of decision making among multiple agencies in Cultural Presentation programs. Dance historians Hannah Kosstrin and Naima Prevots have pointed out that the Dance Panel refused to suggest the U.S. State Department sponsor the international tours of Sokolow, a choreographer whose works challenged the U.S. Cold War rhetoric of freedom.32 This

19 decision resulted in the State Department not sponsoring Sokolow’s international tour in the 1950s. However, in the 1960s, William Bales, a long-standing panel member and former chair, started to be interested in her works. The Dance Panel agreed to sponsor

Sokolow’s 1968 teaching tour to Japan under a Senior Fulbright grant for the Program for

Americans Abroad.33 In the meeting of October 17, 1966, William Bales nominated

Sokolow for a company tour to Latin America as an alternative to Alwin Nikolais by stating that “she herself is fabulous and her company dances extremely well.”34 In the

December meeting of the same year, Davies recommended Sokolow's company to tour to Africa.35 In 1967, after several panel members attended Sokolow’s concert, the Dance Panel agreed that “Miss Sokolow is very gifted and very unique, but that her pessimism results in dances of one note.”36 As a result, they agreed to sponsor

Sokolow’s tour to European festivals and appear with other choreographers’ work because they said her dance “might be difficult for the general public to accept in a program made up of just her own .”37 In this sense, the Panel’s discussions about Anna Sokolow’s dance were mainly about her choreographic tone and the Panel’s expectation about local audiences’ receptions, instead of the socialist ideologies in her dances. In other words, even though the Federal Bureau of Investigation traced

Sokolow’s international activities,38 the Dance Panel did not follow the same policy to omit Sokolow from the lists and their recommendations could be based on different considerations, not to mention that the US State Department and the Operations

Coordinating Board made final decisions. In the extended sense, the governing organization does not only form the state; the people also form the state. Such “frictions,”

20 in Tsing’s usage, within an institution and between agencies complicate the history of

U.S. Cold War dance diplomacy.

In addition to the U.S. institutions’ decision making and execution of the Cultural

Presentation programs, another actor that engaged in these diplomatic events is the local audience. In her project on U.S. dance diplomacy during the Cold War era and later on her post-9/11 experience, Dancers as Diplomats, dance historian Clare Croft interviewed dancers who engaged in these so-called cultural exchange programs to examine what was transmitted and exchanged.39 Her perspective on the American dancers’ experiences provided me a new vision regarding these events. Specifically, in the last chapter of her book, she documented her ethnographic experience in a U.S.-Korean exchange program with the Trey McIntyre Project and the Korea National Contemporary Dance Company, and her difficulties communicating with the Korean dancers across language barriers.

This raised a question for me: if English-speaking scholars only hear from those who speak English, how do we understand these “cultural exchange” programs from both sides? My dissertation begins with this question in mind. I examine the Taiwanese perspectives to contribute to this academic discussion concerning dance diplomacy. In this sense, this dissertation not only addresses Taiwanese dance history by discussing these touring events and Taiwanese audiences’ responses. It also responds to American dance history by exploring the transnational connections between the United States and

Taiwan through select Chinese-born American choreographers’ migrations. Through these discussions and analyses, this dissertation illustrates the transnational history across the Pacific Ocean through the moving trajectories of dancing bodies.

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In this sense, I aim to rethink American dance modernity in geographic regions outside the United States. Attention to American modern dance’s traces in East Asia expands dance scholarship on how American modern dance shaped U.S. society to how its influences were distributed globally.40 Such a distribution did not always serve the

U.S. government’s agenda. American modern dance also challenged U.S. society as well as the places outside of the United States that it visited regarding issues of social positions.

Dancing as a Means of Nationalism and Resistance

To discuss the ramifications of American dance tours in Taiwan, I explain how dancing bodies construct and shape nationalism. This perspective counters official nationalism, a ruling class’s nation-building projects to arouse its people’s national sentiments, to show that nationalism is not always top-down; on the contrary, members of a community continuously reiterate and shape their imagination about the nation for their different ends. I focus on how dancing bodies shape the social ideologies regarding national consciousness and imaginations of the nation. Through their experimentations of modern dance adopting Chinese movement vocabulary and/or American dance choreographic methods and technique, Taiwanese choreographers sought to create dances that represent Taiwanese contemporary life experiences rather than representing the imagined Chineseness that the Kuomintang promoted. These Taiwanese choreographers’ various attempts went around censorship and proposed their different imaginations of what the nation should be, other than what the Kuomintang had constructed. In this sense, these bottom-up nationalist discourses proposed through their dancing bodies challenged

22 the Kuomintang-promoted Chinese nationalism, stimulated the audiences’ thinking about the nation, and provided them a sense to participate in the international scene.

Furthermore, American modern dance transmitted through the transnational

Chinese network within East Asia constructed a different kind of imagination of a community not based on territories. Chinese American choreographers traveled between the continent of America and Sinophone regions in East Asia with their cultural and kinesthetic memories. In this regard, their feelings of connection cross national borders.

They bore memories of their social networks across continents and further reterritorialized them through creating different imagined connections.

I focus on how individual bodies’ interactions with each other and policies shape their national consciousness. For the purposes of this discussion, I understand national consciousness to be awareness of shared imagined connections to other members of a national community with which one identifies. Through examining regulatory powers on people’s bodies, I aim to explore how people reiterate their national identity through their bodies. That is, dance artists create and perform dances to advocate their own imagination of the nation’s past, present, and future through moving bodies. Moreover, national identity can be tied to political ideologies regarding race, ethnicity, and gender.

In this sense, I want to further examine how considerations of these social categories interact with one’s national identities, especially during a strictly anti-Communist era for the United States and Taiwan. With this framework I view the Kuomintang’s official nationalism as an external regulatory power on the people and I explore how these people’s internal regulatory power reacts to nationalism-constructing policies.

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Scholarship has shown how nationalism could emerge from people’s imaginations and their reaction to them. In Imagined Communities, Anderson proposes a hypothesis about the historical modulation of nationalism.41 He claims that nationalism was an imagination of belonging in the early modern period. This imagination first resulted from print media to create a sense of community within the European region and make people aware of each other’s existence. This awareness connected these people to form a political community as a nation.

However, nationalism is not purely an imagination based on nothing. Against

Anderson’s dialectical approach based in intellectual discourses, anthropologists John

Kelly and Martha Kaplan turn their attention to the dynamic global and local political forces to point out that ’s nationalist disconnection from race was historically constructed with the Cold War competition and the birth of the United .42 By tracing the history of Fiji, Kelly and Kaplan argue that communities are not merely imagined but “renewed in their existence not only by representations in the semiotic sense, but also by representation in the political, institutional sense.”43 They trace how the global-local dynamics and institutional regulations shaped the post-WWII idea of nation- states and decolonization. In this sense, while Anderson’s discourse analysis shows homogeneity of nationalism as an imagination, Kelly and Kaplan show the implications of entanglements between local and global powers and present possible seams among nationalist discourses. Following Kelly and Kaplan, a nation is not an entity that preexists and rules its people but rather is imagined and formed by and represented through its

24 people’s actions negotiating with global and local powers.44 That is, a nation’s people produce, react to, and shape their own nationalism.

Similar to Kelly and Kaplan’s argument about nationalism emerging from the people, dance scholarship has shown dancing bodies as a means for top-down nation- building projects and also for the ruled people to resist such official projects. Initiated by her personal and family experiences, Indonesian dancer and dance scholar Rachmi Diyah

Larasati shows how the Indonesian government from the 1960s to the 1990s enacted invented tradition to “cleanse,” or remove, memories about Indonesian history related to communism. In her autoethnographic book The Dance That Makes You Vanish, Larasati analyzes her own experiences as a Javanese court dancer on and outside the lands of

Indonesia, as well as the documents from human rights organizations and artistic works.

During the ruling of ’s second president, Haji Mohammad Suharto, the

Indonesian government imprisoned or disappeared dancers accused of being communists to erase the communist past of the country. This removal built a new set of discourses and traditions, including court dances, framing Suharto as the national hero and communism as the evil.45 Larasati argues that Suharto’s nationalist projects produced a nationalist “replica” of imaginary inter-homogeneity. The term “replica” indicates the simulacrum that replaces the real vanished bodies, in her case, the Indonesian dances.

Since these female dancers were removed by the ruling power, the dance they had performed became the fixed ideal simulacrum, more precisely, the traditional. In this way, traditional Indonesian dances presented a homogenous image to represent the nation. On the other hand, these female dancing bodies, in the past and the present, also

25 memorialize the history through their embodiment that the ruling power aimed to exterminate. The dances that Indonesian female dancers archived through their bodies and cognitive memories created a counter-force against the process of nationalist replica formation. The mobility of the ruled people is shown through their dancing of heritage to connect to the past and to resist the violence of the ruling power.

Crossing the Cold War’s contested ideologies, the people of communist nation- states also executed similar embodied resistances against their rulers. East German dance historian Jens Richard Giersdorf asserts that re-visualizing East German dance within global dance history subverts the assumption of the contesting ideology of the Free

World, which frames the people in the socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR) with a lack of individual agency. In his book The Body of the People, Giersdorf analyzes

East German dance, choreography, and physicality in the GDR from 1945 to contemporary memory, to equalize the later remembrance of its past. He argues that the history of corporeal resistances to the cultural policies of folk and concert dance aimed to shape East and the socialist ideology by further exemplifying the

East German people’s resistance, including the choreographers’ adoption of Russian revolutionary ballet, and improvisation and Ausdruckstanz traditions in the 1980s.46

Giersdorf’s revelation of these resistances in challenges the fixed interpretations that marginalize the history of East Germany as the Other of the West.

Such “otherization” is a product of Cold War competition that actually highlights the discursive construction of capitalism as champion and erases East German dance history.

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Therefore, Giersdorf’s research on East Germany provides a significant perspective on deconstructing Cold War ideologies and the always-looming ghost of the Cold War.

The dance scholarship I discuss above exemplifies a fundamental rethinking and deconstruction of Cold War ideologies in the forms of embodiment related to nationalism. Larasati illustrates how Indonesian official nation-building projects created a homogeneous dancing body under the Cold War ideology of freedom vs. communism, but also reveals how the dancing body archived the communist past through dancers’ practices that the ruling class aimed to erase. Giersdorf reveals the corporeal resistances against the East German nationalist project. This history of resistances challenges the binary assumption that views democracy as “freedom” represented through individual agency and communism as monolithic, with a lack of agency. Larasati’s and Giersdorf’s studies challenging Cold War ideologies about freedom benefit my thinking about how the Taiwanese sought freedom in so-called “Free China” through their dancing bodies.

Mobility becomes the key that I reveal in this project concerning the Taiwanese embodied resistance. The Taiwanese adoption of American modern dance was not merely a culturally colonized behavior but a cognitive choice to resist the Kuomintang’s official nationalism under martial ruling. In contrast to the Kuomintang’s emphasizing cultural unity, sociologist Raymond Breton defines civic nationalism as an imaged community of which inclusion or exclusion is “by birth or on the basis of legally established criteria and procedures….The community is based on interest, not on symbolic identification.”47 Although Breton’s idea is based on capitalist , I expend this view on nationalism to a possible basis of an imagined community as

27 members’ shared values. In this sense, I view members’ imaginations about what members should be included and how they should be treated as nationalist discourses.

Nowadays, the idea that democracy has become the central value of the Taiwanese is not merely because of the United States’ influences, but a shared philosophy among the society after decades of struggles. By stating so, I am not indicating that American modern dance “freed” the Taiwanese. Instead, to question the meanings of “freedom” of

American modern dance for the Taiwanese and the United States’ diplomatic propaganda deconstructs the fixed frame of the Cold War and provides different views of East Asia.

In other words, my deconstruction of Cold War ideologies is not to oppose any of the binary (or polarized) camps, but to rail against the binarization itself.

Resistance through dancing bodies poses possible challenges to official nationalism in postwar Taiwan by offering an alternative nationalism of the people. As discussed above, the official nationalism was built through various top-down cultural policies, including the minzu wudao movement, to construct the cultural and political authenticity of China. The minzu wudao movement, which aimed to build aesthetic styles of a homogeneous “,” echoes dance historian Emily Wilcox’s idea of kinesthetic nationalism, which refers to “an idea that what distinguishes Chinese dance as a genre is its aesthetic form, not its thematic content or where or by whom it is performed.”48 In this sense, kinesthetic nationalism is a bodily form of discourses framing and enhancing national identity. Wilcox indicates that this emphasis on aesthetics serves the united national identity of the “Chinese nation” (Zhonghua Minzu) among the diverse ethnic groups in China. Although Wilcox’s research takes place in postwar P.R.C., the

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R.O.C.’s cultural policies aimed to construct similar aesthetics of dance. As Wilcox points out, the modern project of Chinese kinesthetic nationalism began in the 1940s.

Some of these dance pioneers migrated to Mainland China while the Kuomintang-led

R.O.C. was still controlling the land.49 As a result, this dance movement influenced many choreographers that later moved to Taiwan with the Kuomintang’s retreat, such as Liu

Feng-Shueh and Li Tianmin (李天民).

The Taiwanese choreographers’ experiments of dance aesthetics, especially modern dance, challenged the officially-recognized dance aesthetic in the minzu wudao movement. As I will discuss in Chapter 2, Liu Feng-Shueh quit the minzu wudao competition and started her own experiment of Chinese modern dance in 1957. Liu’s questioning the replica of minzu wudao and ten-year exploration of a form that represented contemporary Chineseness shows the influences of those pioneers’ inventions of Chinese dance. Other Taiwanese choreographers, including T’sai Jui-yueh and Lin Hwai-min, who did not study with the Chinese dance pioneers, started their dance experiments after experiencing American modern dance, as I will discuss in

Chapter 3. These experiments contributed to a different imagination about the nation from what the ruling power aimed to construct through the minzu wudao movement. In turn, Taiwanese elites and choreographers reacted to American modern dance state- sponsored tours and their choreographic experiments to reiterate their imaginations about the nation. In this way, I display the transnational influences on Taiwanese dance history and the global circulation of dance as social interventions.

American Modern Dance as Social Intervention

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The American modern dance companies’ state-sponsored tours to Taiwan showcased dancing as social interventions to Taiwanese elites and choreographers. This feature of American dance modernity provided them a means to reiterate and advocate for their ideal imagination about the nation. Before I analyze how the Taiwanese choreographers adopted such dance modernity to shape the martial ruled Taiwanese society, in this section I discuss the existing English-language dance scholarship to show how American modern dance has been shaping U.S. society and also those outside of the

United States. Based on this idea of dance modernity as social intervention, the American modern dance companies’ tours to Taiwan were the U.S. cultural diplomatic events to strengthen the mutual connections between the United States and Taiwan. They also provided a useful means for and empowered the Taiwanese to advocate for freedom of speech, for the arts specifically and also in general.

Theories of gender and embodiment are important to understand how the dance phenomena I discuss occurred. Dance and gender theorists have shown how a body performs one’s gender. Gender theorist Judith Butler’s scholarship on gender performance describes how gender “is always a reiteration of a norm or set of norms, and to the extent that it acquires an act-like status in the present, it conceals or dissimulates the conventions of which it is a repetition.”50 For Butler, the social norms construct gender and the people further perform it. Dance theorist Susan Leigh Foster expands the idea of choreography to exemplify how dance can contribute to identity construction.

Foster suggests that choreography is a useful idea to examine the repetitive acts regarding the construction of gender, ethnic and other social identities.51 She points out that

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Butler’s theory of gender performance highlighting the reiteration of identities through repetitive acts fails to explain how individual acts influence communities. Instead, Foster argues, gender is not only performative but also choreographic. Against Butler’s theory of gender as performance, Foster further points out, “Choreography relies on the inculcated capabilities, impulses, and preferences that years of practice produce, but it also leaves open the possibility for the unprecedented.”52 Choreographers and movement executors, who may take multiple roles in the process, design the verbal and nonverbal bodily expressions for viewers, but also experience the unanticipated, the unprecedented.

In a similar vein, through this choreographic process of gender, the maker, the executor, and the receptor all engage in certain ideology that emerges in the body. In this sense, not only focusing on the skills to represent identities like the idea of performance, a choreographic idea among movements links the performance and the performing body to broader social contexts.

American modern dance has shaped U.S. society as it represented it, largely through embodiments of gender. Dance historian Rebekah Kowal indicates that Martha

Graham’s and José Limón’s dances conducted social change by presenting their personal ideologies of gender and simultaneously deploying U.S. postwar dance universalism, which accorded with the universalist assumption of the U.S. cultural diplomacy based on human commonality.53 She argues that the American modern dance artists and critics’ common beliefs revealed in the Dance Panel’s meetings that dance transcends language barriers and that modern dance “is capable of addressing a fundamental issue of a time” articulated American postwar dance universalism.54 At the same time, Graham’s and

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Limón’s dances also present the dramatized individual characteristics of gender to challenge the conventional image of men and women.55 In a similar vein, Croft illustrates

Graham’s representation of American freedom and her challenges to gender norms. Croft argues that Graham’s whiteness promoted the universalist idea of American freedom and exported the re-imagination of gender by what Croft called a “diva stance,” which

“describe[s] how Graham deployed physical action to ‘disorder’ gender—critiquing and re-imagining gender norms through the body.”56 Graham’s white body allowed her to represent American dance modernity and an assumption that dance transcends cultural differences. On the other hand, her whiteness also allowed her to challenge gender normativity regarding the conventional gender images of both male and female.

Graham’s and Limón’s cases exemplify that American modern dance not only represents the society but also facilitates social change to liberate gender by asserting their transgressive perspectives. As I will show in Chapters 2 and 3, American modern dance brought the Taiwanese artists similar thinking about social change related to gender, race, and ethnicity.

American modern dance has a complex history regarding presentations of race and racialized bodies on stage. For example, dance historian Jacqueline Shea Murphy shows how José Limón's and Tom Two Arrows’ dances resonated with the U.S. policy changes. She argues that the U.S. policies terminated American Indian land reservation and cultural preservation by forcing Indigenous assimilation into the mainstream.57 Also examining the relationship between American modern dance and dance cultures of minorities, dance historian Susan Manning argues that American modern dance and

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African American concert dance were entangled from the early 1930s to the late 1960s.58

Her discussion regards how different audiences received what they perceived to be racially marked (nonwhite) and unmarked (white) bodies. Adjacent to her examination she indicates that Limón, who was Mexican-American, maintained the privilege to sometimes represent a universal (white-appearing) body and at other times to represent a

“culturally and historically specific body” in different dances.59 Limón’s ethnic background provided him strategies of representation when compared to his cohort of

American modern dance. These scholarly works exemplify American modern dance’s dual position regarding social change; they served the mainstream ideologies to a certain degree but simultaneously changed them regarding race through representations of culturally marked and unmarked bodies. Consequently, dance scholarship has proven that dance and dancing bodies are capable of addressing and reiterating racial ideologies regarding the images of race.

Based on the scholarship about American modern dance as a means to conduct social change, this dissertation demonstrates how dance functions in unanticipated ways for the ruling class and for the people. The U.S. postwar dance diplomacy aimed to improve its international reception and also to strengthen the relationship between the

United States and other countries. In addition, American modern dance provided the

Taiwanese a means to negotiate with their official social control. In other words, different individuals and institutions took American modern dance as a means for their own ends.

While these state-initiated tours originally aimed to increase foreign understanding of

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U.S. cultural achievements, Taiwanese choreographers perceived American dance modernity as advocating for social change, as it did for U.S. society.

In addition, Chinese-born American choreographers embodied the idea of

American modern dance as social interventions about race and gender through their physical transnational migrations and practices. As I will discuss in Chapter 4, Chinese

American choreographers Yen Lu Wong and Al Chungliang Huang studied American modern dance in the United States, introduced it to Taiwanese audiences and dance practitioners, and contributed to Asian American movements through their choreographies. In this sense, while much existing scholarship focuses on American modern dance’s influences on its birthplace, this dissertation expands the landscape by discussing the transnational migrations of Chinese American choreographers and the global circulation of American modern dance in international contexts.

Freedom, Universalism and Abstract Expression

Modernism played a key role in the U.S. postwar cultural diplomacy. These cultural diplomatic policies include various forms of information, such as broadcasting, literature, and .60 For example, art historian Serge Guilbaut argued that

Greenbergian formalism, “a theory that was somewhat flexible as it began clearly to define its position within the new social and aesthetic order that was taking shape during and after the war,” and abstract in visual arts were not merely a set of ideologies about art but also related to the American postwar ideologies of social orders, especially “those of the progressive liberal ideology,” by highlighting freedom of expression.61 However, Guilbaut’s analysis overstated the role of abstract modernity in

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U.S. arts diplomacy. As I have mentioned earlier, the U.S. State Department also sponsored American ballet companies and folk dance groups to tour internationally.

Nevertheless, these dances did not arouse Taiwanese audiences’ interests as American modern dance did. In this sense, abstract expression was not directly targeted by the U.S. agencies but selected by the local audiences through their reception.

In addition, the idea of abstract expression is not homogeneous across different artistic venues. The idea of abstraction in visual arts and music may refer to artistic languages unconcerned with representations of the world; however, the idea of abstraction in dance cannot be fully separated from the human world due to its human- based medium, dancing bodies. Established from dance critic John Martin’s theory of

American modern dance, abstraction in dance is to abstract “the essentials from a particular life experience, omitting all that is merely personal and without universal significance.”62 In this sense, abstraction in dance still refers to representations of the world in a way that audience members may find it difficult to associate what happened onstage with specific experiences of individuals or groups; regardless, audience members could still find an interpretation associated with what Martin calls a universalist meaning.

In this way, abstraction benefits audiences of various cultural heritages and life experiences finding a connection between the dance and their life experience. In this sense, abstraction in American modern dance was not purely about artistic form but represented what Martin perceived as common human conditions. Therefore, the idea of abstraction in American modern dance is linked to Martin’s desire to define universal significance.

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Similar to Guilbaut’s criticism on the exportation of U.S. visual arts, some scholars viewed U.S. music diplomacy as a exporting American modernization and the American style of life. Historian Penny Von Eschen focused attention on African

American jazz musicians, including Louis Armstrong, , and Duke

Ellington, and their tours, arguing that jazz diplomacy was not a story of a nation but a story about the trade trajectories of slave migrations. Indeed, they were trades “that forced millions of Africans to the Americas [and] the U.S. involvement in coups, in countries ranging from Iran and Iraq to the Congo and Ghana and the arming of such military states as .”63 Von Eschen’s argument about U.S. jazz diplomacy directly connected these artistic events and the U.S. State Department’s political motivation.

Historian Lisa Davenport framed her examinations of the U.S. State Department’s jazz diplomacy in the global Cold War, pointing out that jazz music was used as a weapon to contest Communism and the Soviet Union and that competition with the Soviet Union kept shaping jazz diplomacy. Therefore, “jazz held a unique position” in relation to other

American means of propaganda. For her, this was a paradoxical position as “the cultural expression of one of the nation’s most oppressed minorities came to symbolize the cultural superiority of American democracy.”64 The United States in this sense foregrounded American political ideology about democracy in its jazz diplomacy. In this way, the United States used jazz music to enhance its international reception abroad by covering over its racial inequality at home.

Dance aligned with other art forms to promote American cultural achievements.

Taiwanese dance scholar Yuh-jen Lu utilized Susanne Langer’s abstract expressionist

36 aesthetics to analyze Chinese American choreographer Al Chungliang Huang’s dances.

Lu argued that “modern dance was exported as a cultural icon for the progressive and

Free world as opposed to the out-dated representational art idolized by the backward

Communist world.”65 Although the United States also exported representational arts abroad, Lu, aligning with other scholars, viewed the U.S. postwar cultural diplomacy as policies to export certain ideologies of social order. This scholarship emphasized certain aesthetics that were consciously and purposefully exported through U.S. diplomatic events to help the United States fight against the Soviet Union in the Cold War.

The U.S. scholarship on American modern dance choreographers also examines the relationship between aesthetics and U.S. cultural diplomacy. Dance historian Melinda

Susan Copel’s research offers evidence that Limón’s humanist value, “emphasiz[ing] human and spiritual ideals, frequently using the human condition as subject matter,”66 played a key role in the decision of the State Department to support the José Limón

Dance Company to tour internationally in 1954 and 1957. The tradition of humanist modern dance espoused by Limón and , Limón’s mentor and a member of ANTA’s Dance Panel, presented a universalist ideology of viewing all human beings as one and calling for a better world. This tradition conforms to the State Department’s diplomatic aims to build international connections and promote American modernization to compete with communism and to maintain a leading position among all nations.

Besides Limón’s humanistic modern dance, Graham’s dance also matched the

State Department’s agenda to promote American artistic achievements. Dance historian

Victoria Phillips Geduld analyzes Graham’s dances presented in two Asian tours to

37 examine whether their perceptions matched the State Department and the Dance Panel’s agendas.67 She argues that Orientalism and American exceptionalism are both represented in Graham’s dances, as well as modernism in terms of dance techniques to show a universal image. Croft examines the core value of cultural diplomacy from dancers’ perspectives.68 She points out that the Cold War dance diplomacy, including

Graham’s and Alvin Ailey’s tours, failed to facilitate a two-way exchange and served as propaganda of American progressive images. As such, these dance companies’ State- sponsored tours undoubtedly served the State Department’s agenda to show American modern dance as an authentic modern art and to promote an American mode of social modernization to buttress the United States’ leading role in the Cold War.

To unpack the complexity of U.S. diplomacy and its international reception, it is important to trace the multiple shaping forces at global and local scales. These include

U.S. leadership during the Cold War and local social movements. Because the shaping forces on the United States’ international image entangles the political and social change within the United States, historian Mary Dudziak traces archival documents to show how the 1960s civil rights movement utilized the international critiques on American racial discrimination to stimulate social change, forcing the administration to act in order to maintain a moral image of leadership in the Cold War era.69 Anthropologist Judy Tzu-

Chun Wu traces the transnational individual connections between civil rights actors and foreigners to show that these face-to-face interactions shaped their political acts and relevant outcomes.70 In this sense, the outcome of U.S. cultural diplomacy was inseparable from the global Cold War competition and the domestic social development.

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The conventional one-way concept of cultural diplomacy ignores the local and international factors and those from the Soviet Union.

The complexity composed by multiple factors from diverse angles challenges one-way assessments of cultural diplomacy. Fosler-Lussier challenges Washington, DC’s water-flow model of cultural exchange by proposing an information flow model that illustrates the complicated cultural transmission mediated by the Embassies and local agents in the host countries.71 The model of flow of information proposed by the State

Department’s International Information Administration presented a top-down, one-way flow of information into the host country; Edmund Kellogg presented the information flow of the U.S. cultural presentation programs from the diplomatic field as a network of multiple agencies. Fosler-Lussier argues that both perspectives are significant and compose the full picture with one another.72 Knowing their efforts would not transfer

American ideology, the State Department implemented cultural diplomatic projects to increase connectedness between the United States and the host countries. Also, the feedback from United States’ local agencies and the host countries may shape the impacts of cultural diplomacy. Consequently, the information flow models the point of view away from seeing cultural diplomacy as a one-way flow and further shows the complexity of cultural diplomacy. This combination of both perspectives thus benefits my thinking about the possible forces and agencies that shape the outcome of the U.S. postwar dance diplomacy. I examine it through my analyses of the Dance Panel’s discussions, local receptions, the dance works, the global Cold War, and the local contexts regarding ideas of freedom.

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Research Methods and Materials

My methods for carrying out this study are largely archival, complemented by oral history and choreographic analysis of dances on film. I focus on published dance criticism in Taiwan, in addition to reports from around East Asia, to explore the local receptions of American modern dance companies’ East and Southeast Asian tours. These tours followed similar touring paths, and Taiwan was one of their stops. Taiwanese newspapers presented interest in these U.S. diplomatic events, which is surprising to me because of the volume of reports and reviews. The volume of dance criticism in Taiwan, in the form of introductory essays, reviews, and reports from 1960 to 1980 shows the importance of these U.S. diplomatic events. The reports from major newspapers, such as

Central Daily, United Daily, and China Times, to smaller and local ones, such as China

Daily News and Minzu Evening News, traced the announcement of the American modern dance companies’ visits: their arrivals, their activities, and their departures. However, the newspaper reports in Japan, , , and Thailand that I found mostly only provided information about the events, no matter in local languages, English, or

Chinese for different readers. For example, the Bangkok Post, the most historical

English-language newspaper in Thailand, presented information alongside photos of Paul

Taylor Dance Company provided by USIA as a standard practice, while the Thai and

Chinese newspapers published in Thailand showed little about these tours. Clearly, these events were not marketed to ethnically Thai and Chinese people in Bangkok but rather for the elites who read and spoke English. Compared to the small number of pieces of information regarding the American dance companies’ State Department-sponsored tours

40 that I could find from the local and domestic newspapers, the archived Taiwanese receptions of the American companies’ footprints in Asia best evidence the outcomes of

U.S. Cold War dance diplomacy. They show how these American modern dance companies were received as free artistic expression and the representation of the United

States’ postwar power as the leader of the capitalist bloc.

In addition to dance criticism, U.S. official documents show the decision-making process regarding the American dance companies’ state-sponsored tours. These archival materials, mainly from the National Archives at College Park, Maryland, and the David

W. Mullins Library at University of Arkansas, corroborate the negotiation process between multiple agencies about which dance genre to choose, who to send, and where to tour. The Dance Panel of ANTA (later the Dance Advisory Panel of the Bureau of

Educational and Cultural Affairs) fielded dance experts to make such recommendations.

The U.S. embassies also requested what the local audiences desired. The office of the

Cultural Presentations Program of the Division of Cultural and International Affairs represented the State Department to provide the request and to control budgets. These historical documents offer evidence of the Dance Panel’s recommendation-making process and the US embassies’ observations regarding local reception of these diplomatic events.

In addition to archival materials, I conduct oral history to explore the Taiwanese receptions. Through oral history, I aim to understand these events and how they are memorialized and narrated. I interviewed Taiwanese choreographers and dancers who witnessed or experienced these dance diplomatic events. I found that it is difficult for

41 these interviewees to remember what they watched forty to fifty years ago. The oral history that I conducted, in turn, presents the overall atmosphere and development of

Taiwanese dance at that period of the 1960s to 1970s. Additionally, there are already many interviews published in different forms of media. These published interview materials supplement the oral history since they are either closer to the time of these events or present their memories about the specific events. These sources help me explore what and how American modern dance shaped their identities. Although their memories might be affected by the Taiwanese anti-American movements in the 1970s, in which the

Taiwanese protested against the United States’ renormalization with the P.R.C., I aim to understand how Taiwanese audiences viewed American modern dances during the specific era, and how they remember and further narrate the stories of their witnessing experiences of American modern dance.

A note regarding the of Chinese languages and names is necessary, because multiple systems and languages have been used in Taiwan. I followed historian

Evan Dawley’s Romanization in his book, wherein he explores the formations of ethnic identity as Taiwanese based on shared local languages and life experiences, in , a city in northern Taiwan, during the Japanese colonization period.73 Dawley’s

Romanization consists of the Hanyu system except for well-known names. For the translated names that have been used publicly or on accessible documents, such as degree thesis and program notes, wherein the artists had a degree of control over the

Romanization of their names, I followed the usage in order not to cause confusion and to express my respect to the artists. Some examples of these names include Cheng Shu-qi,

42

Chiang Kai-Shek, Lin Hwai-min, Liu Feng-Shueh, T’sai Jui-Yueh, and Wu Su-chun. For the names of scholars who have been published in English, I also adopted the translations that they use. Otherwise, I used Hanyu pinyin, a dominant system developed by the

P.R.C., to transliterate Chinese words and other Chinese names.

Chapter Outline

The dissertation includes five chapters that consider how and what American modern dance brought to East Asia during the Cold War era. I tell the stories of state- sponsored East Asian tours of American modern dance companies, including Ailey,

Limón, Taylor, Graham, and Nikolais, and analyze the audiences’ responses in which their struggles regarding national identity were embedded. For comparison, I extend my analyses to responses from other East and Southeast Asian regions. I present Al

Chungliang Huang’s and Yen Lu Wong’s transnational migration stories to draw a full picture of American modern dance’s cultural transit to East Asia. Finally, I trace the

“afterlife” of American modern dance tours in Taiwan to show their influence in terms of artistic forms and content.

Chapter 2: “Freedom Reflected in Taiwanese Eyes” explores Alvin Ailey’s,

Carmen De Lavallade’s, and José Limón’s tours in Taiwan, examining Taiwanese audiences’ reading of freedom and the related ideologies of race and gender. Manning indicates José Limón’s dual position regarding raciality. On the one hand, his immigrant background marked his as a culturally marked body; on the other, his modern dance training allowed his body to present as culturally unmarked.74 Similarly, the Dance Panel considered Alvin Ailey for his culturally marked body (it was advantageous to tour an

43

African American artist to give the illusion of racial equality despite deep racial divides at home) but the modern dance transcendent value emphasizing spirituality in his works, such as Revelations (1960), carried out American dance modernity.75 The gender issue within these choreographers’ works attracts dance scholars’ attention. Limón’s and

Ailey’s masculinity shown through their dancing bodies presents an American image of strength. However, I argue that the Ailey company’s two visits brought Taiwan’s audiences new perspectives on dance modernity and social equality, while Limón’s humanistic dance demonstrated American universalist modernization and rarely-seen masculinity in dance to Taiwan’s audiences. To exemplify the influences of Ailey’s and

Limon’s American modern dance, I discuss Liu Feng-Shueh’s experimental project of

Chinese modern dance. I assert that Ailey’s and Limon’s American modern dance reiterating social ideologies about Americanness provided models for, if not directly stimulated, the Taiwanese choreographers to conduct their experiments of nationalism, which used to be officially defined. In this sense, Ailey’s and Limón’s Asian tours simultaneously served the U.S. State Department’s agenda but also challenged the officially constructed nationalism in Taiwan in the name of freedom.

Chapter 3: “The Cultural Markings of American Modernity” mobilizes another angle of the idea of masculinity and the related American modernity to discuss Paul

Taylor’s, Martha Graham’s, and Alwin Nikolais’s Asian tours in the late 1960s to the

1970s. The Dance Panel’s first decision to recommend Graham to the State Department for the dance diplomacy project restated Graham’s Americanness. Paul Taylor’s athletic image shows a friendliness of America as Cold War world leader. Nikolais’s

44 depersonalization of dancing bodies by covering dancers with elastic cloth presents

American high art modernism. These choreographers’ works all present certain aspects of modern dance whiteness as ethnically unmarked to transmit the idea of Americanness.

On the other hand, Taiwanese choreographer Lin Hwai-min learned Graham technique from Marcia Thayer at the University of Iowa, and later founded the first Taiwanese professional dance company—Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan. Since then, Graham technique played an important role in Lin’s training and choreography with Chinese and

Taiwanese content matter, as well as in Taiwanese dance education. This chapter explores this history of American dance modernism in Taiwan to show the different interpretations of negotiating modernity within Chinese nationalism. I argue that the aesthetic politics that the State Department-sponsored tours of Paul Taylor Dance

Company, Martha Graham Dance Company, and Nikolais Dance Theatre from 1967 to

1979 introduced an idealized American masculinity to Taiwanese audiences. The

Taiwanese perception of American masculinity was transformed into nationalist discourses in reaction to the national crises caused by the increasing international recognition of the P.R.C. in the 1970s, which resulted in the replacement of the representative of the Kuomintang’s Free China. American modernity is not only defined by its development in the United States; it is necessary to look for its broader traces and influences globally. To explore how Taiwanese choreographers adopted American dance modernity, I analyze T’asi Jui-yueh’s, Liu Feng-Shueh’s, and Lin Hwai-min’s choreographies to exemplify the competing reiterations regarding the future of the nation- state, through their adaptation of choreographic method and aesthetics from American

45 modern dance. These choreographies, as responses to these national crises, demonstrate how dancing bodies are capable of addressing the imagination of the nation-state through their experimentation of dance modernity.

Chapter 4: “American Dreams, Chinese Moves” focuses on Chinese transnationalism through dance in the Sinophone world across East Asia and the United

States. This chapter discusses choreographers’ facilitation of global transmission of American dance modernity. Asian American choreographers Al

Chungliang Huang and Yen Lu Wong were born and raised in East Asia and studied in the United States, living examples of what the Taiwanese called “American dreams” at that time. Eventually, they each chose dance for their careers and developed their Chinese identity by practicing Chinese forms or exploring Chinese content matter. In 1967 and

1968, Taiwanese elites and dancers invited Huang and Wong to give workshops of

American modern dance in Taipei. Their workshops provided the Taiwanese dancers their first experience of American modern dance and further pushed some dancers to study modern dance in the United States. Nevertheless, with their transnational migrations, Huang and Wong also adopted different Asian traditional practices and cultural elements into their choreography and movement practices. The hybridity in their works not only shaped the formation of Asian Americans as a social group but also was a result from their immigration experiences in the 1960s and the Asian American movements in the 1970s. Their works further inspired Lin Hwai-min’s choreography in the 1970s to explore Taiwanese ethnic identity.

46

Ultimately, by telling these Asian American choreographers’ transnational stories,

I reinforce that the definition of American dance modernity is neither only about receptions in the United States nor about American choreographers. That is, global migrations facilitated the global transit of American modern dance and thus this work should be defined globally based on local receptions in different societies. American modern dance history, then, is not myopically American but transnational.

1 Danielle Fosler-Lussier, Music in America's Cold War Diplomacy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), 6. 2 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. (1983; repr., : Verso, 2006), 6–7. 3 Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York & London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998), 254. 4 Ibid. 5 See Chapter 4 for the Free China Journal event. 6 Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 3. 7 Hsiao-ting Lin, The Cold War Between Taiwan and China: The Declassified Documents [in Chinese] (Hong Kong: Joint Publishing, 2015), 8–9. 8 Kun-Hung Hou, “戰後臺灣白色恐怖論析” [White Terror in Postwar Taiwan], Bulletin of Academia Historica 12 (June 2007): 139–203. 9 Wu Guozhen, “＜何日君再來＞的禁唱與開放” [The censorship and the uncensorship of He Ri Jun Zai Lai], New Talk (Taiwan), July 3, 2018. https://newtalk.tw/news/view/2018-07-03/129693. 10 See Milo L. Thornberry, Fireproof Moth: A Missionary in Taiwan’s White Terror (Mechanicsburg, PA: Sunbury, 2010), 174 & 177. 11 Li Yuping, Unsung Heros of the Aviation Industry in Taiwan [in Chinese] (Taipei, Taiwan: Independent & Unique, 2011), 90 & 124–130. 12 Ibid., 164. 13 “美歌舞團訪華” [American dance company visiting Taiwan], Overseas Chinese Daily News (Hong Kong), April 15, 1962, 香港舊報紙, MMIS, Hong Kong Public Libraries. 14 Jichang Chao, «美援的運用» [The Use of American Aids] (Taipei, Taiwan: Linking Books, 1985), 1–2. 15 Ena Chao, “美國政府在台灣的教育與文化交流活動 (一九五一至一九七 ○)” [U.S. Educational and Cultural Exchange Program in Taiwan (1951–1970)]. EurAmerica 31, n. 1 (March 2004): 79–127. 47

16 A-Ching Hsiao, Return to Reality: Political and Cultural Change in 1970s Taiwan and the Postwar Generation [in Chinese] (Taipei, Taiwan: , 2008), 76–84. 17 Chien-Chung Chen, “美新處 (USIS)與臺灣文學史重寫:以美援文藝體制下 的台、港雜誌出版為考察中心” [USIS and the re-writing literature: A study on the publication of Taiwan and Hong Kong’s magazines on US aids under the literary and artistic institution], Bulletin of Chinese 52 (December 2012): 211–242. 18 For example, Robert Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2001); Robert Rydell, World of Fairs: The Century-of- Progress Expositions (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993); Donald Pease, “New Perspectives on U.S. Culture and Imperialism,” in Cultures of United States Imperialism, edited by Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, 22–40 (Durham and London: Press, 1993); David Lake, Entangling Relations: American Foreign Policy in Its Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); David Lake, “The New American Empire?” International Studies Perspectives 9 (2008): 281- 289, https://doi-org.proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/10.1111/j.1528-3585.2008.00334.x; Harry Magdoff, The Age of Imperialism: The Economics of U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Modern Reader, 1969). 19 Rob Kroes, “American Empire and : A View from the Receiving End,” Diplomatic History 23, no. 3 (Summer 1999), 464, https://doi- org.proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/10.1111/0145-2096.00177. 20 For San Francisco Ballet’s 1957 visit, see “舊金山芭蕾舞團 將來台公演三場 元月十二十三兩天舉行” [San Francisco Ballet is going to tour to Taiwan for three concerts on January 12 and 13], Central Daily (Taiwan), December 22, 1956; “關於即將 前來臺灣演出的舊金山芭蕾舞團” [About San Francisco Ballet, which is going to tour to Taiwan], Central Daily (Taiwan), January 1, 1957; “舊金山芭蕾舞團 十二起公演 明 天開始預售門票” [San Francisco Ballet is going to perform on the twelfth; Tickets will be on sale since tomorrow], Central Daily (Taiwan), January 4, 1957; For Dance Jubilee’s 1960 visit, see “茱碧麗歌舞團 三大台柱同來” [The featured stars of Dance Jubilee will come together.], United Daily (Taiwan), January 25, 1960; “茱碧麗歌舞團 一行昨抵台” [The troupe of Dance Jubilee arrived Taiwan yesterday], United Daily (Taiwan), February 7, 1960; “蔣夫人昨歡宴茱碧麗歌舞團” [Mrs. Chiang hosted a party to welcome the troupe of Dance Jubilee], United Daily (Taiwan), February 8, 1960. 21 “茱碧麗歌舞團 三大台柱同來”, United Daily (Taiwan), January 25, 1960. 22 “關於即將前來臺灣演出的舊金山芭蕾舞團”, January 1, 1957. 23 “蔣夫人昨歡宴茱碧麗歌舞團”, United Daily (Taiwan), February 8, 1960. 24 Ibid. 25 For example, United Daily introduced Rod Alexander, , and Carmen Gutierrez. It briefly mentioned Guierrez’s birthplace as Mexico and highlighted them three as American. “茱碧麗歌舞團 三大台柱同來” [Three main dancers of Dance Jubilee coming Taiwan.], United Daily (Taiwan), January 25, 1960. 48

26 Lin-chuan Kuo, “The Pioneer of Taiwan Modern Dance-A Dancer's Life of Tsai Jui-Yueh” [in Chinese] (master’s thesis, National University of , 2007), 63, NDLTD in Taiwan, https://hdl.handle.net/11296/5qmzsf; Ya-ping Chen, “身體的歷史: 表 演性舞蹈” [The history of body: performative dance], in «中華民國發展史:文學與藝術 » [The Republic of China’s development history: literature and arts], edited by Chen Fang-ming and Lin Hsin-yueh (Taipei, Taiwan: National Cheng Chi University & Linking, 2011), 314. The Dance Prohibition Order was first in effect in 1948 when of Hsupeng (1948-1949) started, due to the Western fever in Shanghai. After the Kuomintang government lost Mainland China and retreated to the Taiwan Island, the order remained effective, even when the Kuomintang’s nationalist policies were applied to encourage minzu wudao, or the Chinese ethnic dances. This order influenced the private dance studios’ business and turned social dance underground. 27 Chen, “身體的歷史,” 319. 28 Anna Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 3. 29 Ibid., 9. 30 Gay Morris, A Game for Dancers: Performing Modernism in the Postwar Years, 1945–1960 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2006), xviii. 31 The Dance Panel, as well other panels, were first established as a committee of experts under ANTA in 1954 for the Cultural Presentation Program. After the Fulbright- Hays Act of 1961 was passed, the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (CU), former the Bureau of Education and Cultural Relations, was reformed under the US State Department. Then, the advisory panels were moved to be administrated by CU. For detailed history of the forming of the panels, see Lisa Davenport, Jazz Diplomacy: Promoting America in the Cold War Era (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2009), 38–39. 32 For example, see Hannah Kosstrin, Honest Bodies: Revolutionary Modernism in the Dances of Anna Sokolow (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 162; Naima Prevots, Dance for Export: Cultural Diplomacy and the Cold War (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1998), 62. 33 Minutes of Dance Advisory Panel, September 21, 1965, page 9, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs Historical Collection, MC-468, Box 101, Folder 19, the David W. Mullins Library at University of Arkansas. 34 Minutes of Dance Advisory Panel, October 17, 1966, page 6, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs Historical Collection, MC-468, Box 101, Folder 19, the David W. Mullins Library at University of Arkansas. 35 Minutes of Dance Advisory Panel, December 6, 1966, page 3, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs Historical Collection, MC-468, Box 101, Folder 19, the David W. Mullins Library at University of Arkansas. 36 Meeting Minutes of Dance Panel, March 27, 1967, page 7, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs Historical Collection, MC-468, Box 101, Folder 19, the David W. Mullins Library at University of Arkansas. 37 Ibid. 49

38 Kosstrin, Honest Bodies, 4. 39 Croft, Dancers as Diplomats, 180–203. 40 See, for example, Kosstrin, Honest Bodies; Sabine Sörgel, Dancing Postcolonialism: The National Dance Theatre Company of Jamaica (Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript, 2007); Van Zile, Perspectives on (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001). 41 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 6–7. 42 John Kelly and Martha Kaplan, Represented Communities: Fiji and World Decolonization (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2001), 4–5. 43 Ibid., 22. 44 Ibid., 5. 45 Rachmi Diyah Larasati, The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), xvii. 46 Jens Richard Giersdorf, The Body of the People: East German Dance Since 1945 (Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2013), 5–6 & 9–11. 47 Raymond Breton, “From Ethnic to Civic Nationalism: English Canada and Quebec,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 11, no. 1 (1988): 87. 48 Emily Wilcox, Revolutionary Bodies: Chinese Dance and the Socialist Legacy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2018), 6. 49 Ibid., 5. 50 Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (East Sussex, England: Psychology Press1993), 13. 51 Susan Leigh Foster, “Choreographies of Gender,” Signs 24, no. 1 (Autumn 1998): 1–33, https://www-jstor-org.proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/stable/3175670. 52 Ibid., 30. 53 Rebekah Kowal, How to Do Things with Dance: Performing Change in Postwar America (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2010), 20–21, 32 & 83. 54 Ibid., 32. 55 Ibid., 83–84. 56 Clare Croft, Dancers as Diplomats: American Choreography in Cultural Exchange (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 119. 57 Jacqueline Shea Murphy, The People Have Never Stopped Dancing: Native American Modern Dance Histories (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 194. 58 Susan Manning, Modern Dance, Negro Dance: Race in Motion (Minneapolis, CT: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), xiv–xv. 59 Ibid., 193. 60 See, for example, Andrew Falk, Upstaging the Cold War: American Dissent and Cultural Diplomacy, 1940-1960, (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010); Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: , Freedom, and the Cold War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Michael Nelson, War of the Black Heavens: The 50

Battles of Western Broadcasting in the Cold War (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1997); Andrew Rubin, Archives of Authority: Empire, Culture, and the Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012); Reinhold Wagnleitner, Coca- Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in after the Second World War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). 61 Serge Guilbaut, “The New Adventures of the Avant-Garde in America: Greenberg, Pollock, or from Trotskyism to the New Liberalism of the ‘Vital Center,’” translated by Thomas Repensek, October 15 (Winter 1980): 61 & 62, https://www-jstor- org.proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/stable/778453. 62 John Martin, Introduction to the Dance, rev. ed. (1939; repr., Princeton, NJ: Dance Horizons, 1965), 89. 63 Penny Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up The World: Jazz Ambassadors Play The Cold War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 253. 64 Davenport, Jazz Diplomacy, 5. 65 Yuh-jen Lu, “Wrestling with the Angels: Choreographing Chinese Diaspora in the United States (1930s-1990s)” (PhD diss., New York University, 2002), 133. 66 Melinda Susan Copel, “The State Department Sponsored Tours of José Limón and His Modern Dance Company, 1954 and 1957: Modern Dance, Diplomacy, and the Cold War” (EdD diss., Temple University, 2000), 8. 67 Victoria Phillips Geduld, “Dancing Diplomacy: Martha Graham and The Strange Commodity of Cold-War Cultural Exchange in Asia, 1955 and 1974,” Dance Chronicle 33 (March 2010): 44–81, https://doi-org.proxy.lib.ohio- state.edu/10.1080/01472520903574758. 68 Croft, Dancers as Diplomats, 12–13. 69 Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 17. 70 Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism During the Vietnam Era (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), 4. 71 Fosler-Lussier, Music in America's Cold War Diplomacy, 6. 72 Ibid. 73 Evan N. Dawley, Becoming Taiwanese: Ethnogenesis in a Colonial City, 1880s–1950s (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 2019). 74 Manning, Modern Dance, Negro Dance, xv. 75 Croft, Dancers as Diplomats, 93.

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Chapter 2

Freedom Reflected in Taiwanese Eyes

In the early 1960s, the Carmen De Lavallade-Alvin Ailey American Dance

Company and the José Limón Dance Company flew more than halfway around the world to East Asia. This was their first trip to Taiwan. As officially-supported U.S. events, these tours signified an anticommunist alliance with the Chiang Kai-Shek military government, which was defeated by the and thus retreated to Taiwan in the late 1940s. The pro-Kuomintang newspaper of Hong Kong, Wah Kiu Yat Po (華僑日報), reported that De Lavallade-Ailey’s tour was “a visit of friendship.”1 In its report about De

Lavallade-Ailey’s performance in Hong Kong, this specific phrase promoted the message of a U.S.-Kuomintang alliance in Hong Kong to counter other pro-Communist Chinese media criticism about Kuomintang and its leader Chiang.2 Taiwan’s official newspaper

Central Daily also emphasized that De Lavallade-Ailey’s visit to “Free China” was

“arranged by the U.S. State Department” as “a part of Cultural Exchange programs of

3 U.S. President Special Funds.” Under these conditions, De Lavallade-Ailey’s and

Limón’s troupes brought Taiwanese audiences their first experience of American modern dance. This chapter illustrates how the local people interpreted the American modern dances in their own way to meet their concerns regarding artistic freedom. Local audiences channeled, selected, and utilized the American cultural exports toward local 52 political ends. Discussions in English scholarship about American imperialism as manifested through its postwar foreign policies suggest a kind of neocolonialism, as political scientist Martina Topić and art historian Cassandra Sciortino define imperialism as “a domination that is enforced to impose values, culture, and tradition of the dominator over the dominated.”4 As I will analyze below, the American companies supported by the

U.S. diplomatic policies displayed their modern artistic values in dance to the Taiwanese audience. At the same time, I argue, these companies also provided examples of artistic free speech during martial rule in Taiwan for Taiwanese audiences under that rule.

This chapter discusses the Taiwanese responses to the performances of De

Lavallade-Ailey’s and Limón’s Taiwan tours to show how American modern dance was framed with the rhetoric of “American” freedom and how local audiences perceived it through dancing bodies. While this dissertation examines the American modern dance state-sponsored tours and Chinese American choreographers’ visits from 1950 to 1980,

De Lavellade-Ailey’s and Limón’s tours opened a new window for the Taiwanese in the early 1960s. While the U.S. state sponsorship provided these dance companies with economic freedom, the Taiwanese audience, including intellectuals and artists, translated the overarching postwar rhetoric of freedom that the American diplomatic policies endorsed as an invitation to advocate for freedom of artistic speech under authoritarian rule. In this sense, the United States’ Cold War dominance facilitated American political and economic control over Taiwan, and at the same time, it backed up the Taiwanese resistance against Chiang Kai-Shek’s monarchy with the rhetoric of freedom that agencies and individuals interpreted into various meanings for their own ends.

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The international reception of American freedom through dancing is complicated.

American modern dance has been associated with the idea of freedom. However, the definition of American freedom has failed to stick to one solid meaning. It changes over time. As historian Eric Foner points out, the shifting meanings of American freedom are based on three dimensions: political rights, economic independence, and a tense trade-off between ethical standards and personal choices.5 These dimensions are also reflected in the development of American modern dance. Dance scholar Gay Morris indicates that

American modern choreographers and dancers sought political and economic freedom from the market and the state to fulfill the requirements of modernism, especially in respect to the end of New Deal politics during the Cold War era.6 Their struggle for political and economic freedom was especially problematic on state-sponsored tours of

American modern dance companies. As dance historian Naima Prevots argues, these companies benefited from state funds and also gained fame, while they had to be concerned about the pressure from the United States as cultural ambassadors.7

Through my analysis of the historical archives, including dance videos, photos, local news reports, dance reviews, and the minutes of the Dance Panel and reports of the

U.S. agencies in Taiwan, it becomes clear that De Lavallade-Ailey’s and Limón’s dances simultaneously promoted and challenged the ideas of freedom held by the U.S. State

Department, and the Chiang government. This was reflected in Taiwanese audiences’ responses, which expressed underlying dissatisfaction about monarchy and their desire for freedom of speech. Since the dancing body became the site of debate about freedom, as diplomacy played out on the concert stage, the embodied contradiction of American

54 modern dance in the name of freedom complicated dance modernism on international stages.

The Taiwanese audience localized perceptions concerning the various ideas of

American freedom that surrounded American modern dance. How the Taiwanese received the meaning of freedom was a complicated mixture of various ideas shaped by the historical development of American modern dance, the Cold War and local political contexts. In what anthropologist Anna Tsing terms as frictions, local audiences translated ideas of freedom through these dancing bodies to challenge the rhetoric of “Free China,” which legitimized Chiang’s anti-communist authoritarian control over Taiwan. This translation, however, was not simply a distortion. The racial justice movements in the

United States associated with the promoted Blackness of De Lavallade-Ailey Company and Limón’s dual representation of whiteness and people of color contributed to this translation regarding political freedom.

Besides, the individual expression central to American choreographers’ dances often contradicted American modern dance’s representative image of American freedom on international tours. The U.S. State Department’s support for exporting American dance companies abroad was initiated with President Dwight Eisenhower’s emphasis on

8 freedom as a primary U.S. value during the Cold War. Such a cultural export effort in the name of freedom within the context of the United States as a Cold War superpower ironically parallels to the idea of personal freedom, which Foner defines as “the ability to make crucial individual choices free from outside coercion.”9 Historian Penny Von

Eschen, in her monograph Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the

55

Cold War, criticized U.S. jazz diplomacy to Africa and Western Asia as reinforcing the country’s deep involvements “in the machinations and violence of global modernization.”10 However, the participations of multiple agencies made these cultural diplomatic events possible. As I discussed in Chapter 1, multiple agencies and individuals were involved in the diplomatic events. Their multiple agendas also shaped the outcomes of the events. In this sense, these agencies and individuals interpreted the initiated agendas of the U.S. Cultural Presentations program in various ways, particularly through the dancing bodies that Taiwanese audiences perceived as representing artistic freedom of speech.

American modern dance as an export simultaneously represented the freedom that the State Department established and challenged homogenization in the name of that freedom. This contradictory situation traveled with the dance practitioners. In the late

1940s, Mao Zedong defeated the Kuomintang government in the Chinese Civil War

(1945-1949) and the Kuomintang retreated to Taiwan. As a response to Mao’s success in communist cultural promotions through public song, visualized slogans, and stage performance, Chiang initiated his cultural construction of Chinese nationalism in the

1950s. Two performing arts terms related to dance—guoju (國劇, or the national opera) and minzu wudao (民族舞蹈, or ethnic dances)—were promoted to emphasize the authenticity and homogeneity of Chinese nationalism. Guoju, which used to be called pingju (平劇), is the theatrical practice that originated in the Beijing area (which used to called Be-Ping). Influenced by opera performer Mei Lan-Fang (梅蘭芳) and his

56 supporter Chi Ru-Shan’s (齊如山) innovation and international promotion, it was lifted to a national position in order to emphasize the roots of Chinese culture in Taiwan.11 The

Chinese nationalism of the Kuomintang government that sought roots in the authenticity of Chineseness also discouraged innovation that might challenge the official recognition of the national art forms.12 In this sense, guoju has since lost its public attraction and has become more of a museum piece.

In a similar development to guoju, minzu wudao was a tradition invented to create geographic nationalism and as a result was restricted by a limited, constructed idea of

Chineseness. Chen Ya-Ping’s essay “Dancing Chinese Nationalism and Anticommunism:

The Minzu Wudao Movement in 1950s Taiwan” illustrates the invention of tradition and limitation.13 By exemplifying bianjing wu (邊疆, or borderland dance), one category in minzu wudao, Chen argues that the bianjing wu drew a map of an imaginary united China where Chiang had claimed to govern the people.14 On the contrary, due to this construction, the people in Taiwan could not travel to those border areas. The resulting lack of choreographic input restricted the development of the minzu wudao movement so that it ultimately became uninteresting to audiences.

Although the De Lavallade-Ailey and Limón dance companies were supported by the U.S. State Department to disseminate American artistic achievements, they also presented their own ideologies in the same way that they shaped social ideologies of gender and race within the U.S. society.15 On the one hand, this artistic assertion can be viewed as freedom of individual speech. In such speech, freedom plays an important role in constructing a belief in democracy to fight against communist fascism during the Cold

57

War. On the other hand, the companies also distributed US transgressive ideologies on their international tours. These layered exportations from American modern dance, along with a general image of the United States, provided the international audience with multiple points of entry for interpretation.

This chapter also explores how American modern dance and Taiwanese choreographers reiterated their social ideologies within a national consciousness through their struggles toward political and artistic freedom. While these American choreographers and dancers effected change within the United States, their representative status in the United States on the international tours awakened and further merged their social ideologies into their national identity. Alvin Ailey’s soloist Judith Jamison told

Clare Croft in an interview, “it’s a terrible mistake when people don’t understand that as

African Americans our culture originated so many things that are considered to be from this country [the United States] and that when we go abroad we take what we have as black people.”16 Jamison expressed her awareness of their diplomatic representative position and “placed African American performers at the active center of American culture.”17 In this sense, Jamison’s national and racial identities layered to appeal for a nation of racial equality. In a similar vein, Taiwanese choreographer Liu Feng-Shueh (劉

鳳學; 1925-), educated in Japan-ruled Northeast China and having moved to Taiwan to serve as a dance professor in the Department of Physical Education at National Taiwan

Normal University, quit from the officially-initiated nationalist project and conducted a

10-year exploration into Chinese modern dance. In this way, she sought an alternative way to express her own thoughts about contemporary Taiwan through dancing bodies as

58 an artistic and expressive form. Both the American cultural ambassadors and Taiwanese dance artists expressed their desires about the imagined community—the nation— through their dancing bodies as a means of social intervention to bring social change through these diplomatic events.

In addition to the agencies and individuals who directly engaged in these dance diplomatic events, I extend my analysis to the broader historical context to provide a picture about what the idea of freedom meant in postwar Taiwan. Tsing’s research in The

Mushroom at the End of the World reveals how transnational and historical contexts seemingly irrelevant to each other may entangle to shape a specific phenomenon. The entangled contexts are “like the flushes of mushrooms that come up after a rain,” and

“build an open-ended assemblage, not a logical machine; they gesture to the so-much- more out there.”18 Standing with Tsing’s images of entanglements, I trace Taiwanese perceptions about African Americans and the citizens’ attitudes toward the United States, to discuss the Taiwanese’s postwar perception about the United States and its racial issues. These, which include Taiwanese anti-American riots, daily consumer productions, and the changes within Taiwan’s performing arts environment seemed to be unrelated, but in an unanticipated way, shaped the outcomes of the following diplomatic events through local notions about race and nation. In this way, I show how the historical context shaped the outcomes of De Lavallade-Ailey’s and Limón’s tours.

To focus on postwar Taiwan, I collected archival materials, including newspaper reports, magazine articles, criticism and reviews, interviewees’ comments and thoughts, video clips and several photos, to imagine what took place in front of Taiwanese

59 audiences and how they thought about these American modern dance events.

Furthermore, to showcase the transnational circulation of American modern dance through the State Department tours, based on newspaper reports and published interviews, I discuss similarities between American modern dance and Liu’s Chinese modern dance to unpack the over-simplified story of so-called American imperialism to showcase the global circulation of dance in the 1960s.

Entwined with Taiwanese audiences’ negotiations of freedom as they watched De

Lavallade-Ailey’s and Limón’s tours was their reading of freedom of expression with its associated subjectivity of women and racial minorities in American work. Dance historian Susan Manning proposes a binary idea of culturally unmarked and marked bodies: the former refers to the body of whiteness that could supposedly speak universally while the latter remains confined to its cultural region.19 Manning indicates that after 1940, American modern dances often staged universal subjects by representing mythic dramas and “dancers as inhabitants of abstract worlds.”20 As Manning illustrates,

Limón’s dual representation of himself as a Mexican-American and an “everyman” hero figure through his body that audiences alternatively received as racially marked and unmarked body enable him to present a mythic abstraction of American modern dance. In contrast, dance scholar Thomas DeFrantz argues that Ailey’s dances “encode aspects of

African American life” but not a universal whole so as to address the experiences and memories of a minority in the United States.21 Croft, in turn, asserts that Revelations

(1960) shows African American modernity with the transcendent value of American modern dance.22 These scholarly discussions on racial representations in American

60 modern dance reveal multiple interpretations. Ailey’s Revelations not only shows African

Americans’ experiences of oppression but also expresses a humanistic value that audiences of different cultural heritages were able to receive. While the existing critical dance scholarship focuses on racial and cultural markers, I argue that nationality also plays a significant role in the reading of universal and marked bodies. As I will show in this chapter, postwar Americanness casts Limón’s and Ailey’s dance as both racially marked and unmarked in the Taiwanese reception. The idea of the racially unmarked body relying on white privilege relates to race within the American context, as Manning proposes, but it can also relate to the power hierarchy of nationalities within the Cold

War context.

Gender ideologies also adhere to international perceptions of Americanness.

Gender representations within these choreographers’ works attracted the Taiwanese audience’s attention, challenging stereotypical connections between gender and dance.

Dance historian Rebekah Kowal indicates that Limón’s dance presents unconventional maleness within “the representation of exceptional men, heroes, who face extraordinary challenges or obstacles.”23 The representation of exceptional men in Limón’s dance shows a powerful image of masculinity. In contrast, dance scholar Ramsay Burt points out that Ailey’s dances present complicated ideas of masculinity through “rugged, hypermasculine roles” and, for some other roles such as Eleo Pomare’s Junkie, “a failure to live up to such masculine ‘ideals.’”24 In this sense, Limón’s and Ailey’s masculinity shown through their dancing bodies presents an American image of strength represented by ideal masculinity and contradictorily challenges the conventional idea of masculinity

61 with the unconventional maleness and its failures. Taiwanese audiences perceived these cultural markers of dancing and dancing bodies. De-Lavallade-Ailey’s athletic masculinity and Limón’s humanistic dance demonstrated American dance modernization and a rarely-seen masculinity within narrative dance to Taiwan’s audiences. In this sense,

De-Lavallade-Ailey’s and Limón’s Asian tours simultaneously served the U.S. State

Department’s diplomatic agendas for the promotion of American cultural achievements and international image while at the same time challenging the local gender ideologies in

Taiwan. The touring companies benefited from the outcomes of these diplomatic dance events, and at the same time the Taiwanese audiences interpreted the idea of freedom based on their own needs to challenge the strict control of speech in the postwar era.

Changes in the Artistic Environment: Far Eastern Management Company and

Zhongshan Hall

Changes in the artistic environment in terms of space and values represent different degrees of artistic freedom. These changes are often the outcomes of planned and unplanned shaping forces. These forces do not only come from governmental cultural policies but also from efforts of local amateurs, companies, and encounters with foreign artists in diplomatic events. I sketch the history of the Far Eastern Management Company

(遠東音樂社), the first artistic management agency that held all the U.S. 1950s-1960s diplomatic events in Taiwan, and the history of Zhongshan Hall, the major theatrical space for these events. In this way, I illustrate the entangled efforts of the United States and Taiwan government personnel, the local agencies, amateurs, and artists that facilitated the modernization of Taiwanese concert dance.

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In the case of postwar Taiwan, the diplomatic events initiated by the United States facilitated the development of performing arts in terms of management and space. After its retreat to Taiwan, the Kuomintang government treated arts as political means to contribute to Chinese nationalism. The development of performing arts in Taiwan was restricted in many ways. On June 1, 1955, Symphony of the Air led by Director Thor

Johnson toured to Taiwan under the U.S. State Department Cultural Presentation

Program. This visit facilitated the founding of the first Taiwanese art management company.25 This first American National Theater and Academy (ANTA) event in Taiwan was hosted by the National Women's Anti-Communist and Anti-Russia League of the

Republic of China, a semi-formal organization founded and led by First Lady Soong Mei-

Ling (宋美齡), known as Madame Chiang. Although the multi-functional Zhongshan

Hall was the first option, Taiwan’s first foreign symphony was held at the Tri-Service

Basketball Courts due to capacity considerations. This concert event impressed Taiwan’s music amateurs, including Chiang Liang-gui and Chang Ji-gao (張繼高), but nevertheless embarrassed them due to the lack of professional space and hosting organization.26 As a result, Chiang chose to found the first art management company that could host these art events. This official-private social network facilitated the history of dance diplomacy between the United States and Taiwan.

The U.S. State Department Cultural Presentation program created the need for an art management company to support international events, which led to the first

Taiwanese arts management company. Chiang Liang-gui (江良規), the first Chinese person to earn a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Physical Education at Leipzig University 63 and also a basketball coach and professor at National Taiwan Normal University, invited the Harlem Globetrotters to Taiwan in 1952. In 1956 the United States Information

Service (USIS) asked Chiang’s Far Eastern Travel Service (遠東旅行社) to host the

Holiday On Ice International Ltd. touring event. Because of Chiang’s successful business, his friend, Professor Dai Zui-lun (戴粹倫), the chair of the Music Department at National

Taiwan Normal University, suggested Chiang to expand the travel business to hosting international art events. Chiang himself had little knowledge about music.27 Thus, Chiang invited Chang Ji-gao to assist with this new business to establish the Far Eastern Art

Management Company.

American cultural presentation events also benefited the development of theatrical space in Taiwan, and vice versa. The first concert of the U.S. Cultural

Presentations Program in Taiwan was held in a temporary space. Therefore, the Far

Eastern Art Management Company persuaded the Ministry of National Defense to open

Zhongshang Hall for profitable performing arts events.28 The Japanese colonial government built Zhongshang Hall in 1936, which used to be named Taihoku Kōkaidō

(台北公会堂, meaning Taipei Public Auditorium), for public events, such as exhibitions.29 In 1945, the Republic of China took control of Taiwan from the Japanese and changed name of the venue to Zhongshang Hall in honor of Sun Yan San (孫中山, pronounced as Sun Zhongshang in Mandarin Chinese). During this period, Zhongshang

Hall was the space for art exhibitions and music and dance concerts.30 After the

Republican government’s retreat, Zhongshang Hall became a space for governmental

64 assemblies and official events, including presidential inaugurations and meetings of the

National Assembly (the national convention of Republic of China). Because of

Zhongshang’s public image, ticketed shows were not allowed to be presented in the hall to avoid any connection to consumer business. Because U.S. diplomatic events were hosted by his company for profit, Chang negotiated with the officials by emphasizing the artistic values of these diplomatic events, especially those sponsored by the U.S. State

Department.31 Due to its diplomatic purpose, Zhongshang Hall opened for profit-making artistic events and changed from a center of public meetings and events to a center for performing arts.

Besides concert space, capitalism was another aspect of the changes that the U.S.

Cultural Presentation program brought to Taiwan. Because of Chiang’s experience inviting the Harlem Globetrotters to perform in Taipei, the USIS in Taipei requested

Chiang’s Far Eastern Travel Service to host Holiday On Ice, an American performing group of ice skaters. This not only facilitated the founding of the first artistic management company in Taiwan but also set up state-private collaborations for the U.S.

Cultural Presentation tours in Taiwan. This state-private collaboration thus changed the assumed Taiwanese view on arts as non-profit entities to be somewhat associated with commercial profit. During the era of martial rule, ticket prices for entertainments and arts was fixed by the government. Thus, in order to host the Ailey company’s 1976 tour,

Chang persuaded the government to triple the ticket price to NTD 300 (USD 7.89) by emphasizing the artistic value and the unusually large size of Ailey’s troupe (ticket price was fixed to NTD 100 (USD 2.63) for years).32 To promote Ailey’s 1976 concerts with

65 this new price structure, Music & Audiophile, a magazine Chang edited, published an article introducing Ailey as the “‘real’ representative, internationally recognized modern dance company in the United States.”33 In this article titled “Why the Far Eastern Artistic

Management Introduces Alvin Ailey and his Company,” the author, listed as the magazine journalist, emphasized Ailey’s international reputation as an American choreographer. Furthermore, the author convinced readers that the inflation of the ticket price matched the Ailey company’s international recognition and high standards. This linkage between the inflated ticket price with Ailey’s international reputation, in this sense, also promoted Ailey’s recognized representation of African Americanness. Also, its emphasis on the Ailey troupe’s large scale and professionalism provided Taiwanese artists an example of a professional dance company. These associated aspects facilitated by the U.S. Cultural Presentations program further shaped multiple outcomes of these diplomatic events.

The transnational official-private network among U.S. personnel abroad and

Taiwanese arts amateurs thus made possible the cultural diplomatic events in Taiwan.

The Far Eastern Artistic Management’s efforts in the 1950s facilitated the development of Taiwan’s artistic environment, in which the De Lavallade-Ailey American Dance

Theater’s visit arrived. However, as I show above, the promotional rhetoric of the first

American modern dance diplomatic event in Taiwan not only addressed the artistic value of American modern dance but also highlighted De Lavallade and Ailey’s African heritage as a part of their Americanness. To further understand the Taiwanese reception

66 of these artistic events, it is necessary to discuss the racialization of African Americans in postwar Taiwan.

Mei(guo) Heiren: Racializing African Americanness

The idea of black people, or Heiren (黑人) in Chinese, is imperative to discuss here to further examine the perception of African Americans, and specifically De

Lavallade-Ailey’s tour, in Taiwan. The United States’ Cold War foreign policies aimed to promote American democracy against the expansion of communism. The United States also wanted to project an image of strength despite the racial inequalities that defined

American culture at the time. The U.S. government, under pressure from Civil Rights groups and international criticism, felt prompted to show social change related to African

Americans’ social status, to counter the Soviet bloc’s attack on the U.S. history of slavery and segregation, and to show international society a morally legible position as the international leader.34 Croft points out that the State Department aimed to twist the international perception of American racial inequality by sending Ailey’s company with a sense of self-determination.35 However, by further examining Ailey’s and the company’s dancers’ own conception of the situation, Croft found that they expected to represent their

African Americanness more than their blackness.36 In Taiwan, conversely, the Ailey company’s African Americanness was taken up in the local racial discourses of Heiren, which translates loosely to blackness. This translation creates frictions, in Tsing’s term, in the perception of African Americanness in Taiwan.37 This perception had local implications for Taiwanese spectatorship as it translated the identities of the Ailey performers differently than in other international contexts where they toured.

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The term for black people translates imperfectly into Chinese, but representations of people of African origin circulated in Chinese cultural spaces since at least the early twentieth century. A product introduced in 1933 called “Darkie Toothpaste” (黑人牙膏, heiren yagao) and since 1989 called Darlie Toothpaste provided the most frequent appearance of the term Heiren in Taiwanese daily life at that time, and it exemplified this local perception regarding race. I searched Heiren in the Taiwan News Smart Web, a database collecting the major domestic and regional Taiwanese newspapers, for news reports in the 1950s. The result showed that this term Heiren mostly appears in international news items about African and American black people, including American touring artists sponsored by the U.S. State Department. The toothpaste and the other products named after it were the most frequent source of the term Heiren that the

Taiwanese encountered at that time.

Darlie Toothpaste went to the market shelves in Shanghai in 1933 and later the company moved to Taiwan and Hong Kong after the Chinese Civil War (1945-1949). It was produced by Hawley & Hazel Chemical Company. Historian Li Zhufan (李祖范) indicated that the founders named their toothpaste with Heiren to refer to “African people’s white teeth in contrast to their dark skin.”38 The logo showed a smiling man’s face painted in blackface with his teeth bright against the makeup. This imagery aligned with many early-twentieth century American films featuring “dandy” characters in blackface dressed in tuxedoes and top hats, as outgrowths of minstrelsy. Many newspaper reporters referenced a saying about the icon, stating that white American comedian Al

Jolson, who performed blackface in his minstrel show on film, inspired the company

68 executive, who visited the United States in the late 1920s to use the imagery.39 This icon created an ambiguous reference to both an African person and a white American blackface performer, and perpetuated the racism associated with this imagery.

The brand name of Darkie Toothpaste in Chinese, Heiren, literally translates as a black person/people. The character Hei means “black” or “dark.” Thus, Heiren may refer to all people with dark skin or specifically to people of African origin. In an advertising story in China Times in 1953, a female typist, Ms. Hung, was nicknamed Darkie

Toothpaste because her skin tone and smile aligned with the stereotype.40 In this advertisement, the author stated that Ms. Hung showed her appreciation to be nicknamed

Heiren and had no problem being associated with Hei.41 This advertisement reinforced certain desires for health by defining them in terms of skin tone, through a racist stereotyped image of black people, however. Yet the Taiwanese, especially peasants, lacked knowledge about the American slave history and blackface. So, Heiren was racialized in a way that most of the Taiwanese did not recognize because they lacked personal experiences interacting with black people and they lacked sufficient knowledge about the history of oppression of African Americans in the United States (e.g. the

Taiwanese did not discuss about blackface minstrelsy as and racist). Following the success of Darlie Toothpaste, other cleansing products named after Heiren, such as facial soaps, shoe polish, and floor wax, flooded the markets. Since then, Heiren has become ubiquitous in Taiwanese daily life, yet, since 1989 the product has been renamed

Darlie Toothpaste, with a slightly toned-down logo.42 In this sense, while the racialization of and violence against black people in the United States has been intimately linked to

69 blackface performance, the brand Heiren and the icon inspired by blackface reflected the localized racializing process of people of African origin outside of the United States.

The Taiwanese terminological perception of Heiren was further associated with artistic talents through the U.S. diplomatic events. For the Taiwanese, this racialization process distinguished American blackness from African blackness. Since the late 1950s,

Chiang Liang-gui and his company hosted several African American musicians and athletes in Taiwan. These included , William Warfield, Bill Haley &

The Comets, and the Harlem Globetrotters. They were all introduced as Mei(guo) Heiren

(美國黑人 or 美黑人), meaning American black people. For example, Central Daily, the

Kuomintang government’s official newspaper, highlighted the incredible winning record of the Harlem Globetrotters composed of Meiguo Heiren.43 China Times introduced

Anderson as the “worldwide well-known Heiren female ,” and “named as one of the top ten women globally.”44 China Times described Warfield as the most well-known black male singer in the United States and “his reputation is even better than Anderson, who had visited Taiwan.”45 Consequently, Taiwanese were familiar with African

Americans’ talents and efforts in performing arts and athletics. These descriptive reports of African American touring groups connected American blackness to a kind of innate talent on artistic and physical levels that fueled Taiwanese fascination.

Alongside these tours, the news about the activities and conflicts within the U.S.

Civil Rights Movement appeared concurrently in Taiwanese public media. The reports highlighted African American activism and linked it with Heiren. The school desegregation event with the children known as The Little Rock Nine is an example. On

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September 6, 1957, Central Daily reported that Orval Faubus, Governor of Arkansas, telephoned U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower to stop the Federal government’s

“inappropriate intervention” regarding school desegregation, which is directly translated as Hei Bai Hexiao (黑白合校), meaning black and white students studying in the same school.46 From September 24, when the conflict happened, Central Daily, a newspaper under the Kuomintang’s control, followed the details of the conflicts from how the nine

African American students entered the school through the side door, to how they were forced to leave the school, and to how the federal army guarded them as they entered the school the next day. It is important to notice that the U.S. federal policy of school desegregation in these reports was described as the law that one must obey, in contrast to the Arkansas white protesters’ resistance as behavior that is against the law. For example,

Eisenhower’s sending the army was reported as the way “to uphold the law.”47 In regard to the brawls between the supporters and the protestors, the report indicated that the black supporters guarded the students against angry white protesters.48 Such a contrast between the protective behavior of the black supporters and emotional reactions of the white protesters gave an impression to Taiwanese audiences that the resistance counter to the

American Civil Rights Movement was irrational and illegal. In addition, a feature article titled “The U.S. President and The Current Congress” in the Central Daily on September

26, 1957 introduced Eisenhower’s Civil Rights Bill and racial equality to the

Taiwanese.49 This article was written by Chen Yu-ching (陳裕清), and was titled

“Commissioner in the United States” Chen listed Eisenhower’s significant policies and contributions, with the Civil Rights Act of 1957 listed as the first. Chen concluded that

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Eisenhower’s Civil Rights Act “contributes to the racial equality in the United States and advancement of black people in politics.”50 Therefore, the Eisenhower government’s desegregation created an impression through these reports of racial equality. All these

Taiwanese reports supported by US press releases made Taiwanese readers think that the racial injustice was a thing of the past. These reports contributed to a positive image of

America where no resistance to the government’s effort of desegregation was needed.

It is worth highlighting that postwar Taiwan was in a strictly anti-Soviet and anti-

Communism era. Unlike Hong Kong or Japan, where Soviet propaganda circulated,

Soviet attacks on U.S. racism could hardly reach Taiwanese readers, at least not publicly.51 This strict policy thus led to many imprisonments and death penalty cases for the students who read Marxist books.52 The Taiwanese police imprisoned Taiwanese choreographer T’sai Jui-yueh because her husband communicated with a Hong Kong friend, who encouraged him to leave Taiwan (I discuss this case in Chapter 3). Overall, the Soviet Union’s counter information about U.S. racial segregation and discrimination did not affect Taiwanese readers’ perceptions about the Eisenhower government’s efforts to secure justice and equality as it had in other parts of Southeast Asia.

Postwar Taiwanese perceptions of the United States were more positive than negative. The Taiwanese understanding of racial conflicts in the United States and the

U.S.-Taiwan international relationship still play roles in perceptions of U.S. cultural presentations. The Civil Rights Movement events appeared repeatedly in the Taiwanese newspapers, the key public media in Taiwan of the 1950s. However, knowing about the racial conflicts did not mean the readers understood them. The Taiwanese’s perception of

72 blackness was quite different from the United States. Since for the Taiwanese, being black is not necessarily pejoratively connected to occupying a lower social position, the

Taiwanese reception of blackness set the Taiwanese audience’s interpretation of

American modern dance in a different light from the reception of other countries participating in the Bandung Afro-Asian conference (1955). At the conference, as historian Emily Wilcox argues, the P.R.C. developed a specific approach to dance as a diplomatic means to learn from, rather than export to, the neighboring countries.53 The

Kuomintang government did not attend the conference because of its pro-American stance that opposed the P.R.C. that did attend as representative of China in the conference. The Kuomintang government undisguisedly showed its opposition to the

Bandung conference, even after ten years. An editorial of the Kuomintang-owned Central

Daily described the 1955 Bandung Conference as a shame and considered it as part of communist conspiracy.54 This editorial exemplified the Kuomintang’s opposition to the alliance of anti-Western imperialism and attempts to connect it to communism. The international anti-Western imperialism movement did not influence postwar Taiwan, and the Taiwanese’s pro-U.S. position with the United States representing the Free World shaped how Taiwanese audiences received American modern dance and issues around blackness.

Local social movements provided evidence for the peasants’ pro-American stance in the general Taiwanese climate. In 1957, two anti-American riots happened in both

Japan and Taiwan. However, the different framings and outcomes of the 1957 anti-U.S. riots, as I show in the next section, showed the distinct attitudes of local peoples toward

73 the United States’ Cold War dominance. These riots relate to the extraterritoriality of the

U.S. diplomatic and abroad and thus provide a better understanding for how the people of Japan and Taiwan viewed the United States differently during the postwar era. The Taiwanese’s overall pro-U.S. attitudes thus contributed to their positive reception regarding the American dance tours.

The Anti-U.S. Riots of 1957 in Asia

The locals’ attitude toward the United States indeed shaped the outcomes of diplomatic dance efforts. However, interactions between the local people and U.S. personnel in the host country also shaped this attitude. Two significant historical events that reflected the U.S. international image and U.S. relations give clues to further think about receptions and the relationship between bodies and nationalism in Asia. In 1957, two shooting incidents by American soldier William S. Girard, a U.S. Army specialist, and Robert G. Reynolds, an American member of the Military Advisory and Assistance

Group-Taiwan, triggered two anti-U.S. riots in Japan and Taiwan. These incidents caused serious damage to the U.S. embassies in Japan and in Taiwan, as well as to the U.S. international image. On January 30, Girard killed a woman who was collecting scrap metal on a U.S. Army shooting range in Gunma Prefecture. Coincidentally, two months after the Girard incident in Japan, Reynoldskilled Liu Ziran (劉自然), a Republic of

China Army Major, outside Reynolds’s house in Yangminshan (陽明山), or Grass

Mountain.55 Both the cases aroused anti-American protests against the extraterritorial immunity of U.S. officials in East Asia. However, the 1957 riot in Taiwan, which destroyed the U.S. Embassy, resulted in less harm on U.S.-Taiwan relations compared to

74 the strong Japanese anti-American atmosphere due to WWII and U.S. postwar occupation. Through his detailed research on the Reynolds riot and the following political and public reactions, historian Stephan Craft points out that the authoritarianist ruling of

Chiang Kai-Shek and his son Chiang Chin-kuo turned the anti-American riot into a negotiating tactic to strengthen the U.S. State Department’s alliance with the Kuomintang and to suppress other rising political powers in Taiwan.56 In contrast, the Japanese newspaper Hokkaido Shimbun attacked the United States by indicating that the cases were due to “American racial prejudice and superiority complex.”57 Although the cases changed U.S. postwar foreign policy, as Craft argues, reactions to the Japanese and

Taiwanese riots show different interpretations regarding U.S.-local relationships.

In addition to the local governments’ different interventions, intertwined local contributed to the diverse public attitudes that, in turn, affected dance spectatorship. A 1957 photo of Liu Ziran’s widow standing at the gate of the U.S.

Embassy when the rioters broke into the U.S. Embassy delivers a distinct image.58 In this photo, Mrs. Liu holds her arms in front of her chest. A protesting sign above her head shows her accusation in both English and Chinese: “The killer—Reynolds—is innocent?

Protest Against U.S. court martial’s unfair unjust decision!”59 She stands by the gate of the U.S. Embassy and stares toward the left, leaving some space between herself and the crowd. From that position, Mrs. Liu could not see what was happening in the Embassy area and her face in the photo shows that she is not eager to know. Although the wording

“unfair” on the sign may be interpreted as a racial discrimination, it is clear that Mrs.

Liu’s accusation is directed at the legal decision instead of raising the conflict to the

75 international level. It was about justice for her husband, not for the U.S.-Taiwan relationship. Her distance from the crowd also reflects her apparent disinterest in the rioting. Although the rioting crowd broke into the building of the U.S. Embassy, tossed chairs out the second floor windows and climbed up the flagpole to replace the U.S. flag with R.O.C.’s, the whole event calmed down in a few days after Chiang Ching-kuo started controlling the crowd and the public media. Several rioters were arrested and the commander of the defunct Taipei Garrison Command Huang Jen-wu (黃珍吾, Al

Chungliang Huang’s father) was dismissed. The 1957 incident did not become an international conflict between the United States and Taiwan.

Considering the different results of the 1957 riots in Japan and Taiwan reveals divergent public attitudes toward the United States that shaped the audience receptions to

American dance companies’ touring concerts. The Japanese anti-Americanism was embedded within Japanese nationalist discourses against American white supremacy over other races, including African Americans and the Japanese. Thus, for the Japanese audiences, De Lavallade and Ailey’s embodiment of African American elements challenged U.S. white supremacy. Titled “Fine Dance Company From U.S.,” the review in The Japan Times stated that “[within] five minutes the De Lavallade-Ailey American

Dance Company won over an audience…[a]t the end, [my Japanese friends] were too busy applauding to continue their intellectual cogitations.”60 This review shows admiration for the movement vocabulary from these modern dance pioneers and of the props and songs “in the form of Negro spirituals.”61 In contrast, the Taiwanese audiences’ reading of the dances of De-Lavallade-Ailey did not address the racial aspects as much as

76 the expressivity of the form. The Taiwanese reading of artistic free speech aligned with their understanding of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement and with the outcomes of the

1957 riots. In this sense, the Taiwanese reading of Ailey’s dance was shaped by their own situation regarding freedom of expression and how they engaged it through American dance, while the Japanese had suffered more from the United States’ postwar social and political intervention.

Between the 1957 riots in Japan and Taiwan, local nationalisms were engaged in different degrees. In Japan, the incident accelerated anti-Americanism as part of the

Japanese nationalist aim to criticize the United States for racial discrimination. In

Taiwan, the protest did not lift anti-Americanism to the nationalist level. The Taiwanese did not connect the 1957 accidental shooting to the racial issues within the United States and internationally. Although the 1957 riot forced Far Eastern Artistic Management to cancel Richard Tucker’s state-sponsored concerts on May 27 and 28, other U.S. musicians’ visits and concerts in the following months remained scheduled and were widely attended. In this regard, the Kuomintang’s ruling in Taiwan played an important role, influencing how the local people perceived U.S. images and cultural presentations.

In the next section, I will further discuss how the different reactions to the 1957 anti-

American riots relate to local perceptions of De Lavallade-Ailey’s 1962 Asian tour.

De Lavallade-Ailey American Dance Company

De Lavallade and Ailey’s visits to Taiwan, on the one hand, reiterate internationally a positive image of the United States with racial equality, and on the other, brought the Taiwanese audiences racialized American blackness within political and

77 artistic freedom. As I will show, the Taiwanese audiences viewed Ailey and De

Lavallade’s dance as representations of racialized American blackness to be associated with artistic talents and artistic free speech. Also, the unconventional gender roles that

Ailey presented as a male choreographer-dancer and the athletic masculinity that De

Lavallade-Ailey’s dancers performed challenged the Taiwanese audiences’ gender stereotypes of dance. In this sense, De Lavallade-Ailey’s 1962 tour to Taiwan provided a progressivist American image that challenged Taiwanese conventional gender and racial ideologies in dance. Taiwanese elites and artists translated these challenges related to social equalities to advocate for their own political and artistic freedom.

In 1962, Ailey and De Lavallade started their first U.S. State Department- sponsored tour to East and Southeast Asia. This was a small-sized tour, in which Ailey and De Lavallade shared top billing as the De Lavallade-Ailey American Dance

Company. They traveled with the African American gospel musician Brother John

Sellers, and dancers in a mixed-race cast which included James Truitte, Minnie Marshall,

Ella Thompson Moore, Charles Moore, Thelma Hill, Connie Greco, Dam Martin, and

Georgia Collins. After their concerts in Hong Kong City Hall from April 9-10, 1962, they arrived at Taipei Songshan Airport. Ailey, De Lavallade, the dancers and musicians, and crew members attended a reception held by the USIS. At the reception, Taiwanese choreographer T’sai Jui-yueh performed several ethnic dances in a cultural exchange gesture between people of different nationalities to welcome the American troupe. Then, this American troupe presented four of their own concerts from April 12 to 14 in Taipei

City Hall.

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De Lavallade-Ailey’s tours displayed the United States’ oppressed history of

African Americans but also a progressivist image of the United States in terms of racial equality. Racial inequality had been a dominant factor shaping domestic politics as well as the international perception of the United States since the wartime.62 During the 1950s and 1960s, as Dudziak argues, Civil Rights activists used the international perception of equality in the United States to push for U.S. social reforms.63 In this sense, the De

Lavallade-Ailey troupe as the first state sponsored African American dance company seemed to fulfill the U.S. State Department’s propaganda goal to counter international critiques about the U.S. racial issues. However, Prevots indicates that there is no evidence, according to meeting minutes, showing that the U.S. State Department urged the Dance Panel to suggest African American choreographers in the late 1950s.64 On the contrary, the Dance Panel had discussions about Ailey since 1958 but decided not to recommend Ailey until 1961 citing Ailey’s limited number of pieces in his repertoire that the Panel considered strong enough. Revelations was one of the four pieces, along with

The Roots of Blues, Portrait of Billie, and The Beloved that changed the Dance Panel’s decision from turning Ailey’s company down to suggesting it to be sent abroad.65 In this sense, De Lavallade-Ailey’s 1962 tour met the U.S. State Department’s need to promote

U.S. progress regarding African American racial equality but the international reception of their diplomatic tours interpreted their dance in this way.

Revelations represented the clearest connections to African American history and music, through the spirituals, compared to the other pieces on tour. In an interview, Ailey stated that Revelations tells of his childhood experience in Texas: “There are dances and

79 songs I feel very personally about—they are intimately connected with my memories of the Baptist Church when I was a child in Texas—baptismals by tree-shrouded lakes, in a lake where an ancient alligator was supposed to have lived—the holy-rollers’ tambourious shrieking in the Texas night.”66 This dance is composed of three sections accompanied by African American spirituals. The first section “Pilgrim of Sorrow” represents sufferings and sorrow through the dancers’ articulate extensions and torso isolations in the solos, the duet, and the ensemble of dancers. The second section, “Take

Me to the Water,” stages a baptismal ceremony in the South through the dancers’ semi- mimetic gestures of praying with upbeat rhythms. The last section “Move, Members,

Move” presents a celebratory church service in which the dancers present both pantomimed everyday gestures, such as fan-flapping and chatting, and flowing, rhythmic jazz dance-influenced phrases, showing isolations of body parts and poly-centric movement. Revelations stages African American spiritual life on the concert dance stage.

However, even with these culturally recognizable movements and narratives the dance can also be perceived as racially marked and unmarked. Dance scholarship has shown how U.S. white audiences and foreign audiences perceive Revelations as modern.

DeFrantz argues that Ailey’s dancers’ “mastery of form,” referring to their ability to

“perform movements culled from Martha Graham, , and Doris Humphrey techniques,” effectively present “the modernist gestures of the spirituals section, the ecstatic improvisations of the baptismal scene, and the rhythmic precision amid character-based dramatic overlay of the sanctuary sequence” to concert dance audiences in the United States.67 Moreover, Croft argues that Ailey’s Revelations served the U.S.

80 diplomatic purpose to differentiate modern U.S. society from its history of slavery.

However, at the same time, the violent and suffering images “undermined the U.S. State

Department’s progress narratives of African American history” by their (the images) presence on the foreign stages.68 On the one hand, the Ailey company’s racialized image and its representation of the United States in these diplomatic tours showed the foreign audience the country’s successful racial integration through democracy as the State

Department intended. On the other hand, Revelations staged African American wounds and trauma as a result of American slavery and showed foreign audiences the ongoing effects of racial inequality. But, because of the place of black representation in Taiwanese culture, the audiences read Ailey’s performance in terms of its ties to the United States’ postwar dominance.

The promotional material from De Lavallade-Ailey’s 1962 visit also provided racialized messages to the Taiwanese before their arrival. On March 23, 1962, Central

Daily announced Ailey’s touring plan.69 This report aligned De Lavallade-Ailey

American Dance Company with the other two African American icons touring around the same time—Harlem Globetrotters and Marian Anderson—and explained that De

Lavallade-Ailey’s visit “is to introduce Heiren’s dance and music.”70 As I discussed earlier in this chapter, the American athletic and artistic performing events in Taiwan connected American blackness with artistic and athletic talents. This alignment of De

Lavallade-Ailey’s artistic achievement with the Harlem Globetrotters and Marian

Anderson echoed the racialization of American blackness to boost the value of De

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Lavallade-Ailey’s visit, but more importantly, used the company’s blackness to celebrate them.

The translation of the De Lavallade-Ailey American Dance Company concerts into Chinese reveals Taiwanese gendered attitudes regarding dance. Taiwan’s artistic management company transliterated and translated the company’s name as Ailin Gewu

Tuan (愛琳歌舞團). Gewu means music and dance, and Tuan, groups. However, the combination of the two Chinese characters Ai and Lin are more often used as a female name. Furthermore, all reports highlighted De Lavallade as the star of this group for her femininity and her presence in Broadway shows and Hollywood films. De Lavallade’s significant achievements in dance were probably featured with the promotional information released by USIS. After the troupe’s arrival, Central Daily changed their promotion focus from De Lavallade and finally introduced Ailey as the leader of the group. In this report, Ailey’s name was transliterated as Ya Lai (亞萊), and the name of the company remained.71 This shows that Taiwan’s artistic management company assumed a female dancer as the star of a performing group due to the feminine stereotype of dance and the gendered assumption of the manager-dancer relationship. Such gendered and racializing newspaper reports and promotions remained until the performance.

Another little-known aspect that shaped the Taiwanese audience’s reception of these American modern dances was the Dance Panel’s influence within the touring program. The program was a result of the negotiation between the Dance Panel and

Ailey. Ailey proposed two programs at first. The first one included Modern Jazz Suite,

Roots of the Blues, Creation of the World, The Beloved, and Revelations, and the other

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Cinco Latinos, Creation of a World, Come Sunday, To José Clemente Orozco, Portrait of

Billie, and Blues Suite. During the meeting on October 17, 1961, the Dance Panel chose to adjust the title Creation of the World to Letter to a Lady because they thought the original was a “pretentious and misleading title.”72 They also suggested adjusting the length. However, Ailey requested in the next meeting a chance to explain his plan for the touring program. On December 19, Ailey gave two new program proposals to the Dance

Panel. Gillespiana and a new piece Been Here and Gone were added to the first proposal.

Creation of World was retitled and re-choreographed into a company piece Adam in the

Garden. Besides, Ailey proposed a new piece based on Pocahontas, “starting off as an

Indian princess and ending as a titled European lady,” for de Lavallade.73 After some questioning from the panel members, the program was set. However, the negotiation made the panel less confident about Ailey’s programming. In a later meeting, the Dance

Panel’s discussion mentioning Ailey indicated that “very strict artistic control” was needed.74 This case shows that the touring program was controlled neither solely by Ailey nor by the Dance Panel, but was rather a product of negotiation.

Although De Lavallade-Ailey Dance Company was promoted as an African

American dance diplomatic troupe, Ailey chose instead to present the multicultural ethnic makeup of his company. Ailey’s proposal regarding the Native American story did not take place and was replaced by ’s Mountainway Chant (1962).75 The actual program De Lavallade-Ailey company presented in Taipei included Been Here and Gone,

The Beloved, Two For Now: Modern Jazz Suite, Roots of The Blues, Revelations, and

Mountainway Chant. The last piece was not listed in the program brochure of Taipei

83 concerts but Taiwan Television Enterprise recorded it.76 The program pamphlet of the

Burma concert noted that this piece was about “a legend of the Southwest American

Indians, of the mythical hero or heroine who experiences death and then returns with a gift for his people.”77 Mountainway Chant was a new piece which premiered in Sydney,

Australia, the first stop on the 1962 tour.78 It is not clear for exactly what reason Ailey substituted his proposal with Tetley’s work but it is clear that Ailey intended to include a dance work related to Native Americans.

Through Lester Horton, the common teacher of Ailey, De Lavallade and Truitte,

Native American dance influenced Ailey and the members of the troupe. Horton was attracted to Native American dance practice and collected many related materials. He featured Native Americans in his dance company and staged several dances based on

Native traditions. Although Indianism, an artistic trend since the late 18th century adopting Native American elements, was not a new thing in the development of early

American modern dance, dance historian Jacqueline Shea Murphy argues that Horton’s interactions with and inclusion of Native American dancers distinguishes his dance from other choreographers who referenced Native American dances because he showed respect for these people and their cultural practices.79 Horton’s inclusion of Native American dances and dancers demonstrated his respectful attitude toward Native Americans to

Ailey, De Lavallade, and Truitte.

Besides his off-stage engagements with Native American dancers, Horton also influenced his mentees through his choreography. As Shea Murphy further argues,

Horton adopted the outstretched, angled arms from his early experience of the American

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Figure 2.1 (Left) A Scene of Mountainway Chant—Eagle Dance. Figure 2.2 (Right) A Scene of Mountainway Chant—Fight scene. Screenshots from “美國愛琳歌舞團表演” [De Lavallade-Ailey Dance Company Performing], Taiwan Television Enterprise, April 12, 1962, Digital Taiwan: Culture & Nature, accessed on January 6, 2017, https://catalog.digitalarchives.tw/item/00/31/9c/3c.html.

Indian Eagle Dance in his Liberian Suite, a piece inspired by ’s jazz music. The usage of outstretched arm gestures inspired Ailey’s choreography in

Revelations.80 In the “Pilgrim of Sorrow” section the dancers, tightly gathering under the center stage spotlight, extend their articulate and lengthened arms skyward, as if seeking to connect with God before circulating their arms down and into a broad wingspan, as if hovering over the earth.81 It might be confusing that Horton adopted an eagle-like gesture inspired from Native American dance in an Africanist work but the following similarity also supports a connection between the recognizable cultural markers. Horton’s Liberian

Suite features De Lavallade and Truitte, and Ailey also rehearsed it. The rehearsal photo taken by Charles Van Maanen shows De Lavallade and Ailey miming walking eagles in the foreground, with their zigzag-shaped arms to the sides and bent, turned-out legs,

85 while four other dancers stand straight, holding sticks and staring upwards or to the left, as in a ritual. These eagle-like gestures and stick-holding postures appear in another work on De Lavallade-Ailey’s 1962 tour—Tetley’s Mountainway Chant. Mountainway Chant is a piece titled after a Navajo medicine ceremony and based on Navajo legend. The dancers present staged rituals and fighting scenes in costumes decorated with long feathers. In the excerpted clip from the Taipei concert,82 Truitte, as Eagle Man, leads a line of other three dancers as they enter the stage. They mimic eagles with opened wing- like arms and stomp on one foot, as if performing the American Native eagle dance of worship (see Figure 2.1). The gestures appear both in the Native American eagle dance and the ritual scenes in these two dance works—Horton’s Liberian Suite and Tetley’s

Mountainway Chant. Although the former is Africanist and the latter is based on Native

American legend, these same gestures circulated through the dancers’ bodies. Dance scholar Priya Srinivasan terms transmissions of gestures and movements among dancing bodies as bodily archives.83 Ailey, De Lavallade, and Truitte’s experiences in Horton’s work helped to transmit the gestures and ritual postures to Tetley’s Mountainway Chant, and the movement repositories in their bodies influenced each other.

However, except for the cultural markers in the costumes and the story,

Mountainway Chant displays a rather primitive conception about American Indian dances. Among the glimpses of this dance, only the one scene I mention above displays the eagle-like arm gestures and the linear formation. Other parts, including the scenes of sacrifice and fights, use sensationalism to move the plot. In the fighting scene, Truitte and

Ailey, with bared chests and feather and fur-decorated limbs, aggressively scuffle

86 downstage (see Figure 2.2). After Ailey rolls on the floor, Truitte spreads his wings to menace Ailey, as an eagle winning the fight. In the sacrifice scene, the five villagers, who continuously shake maracas and murmur as if chanting, escort De Lavallade by scurrying onto the stage. De Lavallade, the Non-Sunlight Struck Maiden as the program note introduces, looks calm and firm in contrast to the anonymous villagers, whose faces are half covered. De Lavallade’s determination to sacrifice herself shows her subjectivity as a heroine, while the villagers are executing the ritual. In his choreography, Tetley utilized the personification of animals and Shamanist rituals to present a primitive image to narrate the Native American legend. These elements draw on American modern dance practices, such as those of to appropriate Native practices in the name of delivering timeless yet otherized Native Americanness on the stage of American modern dance diplomacy.

The foreign reception of American indigenity also problematizes Mountainway

Chant. Mountainway Chant provided the clearest examples of recognizably multi-ethnic markers among pieces in the touring program. However, Prevots notices the Saigon audiences’ ignorance of the elements from various ethnic groups in the program.84 The foreign audience accepted the entire concert as homogenous America. The Taiwanese audiences received the concert in a similar way. Ying Fu (英芙) considered that this piece presented a classic myth.85 She described her interpretation:

De Lavallade plays an [American] Indian virgin, standing on top of the hill. She

embodied her sudden fear of the strange power of nature through her dancing

spasms. The presences of Eagle Man and Bear Man add to the atmosphere of

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[American] Indian culture…From her death to her revival, this dance, with the

colorful and primitive rhythms, narrates a legend of the U.S. Southwest Indians.86

Ying Fu addressed the presence of Eagle Man and Bear Man, both in stereotyped Native

American costumes, as bringing “an aura of mystery” and “primitive rhythms” to illustrate an Indianist image of America. As musicologist Beth E. Levy argues, the image of Native Americans played a key role in the artistic creation of music and visual arts to distinguish American identity from European influences during the first half of the twentieth century.87 In the same way, the image of the Native American legend represents the American community as a whole to foreign audiences; no matter what the dancers’ ethnicities were, they were American. The different part is that, while the white artists adopted Native and African American elements to present their songs, De Lavallade-

Ailey Dance Company, a predominantly black diplomatic troupe, represented another minority group on the foreign stages to claim their American identity.

This absorption of Native Americanness into a seamless image of Americanness as a whole through dancing is similar to the Kuomintang’s nationalist policies over

Taiwanese Indigenous people. Taiwanese historian Kuo-Chao Huang points out that the nationalist policies that the Kuomintang applied not only re-Sinicized Taiwanese residents who experience Japan’s ruling but also Sinicized Taiwanese Indigenous people.88 Through renaming these Taiwanese Indigenous groups and utilizing Indigenous performance as propaganda, Taiwanese Indigenous groups were reframed and included within Chinese nationalist discourses to present a seamless whole of Chinese nationalism.

At the same time, the increasing needs for tourist spots in the 1950s also turned the

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Taiwanese Indigenous rituals into tourist performance for exoticism.89 In a similar vein,

Taiwanese audiences’ reading of Native Americanness in Mountainway Chant contributed to the image of Americanness as a homogenous whole, while exoticized

Native American elements satisfied them in the forms of performing events.

Except for the culturally recognizable costumes, the movements of this work are relatively abstract, not pantomimic, in representing the complex emotional elements of this story. Ying described De Lavallade’s movement as spasms. A comparison to uncontrollable and painful muscle contractions suggests an equally uncontrollable and mythic power taking over the body of the “non-sunlight-struck maiden” (the role De

Lavallade played) in the sacrifice ritual. Ying’s comment emphasized that Ailey’s concert allowed the dancers to transcend their ethnicity to represent a myth that audiences with a different cultural heritage could understand. Ying’s interpretation of the romantic story echoes modern dance critic and theorist John Martin’s emphasis on American modern dance’s transcendence regarding human beings’ emotions shared across cultures.90 Here,

Taiwanese audiences read Tetley’s choreography as transcendent, a central tenet of midcentury according to critics like Martin; so, neither De

Lavallade’s own body nor her appropriated indigenous subject matter suggested that she, in Manning’s words, bore the burden of representing an ethnic (marked) collective.91 This is significant for understanding how Taiwan’s audiences viewed Heiren as color along different racialized and cultural vectors compared to American audiences. In this sense, the perceived Native American theme not only framed the Taiwanese perception of ideas of indigenous Americanness, but also the idea American modern dance universalism.

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De Lavallade-Ailey’s tour brought Taiwan a vision of dance modernity as a means of self expression through athletic strength. Ying Fu described De Lavallade-

Ailey’s dance as “modern dance emphasizing athleticism to deliver legendary classicism.”92 The United Daily also reported Ailey’s show with the title “Affects and

Strength” (情與力). This report stated that Ailey’s company “presented modern dance that has never been seen before. This dance company full of ‘strength’ and ‘affects’ showed modern dance’s natural and untrammeled features.”93 Journalist and playwright

Yao Feng-Pan (姚鳳磐) commented on the dancers’ use of muscularity and body shapes to “express their love and antipathy for life.”94 The critics connected the De Lavallade-

Ailey dancers’ astonishing virtuosity to expression. This virtuosity required to master the modern dance technique, as DeFrantz argues, helped Ailey gain appreciation from the general audience in the United States.95 In a similar vein, Yao appreciated De Lavallade-

Ailey’s modern dance as he indicated that ballet is “beautiful but meaningless” and modern dance is “speech having substance without losing its beauty.”96 The Taiwanese critics perceived American dance modernity as an artistic means to deliver ideas. This function of American modern dance thus won the Taiwanese critics’ appreciation.

The De Lavallade-Ailey dancers’ athletic virtuosity also departed from Taiwanese stereotypes of dance, which assumed soft and delicate movements. I am not suggesting that all Taiwanese dances featured softness and delicateness. However, Yao’s comment shows that De Lavallade-Ailey Company’s significant athletic strength in dancing challenged dance’s presumed function of emotional expression and provides a paradigm for social statement through powerful movements. Therefore, Yao further criticized

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Taiwan’s dance practices, specifically the invented genre of national ethnic dance, minzu wudao, by stating that:

…most of our nation’s dances stay at the [developmental] stage of Japanese ballet

and recreated ethnic dances for nostalgia. After seeing De Lavallade-Ailey

American Dance Company’s performance, choreographers here [in Taiwan]

should feel warned and then wake up.97

Yao did not clearly define exactly what warning dancers should take from the concert.

Yet, the term “wake up” here hints at an active function of dance. To Yao, neither

Japanese ballet as a colonizing influence nor recreated ethnic dances for nostalgia satisfied his expectation of dance as a matured art form in postwar Taiwan.

American modern dance composition contributed to the Taiwanese audience’s reception and interpretation of De Lavallade-Ailey’s dance as American cultural outreach. Yao criticized minzu wudao as “recreated ethnic dancers for nostalgia” but failed to recognize that Tetley’s Mountainway Chant does the same thing as a recreated portrayal of Native Americans performed by African American dancers. The

Americanness that African American dancers performed through staging Native

American legend, in this sense, dismissed the ethnic and racial differences and highlighted a shared nationality. In Yao’s reading, these were all American. That is to say, on the one hand, the received indigeneity performed by African American dancers presents an ahistorical American myth. On the other hand, Yao’s perception also reflected how American modern dance composition provided the Taiwanese audience a way of reading that transcends ethnicity. DeFrantz argues that Ailey’s modern dance

91 composition, as exemplified by Revelations, benefits the expansion of general audiences in the United States.98 In the fighting scene of Mountainway Chant, Truitte spreads his arms decorated with wing feathers and jumps toward Ailey, as Bear Man, who rolls across downstage to dodge Truitte’s attack. Then, Truitte pliés in a wide-legged position and unfolds his wings in a threatening animal gesture, while the group dancers hold their sticks stiffly, watching the fight between Eagle Man and Bear Man. Their articulate postures of fighting delivered the narrative without fully pantomiming attacking and dodging movements, for this fighting scene is short but clearly narrative. Yao seemed to value American dance modernity in De Lavallade-Ailey’s concert without interpreting this dance as actually ethnic. Instead, as exemplified in Yao’s comment, the Taiwanese audience foregrounded American dance modernity in De Lavallade-Ailey’s concert while considering the racial and ethnic elements less important.

Mountainway Chant has never been on stage in the United States, probably because of its problematic primitivism toward Native American culture. Despite the fact that De Lavallade continued to include Mountainway Chant as a part of her own international touring proposal to the Dance Panel,99 Ailey chose to drop the piece from his company repertoire after the 1962 joint tour. Truitte wrote that Ailey “completely dropped from the repertoire [the] stunning piece”100 Ailey’s own experience interacting with Native American dancers in Horton’s dance company and the respect that his mentor paid to them seem to be the reason Ailey sensed the possibly offensive primitivism in a story of a social-cultural minority different from his own, even though he

92 himself struggled with being a social-cultural minority. Mountainway Chant premiered outside of the United States and folded overseas.

Another aesthetic feature merged modernity with American progressivism. Liu

Feng-Shueh, the founder and choreographer of the Neo-Classic Dance Company and a professor at the National Taiwan Normal University, stated: “This performance completely presented the characteristics of modern dance that emphasize the atmosphere without focusing on its form.”101 The idea of form, as culturally unmarked and opposed to content that may relate to ethnic identifiers, seemed to be significant to Liu’s vision of modernity. Dance historian Emily Wilcox argues that Chinese kinesthetic nationalism, developed during the 1940s, emphasized form or style to represent Chineseness rather than content.102 Studying with one of the pioneers of Chinese dance during her teen years,

Liu drew a similar association between nationalism and modernity and formalism.

Therefore, Liu commented that Ailey’s dances revealed a style and form of dance that

“belongs to this time, and is a worthy idea for Free China to research and develop.”103

Liu’s comment challenged the Kuomintang’s nationalist projects that emphasized the connection to the imagined orthodox Chinese cultures and suggested that the arts should be akin to Taiwanese contemporary life experiences. Similar comments also appeared in

Yao Feng-Pan’s review. He stated: “modern dance, just like modern painting and modern music, aims to express human beings’ spirit strongly and intuitionally…They all are the product of current time.”104 Yao’s comment about “the product of the present” provides a view that connects Taiwan with American artistic modernity through shared time, instead of space. He further admired De Lavallade-Ailey’s concert by stating that “seeing De

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Lavallade-Ailey’s dance allows us to understand the completion and achievement of modern dance.”105 In this sense, Yao received and interpreted American dance modernity as racially/culturally unmarked as he advocated for the modernization of Taiwanese dance without stating that specifically.

As seen in Liu’s and Yao’s comments, the Taiwanese audience viewed De

Lavallade-Ailey’s dance as modern and transcendent. The Taiwanese emphasized the connectedness of shared time though they recognized the Native and African American elements in these dances that the De Lavallade-Ailey troupe presented on stage.

Furthermore, the Taiwanese audience blended the idea of Americanness, progressiveness, and the modern together to form an ideal image of the United States. This vision aligned with the international perception of the United States as the leader of the Free Alliance during the postwar era.

Afterlife of De Lavallade-Ailey’s 1962 Tour

De Lavallade-Ailey’s 1962 concerts did not merely bring Taiwan’s audiences a new experience. They also left marked influences on Taiwan. Ailey’s Revelations inspired a Taiwanese painter Tseng Pei-Yao (曾培堯) to begin a 20-year devotion to the theme of creation. Tseng stated:

It has been many years that I keep asking myself: For what are we born? What are

the true meanings of life? When I watched the [Ailey’s] American black modern

dances 17 years [after I started painting in 1945], I was deeply affected by their

dance form—simple movements that sketch mysteries of life through flame-like

rhythms.106

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Although it is unclear which dance works triggered Tseng’s comments on the “flame-like rhythms,” the emphasis of Tseng’s reading on De Lavallade-Ailey’s concert reflects a similar comment DeFrantz made on critic Jill Johnston’s review, in which Johnston

“played up the exotic-primitive appeal of Revelations.”107 Johnston commented that:

It’s a swinging dance that could drive you easily out of your mind, or back to

sanity…You can’t resist it; you can’t resist the rushing rolling sinuous movement

(pure uncontaminated movement) that involves the entire body in rippling waves

of mutually activated segments; you can’t resist the ecstatic extensions which

throw the body into brushing arcs of made abandon; you can’t resist that music,

that DRUM! The drum will never let you go. Ailey has made a theatre piece with

the inspired drunken compulsion of a fertility rite.108

DeFrantz argues that Johnston’s reading about the irresistible rhythms “hints at a limiting, essentialist racial scheme perceptible in Revelations.”109 The swinging and drumming rhythms in this work created a primitivist image for British-born, New-York- based leftist dance critic Johnston. Primitivism was popular in the U.S. modernist visual arts and music since the late 19th century and scholarship has revealed the problematic of primitivist arts: the artists adopt elements from the cultural Other in order to essentialize and, in this way, they reinforce the essentialist racial stereotypes.

While Revelations reflects primitivism in the American critic’s reading, Tseng’s mention of the “mysterious meaning of life” represents his Taoist reading of Revelations and this reading, in turn, affects American art modernism. Primitivism is problematic because it assumes the progression of a linear development of human societies along a

95 spectrum of primitive to civilized cultures. In this sense, when Western artists adopt elements from the “primitive” culture that they assume to be impersonal and collective, this adoption process creates a power hierarchy between the Western and the “primitive.”

However, the Chinese term yuanshi (原始), the translation of “primitive” also signifies the original. This dual meaning of yuanshi represents, from the Taoist perspective, the original as essence. Tseng’s reading refers to the essence of dance as rhythms and this essence represents the meaning of life. In this sense, the way that Tseng defines the essence is close to the values of American postwar modernism that address the essential value of artistic forms.

Tseng’s painting inspired by De Lavallade-Ailey’s dancing also reflects his modernist reading. Tseng was born and lived in Tainan City, which was Taiwan’s old cultural, political, and economic center before the Kuomintang’s rise. After seeing this show, Tseng started to explore local cultural practices and symbols for inspiration in his painting. His first painting after watching the 1962 concert was composed of red, black and white brushstroke dots. His continued his experimental style for several years and later changed his style to include Taiwanese cultural elements around his life, labeling his art works as The Series of Life. In this sense, Tseng’s reading reflects a localized reading of De Lavallade-Ailey’s athletic dynamics that is different from the Western primitivist idea where artists adopt cultural elements from non-Western or indigenous groups. On the contrary, he first focused on the modernist idea of the essence of art forms and then turned his attention to the cultural elements of his own group that were devalued during

96 the 1960s. In the 1970s, Tseng read the transcendent aspect in De Lavallade-Ailey’s dances first and then turned to embrace the ethnicity.

Although Tseng’s case showed that the De Lavallade-Ailey company was inspiring to the Taiwanese audience, the visits did not seem to lead to long-term repercussions, as seen in the immediate responses after the concerts. One 1976 article in

Music and Sound, a magazine founded by the same manager of the company hosting

Ailey’s tours in Taiwan, stated that the Ailey company’s 1962 visit “barely made a dent” because “the Taiwanese audience was so unfamiliar with ‘modern dance,’”110 which contradicted the reports following the 1962 events. Similarly, Taiwanese choreographer

Lin Hwai-min, in his introductory essay to the Ailey company, cited a short review from an unknown source, commenting that “after the folk bards, [the De Lavallade-Ailey company,] bustled and left, the city became silent again.”111 Referencing the program note description about Been Here And Gone as a metaphor, Lin’s description illustrated the short-term impact of De Lavallade-Ailey’s concert in Taipei and also the quick subsiding of impact after the events. Moreover, another introductory essay regarding

Ailey company’s 1976 tour also presented less excitement about the coming touring concerts. The author Debby Chen (鄧海珠) stated that “[m]any well-known foreign dance companies’ tours in Taiwan were overpraised,” and further indicated that no one knew how the troupes would be received until they performed.112 These two articles’ descriptions presented a strange attitude toward Ailey’s company’s tours in 1962 and

1977, which I discuss later in this chapter. Parallel to the different outcomes of the 1957 riots in Taiwan and Japan, this attitude showed that Taiwanese perception regarding

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Africanist elements in Ailey’s works did not challenge their postwar image of America as a friendly helper. Unlike the extreme success of Ailey’s touring concert in Japan, the

Taiwanese audience read his dance paradoxically: as American yet ethnic. This

Taiwanese dual reading complicated the postwar image of the United States with an image of African Americanness, which was different from the imagined white

Americanness of the United States and its leadership during the Cold War era. The

Taiwanese audience read De Lavallade-Ailey’s 1962 touring concert, in the short term, as transcendent American due to the U.S. State Department’s support, but, in the long term, formed an image of the United States about American blackness, distinguished from

African blackness.

José Limón’s Visit with His Singular Presentation of the Culturally Unmarked Body

One year after De Lavallade-Ailey’s 1962 tour, the debut of American modern dance in Taiwan, Limón and his dance company visited Taiwan under the Cultural

Presentations Program. Limón’s tour resulted in different Taiwanese perceptions about

American modern dance when compared to Ailey’s. The Taiwanese press clearly described the choreography by Limón and his mentor, Doris Humphrey, as American

(even though he was born in Mexico). Limón’s 1963 visit thus provides a contrasting case to De Lavallade-Ailey’s American modern dance towards further understanding

Taiwanese perceptions. Unlike De Lavallade-Ailey’s dance, which was perceived as both

Africanist (racially marked) and American (racially unmarked), Taiwanese reports commonly introduced Limón as modern: either ballet or dance. Unlike De Lavallade-

Ailey’s dance, Limón’s dance was introduced as a style characterizing both strict

98 classicism and free modernity.113 In this sense, with its representative position within the

United States, Limón’s dance represents the singular body—modern and free—to the

Taiwanese audience.

José Limón’s Dance Company was significantly involved in the U.S. cultural presentation program. The company was first supported by the State Department with this cultural presentation program in 1954. Although the ANTA Dance Panel, established after the State Department’s decision about Limón’s tour, considered Martha Graham as the first choice in representing American freedom in terms of cultural diplomacy, the successful 1954 touring experience of the Limón Dance Company placed it in a prioritized position in the Dance Panel’s discussions.

During the postwar era, the rhetoric of Cold War freedom was intertwined with the Civil Rights movements of race and gender, as part of United States’ international leadership. Similar to Graham’s assertion of ideological gender transgression, Limón’s dance deploys a shifting presentation of gender. Kowal argues that Limón’s dance presents unconventional maleness with “the representation of exceptional men, heroes, who face extraordinary challenges or obstacles.”114 In Limón’s works, male characters often struggle in relation to female characters. Expressions of a struggling man were opposite to the ideological image of American maleness, which is traditionally considered non-emotional and rational, as in Ted Shawn’s embodiment of masculine physical labor and sense of pride. Dance historian Julia Foulkes argues that “Led by

Shawn, male modern dancers’ emboldened masculinity attracted both men and women, refuted the effeminacy associated with dance, and eventually steered them to leadership

99 roles.”115 Following Shawn, , and Lester Horton in the tradition of

American modern dance male masculinity-qua-homosexuality, Limón challenged the stereotype of gender norms through the humanistic value in his works by presenting such an unconventional image of gender.116 Therefore, Limón showed that American modern dance not only represented social change during its time but also effected change by asserting perspectives of gender.

Dance as diplomacy is not only about what happens on stage but also relates to the diplomatic relations between the two nations. José Limón’s East Asia tour played a diplomatic role in U.S. policy while being significantly valued by the Kuomintang government. José Limón’s Dance Company arrived in Taiwan on November 3, 1963 from Manila, . The performances from November 5 to 9 presented thirteen pieces in Taipei City and Taichong City.117 These pieces included The Moor's Pavane,

The Traitor, There Is A Time (1956), Missa Brevis (1958), Sonata Opus 4 (1947), The

Emperor Jones, Concerto Grosso (1945), The Exiles (1950) and Humphrey’s

Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor (1938) and Night Spell (1953).118 The Taiwanese press also repeatedly reported this information and introduced Limón months before his arrival.119 The volume of information about this tour in Taiwan was significantly higher than in Thailand, Hong Kong, or Japan. The half-a-year early announcements and repeated tracking by the Taiwanese press show that Limón’s arrival in Taiwan was important for the Kuomintang government in a time in which all publications were controlled. The volume in coverage shows that the Taiwanese government saw these

100 diplomatic events as evidence of strong ties with the United States and aimed to prove the value of these ties to its people.

The quantity of Taiwanese press responses for these two-night performances also shows the importance of this event. In the 1960s, besides the official Central Daily, only two private news companies, United Daily and China Times, were authorized to publish newspapers. Even after being authorized, the Government Information Office still monitored all the publications. Each daily newspaper was allowed to print only twelve pages (three printing plates).120 Such page limitations allowed fewer reports and even less room for dance criticism. Despite publishing restrictions, there were still four dance reviews on Limón’s shows. The quantity of dance criticism and updated reports shows that the Kuomintang government highly regarded this cultural exchange with the United

States.

The seriousness with which the Kuomintang government, and also the U.S.

Embassy, valued Limón’s tours is shown by the attempts to teach Taiwanese audiences to

“read” American modern dance. On October 28, several days before Limón and his dancers’ arrival, Li Nuohua, a U.S. embassy officer, along with Li Wenchong, the officer from Taiwan Television (TTV) Enterprise, introduced on TTV “Limón’s new style, which embraces both characters of strict classic ballet and modern .”121 The emphasis on the classic, the modern, and freedom in Limón’s choreography, seemed to have set a perception that the United States would be a good leader with strict and appropriate manners and a free and open attitude. Besides that, Limón gave a lecture- demonstration on November 14 in Lincoln Hall of the U.S. Embassy.122 This cultural

101 exchange event carried the meaning of an alliance against the Mao communist government; the American dance company’s visits represented a friendship between the

United States and Taiwan through the mass media’s information about the U.S. State

Department’s support of the touring programs. With such underlying political significance, this idea of freedom reinforced the image of the United States as a leader of

Free Alliance during the Cold War.

The Taiwanese audience also noticed the innovation of abstraction. Painter and art critic Chu Ge (楚戈) focused on the rhythm in Doris Humphrey’s Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor that Limón’s Company performed.123 Humphrey was Limon’s mentor and his company performed some her works after she died in 1958. Humphrey choreographed this work to Bach’s music. In this dance, most of the dancers appear on a three-level structure onstage, while two dancers come to the center from stage left.124 The two dancers hold with crossed arms, and repeat a movement motif with leg-lifting and bowing in unison. The other dancers on the levels later repeat this movement motif.

Their movement is not pantomimic nor emotive but presents a sense of harmony with

Bach’s Passacaglia. Also, the dancers create abstract shapes, lines, and a rhombus, through their limbs and formations on stage. Their non-representational gestures and formations present abstract visual stimuli to the audience and, in this sense, allow viewers to interpret the meaning of the dancers’ interactions on stage. Chu stated:

The perfection of the human body was shown in the interconnected structure of

Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor. This is the human world, a world composed

of flesh and spirit, a world in which people always look forward to presenting

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their joyful emotion… After watching Limón’s dance, we understand that

“rhythm” in dance is tightly connected to the quality and quantity of rhythm in the

music.125

Chu’s review emphasizes that the rhythm and structure of dance is key to expressing its humanistic ideals. He considers that an ideal can only be effectively presented in a well- knit structure. He further concludes that “dance is not only to express personal high affect. Instead, they put their ideals in the structure.”126 Chu’s review shows how a humanist element in Humphrey’s dance leads toward an ideal world through a formalist approach to dance, rather than through chronological narrative. Notably, this critic focuses on the choreographic style rather than the ethnic makeup of the company.

Humphrey’s abstract dance, performed by Limón’s company, was viewed as a universalized formalism within the idea of modernity. The translation of the title and the

Taiwanese critics’ comments reflect the idea of modernist formalism. First, the translated title of the dance, “gede chengshi huanxiang qu” (歌德城市幻想曲), literally meaning a fantasia in the Baroque period of Bach’s music style, stimulating an imagination of urban scenes, replaced the original title named after Bach’s music. The translated title gives the audience an image of modern urban life. Chu reflected on this vision, stating, “the city I yearn for in my heart is like this: the excitement about grass fields and urban space communicate with each other…describing true pleasures at the bottom of the human heart.”127 In this sense, the title translation and Chu’s reading both referred to a universal imagination about modern life in harmony with nature. Furthermore, Yao Feng-pan also commented on Humphrey’s Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor as an architectural

103 dance.128 He describes that in the first scene “the dancers standing on the platform stage ladder harmonically and symmetrically present a beautiful vision of homogeneity.”129

After beginning the dance spread accross a three-level platform, the dancers step down and create various symmetric formations. For example, the dancers form a three-sided square while they their limbs and lean to fall back and forth as if evoking natural rhythms of life. Yao claims that the abstracted non-narrative movement was the trend in the arts. Such abstraction in dance created through gestural shapes and formations, instead of storytelling, served “dance for dance’s sake,” and Limón’s “achievements in this [artistic] trend and were appreciated.”130 Yao’s comment also shows his admiration for abstraction. Moreover, he further considers that abstraction achieved a universalized value of beauty with a progressive perspective. In both Chu and Yao’s readings,

Humphrey’s dance as presented by the Limón Company presented a modernist and idealized view of contemporary life, without specifying a particular race or ethnicity.

The Taiwanese audiences also showed their appreciation of abstraction by their positive appraisal of the minimal stage and costume design. In addition to Chu and Yao highlighting the simplified stage design, a Central Daily reporter also commented on the costumes in Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor. Costumes in Taiwanese dance at that time were culturally explicit and elaborate in their design, while Limón’s dancers were in plain tights which impressed the Taiwanese audience.131 Liu considers that such stripped costuming “displays the beauty of dynamics and rhythms.”132 In addition to the costumes, the minimalist approaches to lighting and stage design were often compared with guoju.

Both Chu’s and the Central Daily reporter’s reviews compared Limón’s dance to guoju

104 in terms of simplified lighting and stage design. Chu argues that the minimal design shifts the audience’s attention to the performer—as does the abstract movement expression in guoju. Such abstraction of movement was one of “our good traditions” in guoju, he emphasized.133 Limón’s formalist abstract dance movement, shedding complicated stage settings and costumes, was considered similar to the “Chinese tradition” by Taiwanese audiences. Their responses showed a sense of mixed nostalgia for the changed traditions and aspects of Chinese identity that they saw reflected in Limón’s performance of

Humphrey’s modernism. Humphrey’s modernism as performed by the Limón Company gave the Taiwanese critics room to awaken their contemporary imagination about what

Chinese traditions, in this case, guoju, could be. In a broader sense, they imagined what a

Chinese nation on this island could be.

Taiwanese reviewers also emphasized similar humanistic values in narrative dances. Yao Feng-pan’s description of The Moor’s Pavane exemplifies this perspective.

The Moor’s Pavane, based on William Shakespeare’s tragedy (1565), is one of

Limón’s most well-known works. The dance begins with the four characters onstage —

Othello, Desdemona, Iago, and Emilia. Othello is a general in the Venetian military.

According to literature scholar Emily Bartels, “the Moor” refers to specifically to

“Berber-Arab people of North Africa” or generally darker skinned people but not necessarily associated with sub-Saharan Africa.134 In this sense, Othello’s race is not clear but he is definitely not white. The dancers wear Renaissance styled costumes. They dance a pavane, a court dance from southern Europe, holding their spouse’s lifted hands and stepping in a swinging rhythm. Limón adopted pantomiming and dancing movements

105 to replace oral expression of the narrative. For example, Iago stands at Othello’s back and looks over Othello’s shoulders to represent his provocation. At the end of the dance,

Desdemona kneels down and holds her face in her hands to show her suffering. Then,

Othello forcefully flips her toward him while Desdemona faints and falls back over

Othello’s arms. Othello mimes an attack, finally strangling and beating her to death, due to his jealousy. In his review, Yao said that “this dance with its scarlet lighting and costumes strongly shows desires and violence in humanity” and concluded that “this work is indeed perfect, heart-moving, and meaningful.”135 Yao’s review neglects to mention any racial and cultural background. In other words, he unconsciously universalized Shakespeare’s literature in Limón’s choreography. Yao accepted the envy and violence as universal aspects of humanity and completely ignored the possible complexity of the relationships between the four characters, who are in culturally marked costumes (he described Iago as Othello’s devious friend). Such binary interpretation, just like the binary Cold War ideology of freedom verses communism, presents a judgment criterion that seems applicable to all human situations. This banalization of good and evil was largely set by the Cold War ideologies between the two blocs.

A similar universalist reading is shown in dance artist and educator Liu Yuzhi’s

(劉玉芝) review of The Traitor.136 This all-male work tells the biblical story between

Jesus and his follower Judas, who betrays him.137 Judas’s solo danced by Limón begins in a scene with archways. He reaches out his hand and silently leaps forward to explore.

Suddenly alarmed, he observes his surroundings and moves carefully and turns to maintain awareness. Limón’s tense movements and his quickened steps express this

106 anxiety. Then, another dancer catches up to Limón and grasps his shoulder. Their pause contrasts with the other group of dancers onstage looking around to show the increasing tension. After fighting with the group, Limón presents a in the spotlight. He lies on the floor, struggling and trembling. He flexes and shakes his strengthened arms at a low level. These movements all present his psychological state—regret, conflict, and fear—of being a traitor and certainly point to anxieties surrounding his homosexuality.138

Liu described this: “He walks alone, twists on the ground, rolls and turns to present the desire, the suffering, the conflict in the traitor’s heart….This is a reflection of the Bible story where Judas betrays Jesus, and also an expression of desire of humanity.”139

Although Liu, unlike Yao, mentioned the origin of the Bible story, she further linked this

Western religious origin to the universal desire of humanity. According to Liu’s reading, by referring to the New Testament and using tense movements, Limón’s humanistic dance transcends cultural differences with his emphasis on humanity, which refers to shared human experience in the sense of universalism. As a result, the maleness in this dance was ignored, as well as the Western religion. Furthermore, the maleness and the

Western represent all humans by addressing their humanistic values without presenting other genders and cultures. The Traitor, once again, was read as a dance about universal humanity.

Besides a humanistic reading, the reviews also reveal dissatisfaction with restricting artistic expression. Chu emphasized the abstraction in movement and stage design as well. He considered that “what is central on the [Limón’s] stage is humanity, composed of various images.”140 He further appreciated the simple stage design in

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Limon’s dances and criticized the contemporary development of minzu wudao by saying that “in guoju, riding horses, knocking on doors are [received] through [the audience’s] imagination. We have many good traditions, which have been eroded.”141 By comparing

Limón’s dance and minzu wudao, Chu stated his dissatisfaction without hurting Chinese nationalism; the root of Chineseness is good—it is just performed poorly. He also criticized dance in Taiwan by indicating that “[Limon] dance company hoping to project feelings, not to please [the audience]. In Taiwan, there are many so-called dances, which are merely shadow-playing.”142 Obviously, Chu admired Limón’s psychological dance.

He believed that such was the very essence which Taiwanese choreography lacked. A similar appeal to international styles is also seen in his other criticisms. For example, in his 1967 essay about modern Chinese painting, Chu accuses the guohua (國畫, national painting) of passing contemporary paintings off as ancient. He advised not to follow the tools that the Chinese ancients used in painting (here, the Chinese brushes, paper and inks) but to adopt other possible tools to represent Chinese contemporary life.143 He stated that “I am a modernist,” but also a nationalist.144 He believed that aligning Chinese modern painting with the universalized Western painting was a way to revive the greatness of Chineseness.145 His critiques on Taiwanese performance arts reveal that he was displeased with the political control that restricted creation. His anti-restrictive attitude was aroused by the dances that bore the name of freedom—the same dances that initiated Chu’s devotion to art and dance criticism. The universality that Limón’s company presented to him stimulated his thinking regarding Chineseness under the freedom of artistic speech.

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José Limón and his dancers contributed to the construction of an American image associated with universalist progressiveness and to a Taiwanese nationalist reflection on the dearth of freedom. In the Taiwanese reviews, the American dance was connected to a symbol of progress, with emphasis on form and universal humanism. However, the

Taiwanese reviews reflected their local social conditions, which were under strict military rule. Such universal values highlighting American freedom were something for

Taiwanese audiences to pursue. Therefore, Limón’s dances served paradoxical meanings for the Kuomintang government and the Taiwanese people. On the one hand, it shows the membership in an anti-communist alliance led by the United States; on the other hand, it reveals Taiwanese dissatisfaction with respect to its lack of freedom of speech and artistic creation. The universality presented in the Limón company’s touring concert benefitted

United States’ leadership in the Cold War, as well as the foreign audiences that fought for personal and political freedom against ruling powers. These issues returned in Ailey’s

1977 tour.

Ailey’s 1977 Tour: The Taiwanese’s Shifted focus

Ailey’s 1977 tour was framed in a different way from his 1962 visit: as multi- ethnic. As discussed above, in 1962 De Lavallade-Ailey was also introduced as an

American black dance company. However, because a member of the 1977 troupe was nationally related to Taiwanese audiences, Taiwanese perception of the company shifted to multi-ethnicity. There were few dance reviews about Ailey’s 1977 tour. Instead, the presence of the Taiwan born dancer Tina Yuan became the focus in the reports to reflect competing nationalism in Taiwan. Some reports suggested that the Ailey company

109 transcends ethnicity because Yuan’s participation changed the company from a black one to a multi-ethnic one. Other reports also emphasized the importance of cultural roots.

These reports no longer addressed Ailey’s African American heritage; instead, they framed Yuan as a successful example of a Taiwanese citizen in the United States. For example, Debby Chen indicated that Yuan’s “striving and success in the United States is something [R.O.C.] compatriots can be proud of.”146 Taiwan’s competing nationalism was significant in the 1970s, which I shall discuss in the next chapter. In the promotional essay published in 1976, three photos were displayed, occupying one full page, all featuring Yuan.147 One shows Yuan’s portrait. Another shows Yuan lifted by a black male dancer. Yuan straightens her full body, even pointing her toes, in an almost upside- down posture with a joyful facial expression and softly curved left arm, while the male dancer extends his right leg to the side, leaning to the left, and swinging Yuan in his arms. The third photo shows Yuan and another black male dancer mirroring each other’s postures. They both lift one arm up and bend the other to the shoulder level, while both hands are forcefully open with palms facing outwards. They arch their upper bodies backwards and stand with the front leg bent and the back extended. The partial overlapping of their bodies in the photo, with Yuan in the front, produces an image of strength with curved lines. The two photos aligning Yuan with black dancers showcase the multi-ethnicity of Ailey’s company. Compared to the official construction of Chinese nationalism during the previous decade, Yuan’s presence thus turned the focus from

Ailey’s American blackness and the issue of white supremacy to a Taiwanese national striving to dance in the United States to call for a national identity. Due to the anxiety

110 aroused by national crises, the Taiwanese reports interpreted Yuan’s role in the company as a bearer of national pride. Freedom of artistic speech was no longer as important as it had been in the 1960s.

The meaning of Ailey’s 1977 tour was also different because of how it was initiated. Ailey’s 1977 touring plan was not initiated by the U.S. State Department and official agencies. Instead, his company was invited to visit Japan because of his success with Japanese audiences back in 1962. After communicating with the U.S. Embassy,

Ambassador Leonard Unger cooperated with his colleagues in other Southeast Asian countries to win the State Department’s sponsorship.148 This led to the official support of the Ailey Company in 1977 for an East and Southeast Asian tour and expanded their touring plan from one country to the broader area. This history shows that U.S. cultural diplomacy is not merely a top-down process. Many actors, especially the local agencies, play important roles in it.

Consequently, the Ailey company’s two visits brought the Taiwan audiences new perspectives on dance modernity and social equality. However, Ailey and his dancers’ attempts to present U.S. cultural forms with African American contributions did not simply fade out. In the following section, I will discuss how Ailey’s work relates to the

Taiwanese choreographer Liu Feng-Shueh’s reconsideration of dance modernity and

Chinese nationalism. Taiwanese perceptions of Ailey’s visit were not only shaped by pre- existing understandings of American blackness and images of the U.S. and international relations. The tours also supplemented Taiwanese audiences’ need to reflect on their own

111 situation. In addition, these diplomatic events provided a new perspective on dance and the American image to the Taiwanese.

Reflected Dance Modernity and Nationalism

The American freedom of artistic speech perceived by the Taiwanese to be in

Ailey’s and Limón’s dances encouraged Taiwanese dancers to express their imagination about Chineseness in ways beyond what was officially recognized. Liu Feng-Shueh’s

Chinese modern dance project exemplifies the connection between the imported

American dance modernity and the embryonic Chinese dance modernity. Liu was born in

Northeast China and educated in Japan-controlled from 1932 to 1945. She moved to Taiwan with the Kuomintang government in place after the Chinese Civil War and taught in the Department of Physical Education at the Taiwan Provincial University of Education (now National Taiwan Normal University, or NTNU). Inspired by the inquiry of Chiang Liang-gui, the founder of Far Eastern Arts Management and Liu’s colleague, Liu started her research project on Chinese modern dance in 1957. Before that, she participated in minzu wudao competitions but often questioned the nationalist project’s authenticity. Therefore, she isolated herself from the popular muzhu wudao movement and instead worked with her students to explore Chinese dance modernity.

Liu commented on the Ailey Company’s 1962 performance, drawing from her exploration and understanding of dance modernity. She appreciated “the characteristic of modern dance that is not restricted by formalist elements and emphasizes the atmosphere.”149 The cultural markers in Ailey’s modern dance, in this sense, may contribute to Liu’s efforts to revitalize Chinese modern dance as she explored a new

112 dance form to express her nationalist ideas though Liu herself never mentioned clearly.

After ten years of independent research, she announced her manifesto on Chinese modern dance. In the manifesto, she pointed out: “Modern dance is a kind of creative dance that appreciates individuality and expresses thoughts. So far, modern dance in countries on earth shows a common trend—it creates dances that embody the traditional spirits of their nation.”150 Her understanding of the word “trend” departed from the U.S. Greenbergian modernist project that aimed to break from the past, and from the early U.S. modern dance that re-connected to Eurocentric universalism.151 Liu was trying to situate

Chineseness through modern dance in a similar way to how Ailey used modern dance to express his black American heritage.

However, Liu’s vision of Chineseness was not nostalgic towards the lost

Mainland China. As stated above, modern dance for her meant expressing her individuality. This stems from her questioning of minzu wudao, the government- sponsored movement that aimed to build official Chinese nationalism in Taiwan.152 Even though Liu’s effort was concurrent with Ailey’s 1962 visit, it was not initiated in response to Ailey. Liu studied Eurhythmics, the training technique of the Dalcroze system focusing on bodily movement and rhythm, and also modern dance at Chingchun

Women’s Normal University in Japan-controlled Northeast China. Instead, German early modern dance influenced Liu. Her education in Japanese-controlled Manchukuo was through Japanese dance educator Baku Ishii, who studied Eurhythmics in Europe in the early 1920s and was influenced by and . Duncan, an early

American aesthetic barefoot dancer with emphasis on free dance, and Wigman, a

113 progenitor of German , both addressed the expressive function of dance. In these ways, the idea of expressive dance was rooted in Liu’s choreography since her early training. In an interview, Liu said:

Dance is to express through human bodies. People that live in the modern

world have been completely shaped by the modernized environment. It is

impossible to ask to stage classical Chinese dances in their original way from

the beginning to the end. Therefore, in the contemporary society addressing

time and space, we should present the classic dance in forms of modern

dance.153

For Liu, to express is to create. In the context of choreography, a dance shows audiences her exploration and research on Chineseness. To Liu, choreographing becomes modern because it allows her to express her thoughts through dancing bodies, as opposed to choreographing in minzu wudao. To build on this modernity, Liu reiterates her ideologies regarding Chinese nationalism to find her definition of Chinese modern dance through her choreography. By highlighting the self-expressive function of dance, Liu legitimized her experimentation of Chinese modern dance and further explored her imagination about

Chineseness beyond the official definition. In this way, she took a similar approach to

American modern dance choreographers in reconnecting contemporary social experiences with Chinese traditional movement vocabularies to create what she imagined as Chinese dance modernity.

The outcomes of Liu’s 10-year experimental project resulted in merging

American modern dance aesthetics with Chinese subjects and vocabularies. In the 1967

114 premiere of Liu’s Chinese modern dance, Gudai Yu Xiandai (古代與現代, meaning the ancient and the modern), Liu presented both her research outcomes by creating six dance works: two Chinese modern dances and four reconstructed traditional dances. These two pieces, Dushi Jijing (都市即景, meaning an urban scene) and Dadi Zhi Ge (大地之歌, meaning the song of the land), were:

…choreographed based on movements in wuoguo [our country/nation’s] ancient

dance and opera, through abstract and realistic techniques of representation, and

modern aesthetics related to asymmetric and three-dimensional space,

emphasizing variations on movement motifs (i.e. expressive movement). These

works allow wuoguo traditional dance art and new creation to merge with each

other, producing “Chinese modern dance” that is endowed with a traditional

spirit.154

In this short introduction, the term wuoguo (我國, meaning our nation/country) appears twice, intertwining with Liu’s intervention of modern aesthetics regarding space. This modern aesthetics relating to space shifts the choreographic attention from a nostalgic space of the lost land in bianjiang wu to the contemporary space of the dancing body.

The “modern aesthetics” Liu mentioned clearly referred to Humphrey’s Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor, which I analyze above in terms of its use of three-dimensionality.

Liu’s notion of space creates room for further exploration and self-expression, as inspired by Humphrey’s dance as performed by the Limón company. With this invitation, dance artists are able to express their nationalist discourses about wuoguo.

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Although I have no related archival materials showing what these two dances looked like fifty years ago, Liu’s comments on the Ailey Company’s 1962 tour shows the connections regarding space. Liu pointed out that Ailey’s show proved that “modern dance emphasizes the simplicity of costumes and props.”155 Such a comment echoes Yao

Feng-pan’s comments on Ailey’s and Limón’s shows. Yao stated that in Limón’s work,

“the foci were the dancers’ bodily movements and facial expressions, while the costumes and props were reduced to the minimum.”156 Similarly, Yao also appreciated the simplicity of costumes and stage sets in Ailey’s show and admired a “return to innocence.”157 Therefore, Ailey’s and Limón’s tours brought Taiwanese audiences a new insight regarding stage space and the dancer’s personal space. By reducing the emphasis on props in the stage space and costumes within personal space, the space that a dancer moves through is highlighted. The awareness of a dancer’s personal space allows Liu to further think about asymmetry and three-dimensionality of movement design.

Consequently, Liu’s research in Chinese modern dance and its outcomes represents a critical turn in postwar Taiwan. Liu’s discourses on personal expression, as well as on the integration of Chinese arts and culture and awareness of spatial design in modern dance, show her individual interventions in the society. As discussed in Chapter

1, Jinlin Hwang argues that the social modernization projects in the late Qing Empire and

Republican periods during the institutional reforms of armies and schools aimed to release people’s bodies from the domestic sphere and merge them into the national power.158 In a similar sense, the Kuomintang government’s policies on minzu wudao merged Taiwanese dancing bodies into the official Chinese nationalism.159 In contrast to

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Liu Feng-Shueh’s doubts about minzu wudao as representations of Chinese authenticity, her Chinese modern dance transforms the Taiwanese dancer’s body from a dancing body serving the official nationalism to one speaking about the nation through aesthetic choices. The former was to dance under a forced nationalism through various official interventions from the ruling power; the latter expresses one’s thoughts regarding the nation through bodily movement, as Liu’s experimentation of Chinese modern dance reflecting Taiwanese contemporary life experiences exemplified. Liu, through her experiment in Chinese modern dance, explored and presented her national consciousness as a way to resist the official project of nationalism. The kinesthetic nationalism, to use

Wilcox’s term, in 1960s-1970s Taiwan was the result of Taiwanese audiences assimilating the rhetoric of American freedom into their emotions and physicalities.

Freedom Reflected and Needs Answered

This chapter focused on Taiwanese audiences’ first experiences of the De

Lavallade-Ailey Company’s and Limón Company’s tours to East Asia. These U.S. state- sponsored events in Taiwan brought Taiwanese audiences a taste of American dance modernity as a means of individual expression. On the one hand, Taiwanese audiences sought a possible escape from the Kuomintang’s martial rule. On the other, Taiwanese dancers rejected the official Chinese nationalism built by cultural policies and looked for their own understanding of Chineseness and nationalism, which they largely found through dance practices.

Furthermore, American modern dance is not only American; with the international tours, American modern dance created meaning(s) globally. Local

117 perceptions of American modern dance are highly related to the local political and cultural context. The Taiwanese audiences’ readings were different from the Japanese because they had different agendas. In this sense, the critiques on U.S. cultural exports as

American imperialism ignore the receivers’ individual agency. In this chapter, I have shown how local people interpreted American modern dances in their own way to meet their needs. American cultural exports were thus channeled, selected, and utilized based on local views.

Last, but not least, the transnational history in this case reveals meanings of

“freedom” propagated by the U.S. State Department, American modern dance, the

Kuomintang government, and the Taiwanese audiences. This transcends national boundaries but also created frictions among actors. Each actor involved in these diplomatic events had a particular agenda. The State Department initiated this cultural presentation program in answer to President Dwight Eisenhower’s appeal for freedom to shape international perceptions of the country. The “dancer diplomats,” to use Croft’s coinage, of Ailey’s company deployed their nationalist discourses against the United

States’ privileging of white aesthetics to situate their blackness in the center of the image of Americanness. Simultaneously, De Lavallade, Ailey, and Limón benefited from the

State Department’s financial support which provided them a degree of financial freedom from the market. The Kuomintang government in Taiwan sought to strengthen U.S.-

Kuomintang diplomatic relations in terms of the Cold War alliance of freedom by welcoming visits by American modern dance companies, even as they presented the idea of artistic and intellectual freedom. Taiwanese audiences sought to consider ideas about

118 the modern and the nation. The negotiations among the actors framed the outcome; none of them could fully control the meaning of freedom. Ideas of freedom—political, personal, and economic—were all encountered in these diplomatic dance events, in this transnational and multi-lateral history of U.S. dance diplomacy.

1 “友好訪問.” “黑人歌舞” [Black People’s Dance and Music], Wah Kiu Yat Po (Hong Kong), April 19, 1962. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 2 Ibid. 3 “接受美國國務院的安排…作總統文化特別基金項下文化交流的工作.” “美 國黑人三寶之一 愛琳歌舞劇團 明日來華訪問” [One of African American Treasures, De Lavallade-Ailey American Dance Theater, Visiting China Tomorrow], Central Daily (Taiwan), April 10, 1962, 中央日報全文影像資料庫. Chinese names are translated in the original order that a family name is followed by a given name. 4 Martina Topić and Cassandra Sciortino, “Cultural Diplomacy and Cultural Imperialism: A Framework for the Analysis,” in Cultural Diplomacy and Cultural Imperialism: European Perspective(s), edited by Martina Topic, and Sinisa Rodin ( am Main, Berlin, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, and Wien: Peter Lang, 2012), 34. For scholarly discussion of American imperialism in the economic domain, see Chap. 1, n. 12. For related discussions in the domain of arts, see Chap. 1, n. 53. 5 Foner, The Story of American Freedom, xvii-xviii (see Chap. 1, n. 3). 6 Morris, A Game for Dancers, xviii (see Chap. 1, n. 24). 7 Prevots, Dance for Export, 9 (see Chap. 1, n 26). 8 See Prevots, Dance for Export, 8, and Croft, Dancers as Diplomats, 108 (see Chap. 1, 49). 9 Foner, The Story of American Freedom, xviii. 10 Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up The World, 253 (see Chap. 1, n. 56). 11 Hui-ling Chou, “「國劇」、國家主義與文化政策”[Guoju, Nationalism and Cultural Policy], Contemporary Monthly 107 (March 1995): 50–67. 12 Nancy Guy, Peking Opera and Politics in Taiwan (Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 3. 13 Ya-ping Chen, “Dancing Chinese Nationalism and Anticommunism: The Minzu Wudao Movement in 1950s Taiwan,” in Dance, Human Rights, and Social Justice: Dignity in Motion, edited by Naomi M. Jackson and Toni Shapiro Phim (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2008): 35. 14 Ibid., 45. 15 Manning, Modern Dance, Negro Dance (see Chap. 1 n. 51); Shea Murphy, Native American Modern Dance (see Chap. 1, n. 50); Kowal, How to Do Things with Dance (see Chap. 1, n. 46). 16 Quoted in Croft, Dancers as Diplomats, 104.

119

17 Ibid. 18 Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), viii. 19 Manning, Modern Dance, Negro Dance, xv. 20 Ibid., 118. 21 Thomas DeFrantz, Dancing Revelations: Alvin Ailey's Embodiment of African American Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), xiii. 22 Croft, Dancers as Diplomats, 9. 23 Kowal, How to Do Things with Dance, 72. 24 Ramsey Burt, The Male Dancer: Bodies, Spectacle, Sexualities (New York & London: Routledge, 2007), 115 & 117. 25 Ting-Wei Huang, “The Pioneer of Music Agency Management: Far Eastern Artistic Management” [in Chinese] (master’s thesis, National Taiwan Normal University, 2012), 41, NDLTD in Taiwan. https://hdl.handle.net/11296/53duym 26 Yi-Hsiong Chen, “江良規博士獨立創立臺灣史上第一家音樂藝術經濟機構: 遠東音樂社” [Dr. Chiang Liang-gui intendedly founded the first organization of music and art management in Taiwanese history], Muzik 10 (July 2007): 35. 27 Ibid., 29. 28 Huang, “遠東音樂社”, 48. 29 For example, the 1935 exhibition “The Taiwan Exposition: In Commemoration of the First Forty Years of Colonial Rule” took place in the Zhongshan Hall, as the main hall. In 1938, the exhibition “China War Exhibition” held by Taiwan Ri Ri Xin Bao (台灣 日日新報) was in Zhongshan Hall (Taipei Zhongshan Hall Management Office Website, https://www.zsh.gov.taipei/). 30 According to the official website of Zhongshan Hall (https://www.zsh.gov.taipei/ ), the first Art Exhibition was held in 1946; T’sai Jui-yueh’s showcase was held in 1947 and Yang San-lang’s music concert was held in 1948. Last accessed on June 1, 2020. 31 Ji-gao Chang, «樂府春秋» (Taipei, Taiwan: Nine Song, 1995), 320. 32 Until 1978, the currency of NTD to USD was controlled by the Taiwanese government. Since 1973, the currency was fixed at USD 1 to NTD 38. See Zongxian Yu and Jinli Wang, «臺灣金融體制的演變» [The Development of Taiwanese Financial System] (Taipei, Taiwan: Linking, 2005), 9. 33 “遠東音樂社為什麼介紹艾文艾利和他的舞團” [Why the Far Eastern Artistic Management introduces Alvin Ailey and his company], Music & Audiophile, August 1976, 51. 34 Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 13 (see Chap. 1, n. 62). 35 Croft, Dancers as Diplomats, 93–96. 36 Ibid., 104. 37 Tsing, Friction, 3 (See Chapter 1, n. 10). 38 “取非洲黑人面黑齿白，其白越显之意.” Zufan Li, “牙膏生產簡史” [An introduction to toothpaste production], in Shanghai Wenshi Ziliao Cungao Huibian 120

[Edited collections of Shanghai historical archives: Industries and business], Vol. 6, 92– 104, edited by Historical Archive Committee, Shanghai City Hall (Shanghai: Shanghai Guji, 2001), 97. 39 For example, “Colgate Agrees to Change Name of ‘Darkie Black’ Toothpaste,” Los Angeles Times, February 28, 1987; Anderson and Van Atta, “Colgate’s Problems with ‘Darkie’ Brand,” The Washington Post, February 14, 1990. 40 “健美女郎愛用黑人牙膏” [Fit females like darkie toothpaste], China Times (Taiwan), November 5, 1953, 中國時報五十年報紙影像資料庫. 41 Ibid. The author stated that “she does not consider [the nickname] offensive” (她不以為忤). 42 Darkie Toothpaste was later renamed as Darlie Toothpaste in the 1989 after Colgate obtained 50% ownership of Hawley & Hazel, due to the political correction. However, this renaming of its English branding was mostly known in British Hong Kong but not in Taiwan since the remained as Heiren. See n. 38. 43 “美哈林籃球隊下月來台表演” [U.S. Harlem Globetrotters performing in Taiwan Next Month], Central Daily (Taiwan), August 13, 1952. 中央日報全文影像資料 庫. 44 “黑人女低音安德遜抵台” [Black female bass singer Anderson arriving Taiwan], China Times (Taiwan), September 30, 1957, 中國時報五十年報紙影像資料庫. 45 “美黑人歌唱家瓦菲爾德今晚演唱” [U.S. black singer Warfield presenting his solo concert today] China Times (Taiwan), February 20, 1958, 中國時報五十年報紙 影像資料庫. 46 “不當干涉.” “美黑白合校問題 阿州州長籲請聯邦勿予干涉,” Central Daily (Taiwan), September 6, 1957 , 中央日報全文影像資料庫. 47 “維護紀律.” “美政府採果決步驟 派遣軍隊維護紀律” [U.S. federal government adopting resolute steps to send army to uphold the law], Central Daily (Taiwan), September 26, 1957, 中央日報全文影像資料庫. 48 “九名黑人學生進入小岩中學” [Nine black students entering the school in Little Rock], Central Daily (Taiwan),September 24, 1957, 中央日報全文影像資料庫. 49 Yu-ching Chen, “美總統與本屆國會” [The U.S. President and the current congress], Central Daily, September 26, 1957, 中央日報全文影像資料庫. 50 “在促進美國種族平等上，在提高黑人政治地位上…均有劃時代的貢獻.” I adjust the order of wordings duo to grammar. Ibid. 51 Regarding the Soviet Union’s attack on the U.S. racial issue, see Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 12–15. For the information about the strict prohibition over the Soviet bloc and communist propaganda in postwar Taiwan, see Kun-Hung Hou, “戰後臺 灣白色恐怖論析” (see Chapter 1, no. 8); Tsui Yang, “女性與白色恐怖政治事件” [Females and Political Cases of White Terror], in The Symposium of Human Rights and Political Events in Taiwan, edited by Chen Zhilong, Qiu Rongju, and Ni Zixiou, (Taipei, Taiwan: Improper Martial Law Period Insurgency and Espionage Convictions Compensation Foundation Inc., 2006): 411–452. 121

52 For more information about the miscarriage of justice related to Leftist reading groups during the White Terror era, see Yang, “女性與白色恐怖政治事件”. 53 Emily Wilcox, “Performing Bandung: China’s dance diplomacy with India, Indonesia, and Burma, 1953–1962,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 18, n. 4 (Winter, 2017): 518–538. 54 “共匪陰謀與所謂萬隆會議” [Communist conspiracy and the so-called Bandung conference] Central Daily (Taiwan), April 26, 1965, 中央日報全文影像資料 庫. 55 For detailed and multi-angular discussions on these two accidents and related local/U.S. reactions, see Craft, American Justice in Taiwan: The 1957 Riots and Cold War Foreign Policy (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2016). 56 Ibid., 184. 57 Quoted in Craft, American Justice in Taiwan, 156. 58 The photo was published in United Daily on May 24, 1957, Udndata. 59 Ibid. 60 Elise Grilii, “Fine Dance Company From U.S.,” The Japan Times, April 24, 1962. 61 Ibid. The Japanese audiences had some knowledge about African American dance because Dunham’s company performed in the Afro-Caribbean show in Tokyo in 1957. See Arimitsu Michio, “From Vodou to Butoh: Hijikata Tatsumi, , and the Trans-Pacific Remaking of Blackness,” in The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance, edited by Bruce Baird and Rosemary Candelario (New York & London: Routledge, 2018), 37–51. 62 See Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and The Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 63 Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 11. 64 Prevots, Dance for Export, 94. 65 Ibid., 95–96. 66 Quoted in DeFrantz, Dancing Revelations, 15. 67 DeFrantz, Dancing Revelations, 15. 68 Croft, Dancers as Diplomats, 94. 69 “愛琳歌舞劇團四月訪華公演三天 介紹黑人歌舞藝術” [De Lavallade-Ailey American Dance Theatre visiting China on April, staging for three nights, introducing dance art of the black people], Central Daily (Taiwan), March 23, 1962, 中央日報全文 影像資料庫. 70 Ibid. 71 “美國黑人三寶之一 愛琳歌舞劇團 明日來華訪問” [One of the three African American treasures, De Lavallade-Ailey American Dance Theatre coming to China for visiting tomorrow], Central Daily (Taiwan), April 10, 1962, 中央日報全文影像資料庫. 72 Dance Advisory Panel Meeting Minutes on October 17, 1961. Box 101 Folder 17. Collections of Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, the David W. Mullins Library at University of Arkansas. 122

73 Dance Advisory Panel Meeting Minutes on December 19, 1961. Box 101, Folder 17. Collections of Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, the David W. Mullins Library at University of Arkansas Libraries. 74 Dance Advisory Panel Meeting Minutes on September 18, 1961. Box 101, Folder 17. Collections of Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, the David W. Mullins Library at University of Arkansas Libraries. 75 Mountainway Chant is also titled as Mountain Way Chant, for example, on the official website of Alvin Ailey Dance Theater. I follow the program note of De Lavallade- Ailey’s 1962 tour in Burma. 76 “美國愛琳歌舞團表演” [De Lavallade-Ailey Dance Company Performing], Taiwan Television Enterprise, April 12, 1962, Digital Taiwan: Culture & Nature. 77 Program Note of De Lavallade-Ailey American Dance Company. Box 97, Folder 11. Collections of Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, the David W. Mullins Library at University of Arkansas. 78 The website of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Last Assessed on December 20, 2018. According to the record shown on the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater’s website and to Thomas DeFronz’s research, Mountainway Chant (sometimes Mountain Way Chant) was premiered in 1962. But, Mary Ellen Snodgrass’s The Encyclopedia of World Ballet indicates Glen Tetley choreographed this piece for the Ailey company in 1959. It is not clear the actual time this piece was choreographed but clearly its debut was in the 1962 tour. 79 Shea Murphy, Native American Modern Dance, 132 &145–6. 80 Ibid., 142. 81 My analysis of Revelations is based on the restaged version in Alvin Ailey: An Evening With The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, directed by Arthaus Musik, 2001, Kanopy, Premiere in 1960. https://osu.kanopy.com/video/alvin-ailey-evening-alvin-ailey- american-dan 82 “美國愛琳歌舞團表演.” 83 Priya Srinivasan, Sweating Saris: Indian Dance as Transnational Labor (: Temple University Press, 2011), 17. 84 Prevots, Dance for Export, 100. 85 It is not clear who Ying Fu was nor it is a pen name. This dance criticism on De Lavallade-Ailey Company’s concert is the only article published with this name among all reports and criticism from the 1950 to 1980. 86 “麗娃蘭扮演的印第安處女，讀在山頭，以舞體示出她忽然驚恐於奇怪的 自然力量，她痙攣地舞動著.” Ying, “布魯斯之夜 看美國愛琳歌舞劇團” [The Night of the Blue: Watching De Lavallade-Ailey American Dance Theatre], Central Daily (Taiwan), April 14, 1962, 中央日報全文影像資料庫. 87 Beth Levy, Frontier Figures: American Music and the Mythology of the American West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 15. 88 Kuo-chao Huang, “從第一國家到第二國家：原住民歌舞的符碼轉換與政 治歌唱（1945-1960）” [From the first nation to the second nation: Shifts of 123

symbolization and political voice of Indigenous performance, 1945-1960], «台灣原住民 研究論叢» 10 (December 2011): 37–65, http://dx.doi.org/10.29763/TISR.201112.0002. 89 Kuo-chao Huang, “Research on Mountain Tribe Cultural Villages, Tourist- Targeted Performances and Records (1950-1970)” [in Chinese], Taiwan Historica 67, n. 1 (March 2016): 73–114. 90 Martin, Introduction to the Dance, 89 (see Chap. 1, n. 55). 91 Manning, Modern Dance, Negro Dance, xiv–xv (see Chap. 1., n. 51) 92 “運動性很強的現代舞，來傳達了一些神話的古典.” Ying, “布魯斯之夜.” 93 “「愛琳」歌舞團表演了此間前所罕見的現代舞蹈，這一支充滿了「力 量」和「情感」的舞蹈團體，毫無保留地呈現出現代舞蹈奔放、自然的特徵.” “情 與力 愛琳歌舞團之舞風靡了二千觀眾” [Affects and Strength: De Lavallade-Ailey Dance Infatuating Two Thousand Audiences], United Daily (Taiwan), April 13 1962, , Udndata. 94 “表達出對生命的喜愛與贈惡.” Yao, “看愛琳之舞生命的贊頌” [Watching Ailey’s Dance Admiring Life], United Daily (Taiwan), April 14, 1962, Udndata. Yao Feng-Pan, a Taiwanese journalist and playwright then, and later a film director. In this review on Ailey’s show, he chose to use his given name instead of his full name. 95 Thomas DeFrantz, Dancing Revelations: Alvin Ailey's Embodiment of African American Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 3. 96 “美而空泛的…言之有物而仍不失其淳美的.” Yao, “看愛琳之舞生命的贊 頌” 97 “而我國的舞蹈仍大半停留在東洋芭蕾和「懷古而不能仿古」的民族舞蹈 上，觀乎「愛琳」這次的來台演出，這兒的舞蹈家們似應有所警惕和奮發.” Ibid. 98 DeFrantz, Dancing Revelations, 3. 99 Dance Advisory Panel Meeting Minute on March 97, 1964, page 13, Box 101 Folder 16. Collections of Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, the David W. Mullins Library at University of Arkansas. 100 James Truitte, “Dear Alvin,” Choreography and Dance 4, no. 1 (1996):10. 101 “情與力 愛琳歌舞團之舞風靡了二千觀眾” [Affects and Strength: De Lavallade-Ailey Dance Infatuating Two Thousand Audiences], United Daily (Taiwan), April 13 1962, Udndata. 102 Wilcox, Revolutionary Bodies, 6 (see Chap. 1, n. 41). 103 “情與力,” United Daily, April 13 1962. 104 Yao, “看愛琳之舞生命的贊頌”. 105 Ibid. 106 “因此直到[開始作畫的]十七年後，觀賞到首次在在我國表演的美國黑人 現代舞，我深深地被他們那種以舞踏的形式——簡單的動作，火焰般的韻律來描寫 生命的神秘所感動.” Tseng Pei-Yao, The Art of Tseng Pei-Yao: 1945-1989 [in Chinese] (Taipei, Taiwan: Art Venue, 1990), 186. 107 DeFrantz, Dancing Revelations, 17. 108 Quoted in DeFrantz, Dancing Revelations, 16–7. 124

109 See n. 106. 110 “「現代舞」對臺灣觀眾實在太陌生了…所以沒有激起太大的漣漪” “遠 東音樂社為什麼介紹艾文艾利和他的舞團”, Music & Audiophile 50 (August 1976):53. 111 “流浪藝人帶來熱鬧，他們走後此城又冷了” Cited in Lin Hwai-min, “艾文 艾利的「啟示」” [Alvin Ailey’s ‘Revelations.’], United Daily (Taiwan), June 29, 1977, Udndata. Lin adopted “Folk bards” from the description about Been Here and Gone in the 1962 program note. 112 “很多國外著名舞團到台來都令人覺得「名實不符」，這次艾文艾利舞團 將有怎麼樣的水準，恐怕只有到時觀眾才知道了.” Debby Chen, “朱蒂 哭泣 引人共 鳴的現代舞” [Judith, Cry, Resonant Modern Dance], United Daily (Taiwan), June 25, 1977, Udndata. 113 “李蒙舞蹈風格 電視明天座談” [Limon’s Dance Style Lectured on TV Tomorrow], United Daily (Taiwan), October 27, 1963, Udndata. 114 Kowal, Performing Change, 72. 115 Julia Foulkes, Modern Bodies: Dance and American Modernism from Martha Graham to Alvin Ailey (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 80. 116 Manning, Modern Dance, Negro Dance, xv; Copel, “José Limón”, 1–2 (see Chap. 1, n. 59). 117 Only translated Chinese titles were shown on the reports, so some of them are unrecognizable. 118 The specific programs of each night are unclear. 119 “用身體來表現思想” [Using body to express thoughts], United Daily (Taiwan), July 23, 1963, Udndata; “李蒙芭蕾舞團” [Limón ballet dance company], United Daily (Taiwan), October 17, 1963, Udndata; “革命性的芭蕾 美國現代舞蹈家李 蒙將率團來華訪問演出”[Revolutionary ballet: American modern dancer Limón will lead the troupe to visit China and perform], Central Daily (Taiwan), October 4, 1963, 中 央日報全文影像資料庫; Zi Chiu, “推行文化交流的李蒙芭蕾舞團” [Limón Ballet Dance Company pursuing cultural exchanges], Central Daily (Taiwan), October 18, 1963, 中央日報全文影像資料庫. 120 Shun-hsiao Chen, “臺灣報紙版面政治學初探: 1945 - 2004 重大事件的新 聞建構” [The Politics of the Layouts of Taiwanese Newspaper: The Construction of Major Event Reports, 1945–2004], Taiwan Historical Materials Studies 24 (2005):148– 74. 121 “李蒙舞蹈風格 電視明天座談,” United Daily (Taiwan), October 27, 1963, Udndata. 122 “抽象的表現 李蒙現代芭蕾 昨天示範表演” [Abstract expression: Limon’s Modern Ballet, demonstrated yesterday], United Daily (Taiwan), November 5, 1963, Udndata. 123 Chu Ge, “用動作寫詩 看李蒙現代芭蕾舞的感想” [Writing Piet with Movement: Thoughts on Watching Limón’s Modern Ballet], United Daily (Taiwan), November 7, 1963, Udndata. 125

124 Doris Humphrey, Passacaglia and Fugue ([1983] 2000), staged by Paul Dennis, performed by University of Massachusetts and Five College Dance Department dancers, https://vimeo.com/30084601 125 “人體的完美藉著結構上相互的關聯完全顯露了出來。這是人間，靈肉 的人間，隨時企望給出自己歡忻之感情的人間.” Chu, “用動作寫詩,” United Daily (Taiwan), November 7, 1963, Udndata. 126 “舞蹈並非全然的表露個人內心的激動，他們在結構中加入他們的理想.” Ibid. 127 “我心中懷念著的城市，應該便是這種樣子，原野的血液與城市相溝 通…永遠在敘述人類內心中真正的歡愉.” Ibid. 128 Yao, “看愛琳之舞生命的贊頌.” 129 “開始用一個階梯上的人群，整齊而 對稱地表達了一個均勻的美” Ibid. 130 “「為舞蹈而舞蹈」…這種趨向和成就，是值得讚賞的.” Ibid. 131 “台視今訪問舞蹈家李蒙” [Taiwan Television going interviewing Limón today], Central Daily (Taiwan), , November 8, 1963, 中央日報全文影像資料庫. 132 “表現人體的自然每和他們的舞姿美.” Ibid. 133 Chu, “用動作寫詩.” 134 Bartels, Speaking of the Moor: From Alcazar to Othello (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 4. 135 “猩紅的燈光和服飾，濃烈地表現出人性的情慾和狂暴…的確是一齣完 美動人而有深度的作品.” Yao Feng-pan, “看李蒙之舞” [Watching Limón’s Dance]. United Daily (Taiwan), November 6, 1963, Udndata. 136 Liu Yu-zhi, “力與韻律的美 談李蒙現代芭蕾舞的特色” [The Beauty of Power and Rhythm: discussions on the characteristics of Limon’s dance], Central Daily (Taiwan), November 8, 1963, 中央日報全文影像資料庫. 137 This analysis of Limón’s The Traitor is based on the recorded version in José Limón: Three Modern Dance Classics, directed by Harvey Hart (Pleasantville, NY: Video Artists International. 2002). 138 Manning, Modern Dance Negro Dance, 195–197. 139 “他以獨行、在地上扭曲、滾轉，表達叛徒內心的私慾、痛苦、矛盾… 這正是猶大反叛耶穌故事的寫照，也是對於私慾人性的表達.” “Liu, “力與韻律的 美.” 140 “在舞台上，主要的中心是人，人隨時構成不同的畫面.” “Chu, “用動作 寫詩.” 141 “我們的平劇根本就不需要佈景、騎馬、敲門都是用動作去象的。我們 有許多優良的傳統，只是被「發揚」糟了。” Ibid. 142 “這是一個企望給出感情的舞蹈團體，并非為著取悅，在台灣許多所謂 芭蕾舞，不過是影子戲一般的而已。” Ibid. 143 Chu Ge, “論現代中國繪畫” [Discussion on modern Chinese paintings], in « 視覺生活», edited by Wang Yunwu (Taipei, Taiwan: The Commercial Press, 1968), 1–21. 126

This essay was first published in Taiwan Shin Sheng Daily News on July 12, 1967. 144 Ibid., 19. 145 Ibid., 21. 146 “她在美國的奮鬥及成績，很值得國人引以為傲.” Chen, “朱蒂 哭泣 引人 共鳴的現代舞” 147 “遠東音樂社為什麼介紹艾文艾利和他的舞團”, Music & Audiophile, August 1976, 54. 148 Ibid. 149 “這次表演已完美表達出現代舞不拘形式而又強調氣氛的特色.” Quoted in “情與力,” United Daily (Taiwan), April 13, 1962, Udndata. 150 Quoted in Li Xiaohua, «劉鳳學訪談» [Interview with Liu Feng-Shueh.] (Taipei, Taiwan: China Times, 1998), 77. 151 Kowal, Performing Change, 79-80. 152 Chen, “Minzu Wudao.” 153 “舞蹈是透過人體的表現。生活於現代社會的人，已完全受到現代化環 境的影響，如要求將中國古典舞源源本本的表現已不可，因此在今天講求時間，空 間的能社會，應將古典舞以現代舞的方法表現出來.” Quoted in Feng, “劉鳳學談舞” [Liu Feng-Shueh Talking About Dance], Central Daily (Taiwan), August 28, 1969, 中央 日報全文影像資料庫. 154 “依據我國古代樂舞及國術中的動作，透過抽象與寫實的表現手法，非 對稱多於對稱及空間立體化的現代美學觀念，強調主題動作的變化(即表現運動)而 創作的。使我國傳統舞蹈藝術和創作相結合，產生具有傳統精神的「中國現代 舞」。” Quoted in Li, «劉鳳學訪談», 78. Originally in the 1967 program note. 155 “情與力,” United Daily, April 13, 1962, Udndata. 156 Yao, “看李蒙之舞.” 157 “返璞歸真.” Yao, “看愛琳之舞生命的贊頌”. 158 Jinlin Hwang, «歷史、身體、國家: 近代中國的身體形成» [History, Body, Nation: The Formation of Body in the Early Modern China] (Taipei, Taiwan: Linking, 2001), 28. 159 Chen, “Minzu Wudao.”

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Chapter 3

The Cultural Markings of American Modernity

On December 16, 1978, Cloud Gate Dance Theatre’s Legacy (1978) premiered in artistic director Lin Hwai-min’s hometown in southern Taiwan. Early in the morning, news from Washington, DC announced the termination of official relations between the United States and Taiwan to renormalize the U.S.-China relationship. This event provoked massive anxiety in Taiwan. That evening during the Cloud Gate performance, a majority of the Chiayi audience experienced a modern dance concert for the first time. Their national consciousness was awakened while they watched the last scene “Festival,” in which a 30-foot red curtain dropped from the ceiling while the dancers waved body-length thick red ribbons under a tiger’s watchful eye, presenting a

Chinese ritual to celebrate overcoming collective challenges (see Figure 3.1).1 Before this scene, the audience had taken a journey with the dancers on stage which compared the ancients’ labor with their own: fighting all the difficulties they had faced during their crossing of the Taiwan Strait. These dancers held hands close together in a circle, swinging their upper bodies all around with grounded steps in “Call of the New Land,” as if collectively struggling while supporting each other. Some lift others to expand their sail while fighting the heavy waves in “Crossing the Black Water.” They circled and lifted their arms with tension, extending their whole bodies parallel to the ground while 128

Figure 3.1 “Festival” in Lin Hwai-min’s Legacy in 1985. Performed by Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan. Photo by Lee Ming-hsuan. Provided by Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan. jumping midair. They yelled as if exhausting all their energy, to show the heavy labor of farming and building in “Taming the New Land.” Taiwanese dance critic and historian

Ya-ping Chen indicates that “in the stormy age of Taiwan, the same heart beats [evoked by the percussion beats] transcended time and space, as well as the boundary between the stage and the auditorium, tightly connecting the audiences and the dancers through

[presenting] their ancients’ striving stories.”2 Beyond the temporal coincidence connecting the premiere of Legacy and the termination of U.S.-R.O.C. relations, the era itself set the stage for a new Taiwanese national consciousness through moving bodies.

As Taiwanese freedoms further receded under the Kuomintang’s martial rule, American modern dance logics provided an aesthetic avenue that would not get choreographers

129 imprisoned, should they employ them. As a result, Taiwanese choreographers appropriated tactics of abstraction for political and nationalist ends.

Reflecting the title of this chapter, the cultural markings of American dance modernity that American dance diplomacy transmitted to Taiwan provided the Taiwanese a means of reinforcing their nationalist ideologies through dancing bodies. I use “cultural markings” to refer to bodily inscribed ideologies that one may not be aware of but that are revealed through embodied practices. These cultural markings were possible for a couple of reasons. First, American modern dance choreographers reiterated social ideologies regarding national consciousness and gender through their dancing bodies.

Second, the nature of cultural diplomacy transformed the various discourses of American modern dance into nationalist discourses when the American dance companies’ members represented the United States on state-sponsored tours. Third, the modernization history initiated by the government as nationalist projects in China and Taiwan made modernity and nationalism inseparable for the Taiwanese. Therefore, while the Taiwanese faced national crises, their dancing bodies became a significant means of expression regarding the nation.

Following the previous chapter’s discussion on the influence of American modern dance on Taiwanese dance and the modernization of Liu Feng-Shueh’s Chinese dance, this chapter further explicates how dances responded to and shaped Taiwanese society during the Global Cold War. To recap, the idea of the Global Cold War indicated a global competition between the U.S. and Soviet blocs for dominant modes of modernization and social order while other countries benefited from negotiating with the two alliance

130 leaders.3 The Kuomintang-ruled Taiwan, or “Free China,” played a key role for the U.S.- led alliance in representing freedom against Communist China. Within this global framework of competition between two competing kinds of modernization, Taiwanese dance practitioners took up training techniques and choreographic choices adopted from

American modern dance to reiterate ideas about the nation against the officially defined nationalism during the local martial law-ruling era. In this way, the Taiwanese choreographers bore, utilized, and expanded the Cold War rhetoric of freedom.

When the anti-communist policies of the United States and other alliance members changed in the early 1970s, the Taiwanese people faced a tough socio-political situation that played out through gendered power. I argue that the aesthetic politics that I find in the U.S. State Department-sponsored tours of Paul Taylor Dance Company,

Martha Graham Dance Company, and Nikolais Dance Theatre from 1967 to 1979 introduced American dance modernity that Taiwanese audiences interpreted as an idealized masculinity to Taiwanese audiences that, in turn, influenced Lin Hwai-min’s choreography. In this sense, the Taiwanese perceptions of American masculinity were transformed into nationalist discourses related to Taiwan’s geopolitical situation.

Through Taiwanese dancing bodies, Taiwanese choreographers adopted the American idea of masculinity to express nationalist calls for self-reliance relating to the national crises in the 1970s, while also adopting technique and the abstract expression of

American modern dance to avoid censorship during this martial law ruling era. These

Taiwanese choreographers’ nationalist calls (apart from the official nationalism that focused on the authenticity of Chineseness) emphasized new choreographic methods and

131 techniques to represent contemporary Taiwan, and sought to contribute to an ideal nationhood, as free expression of citizenship. In this way, their dances, aligning with other direct and indirect social movements starting in the 1970s, contributed to the loosening of the military ruling and welcomed the dawn of freedom—the 1987 lifting of martial law.

The connection between masculinity and patriotism in Taiwan was built prior to these American modern dance events. The well-known Mandarin children’s song Zhi Yao

Wo Zhang Da (只要我長大), meaning “as long as I grow up,” exemplifies this connection of masculine behaviors to being a soldier to fight for the nation. This song was composed by Bai Jingshan (白景山) in 1950 and won an award from the Chinese

Writer's & Artist's Association. The translation of the first stanza of the lyrics is:

Elder brothers and Father are great.

They honor our family.

They suppress the enemy for the nation.

They laugh for being soldiers.4

In the following section, “elder brothers and Father” is replaced by “Uncles” and “the enemy” is replaced to directly indicate the Chinese Communist Party and the Soviet

Union. Gender-sociologist Ying-Chao Kao indicates this masculine image of male soldiers to fight for the nation was incorporated into the Kuomintang’s nationalism discourse.5 Specific to the compulsory enlistment of males in the since

1949, this incorporation of masculinity into nationalism successfully twisted Taiwanese people’s concerns about participation in the army from Hao Nang Bu Dang Bing (好男不

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當兵), meaning that good men do not become soldiers, to Dang Bing Cai Shi Nan Ren

(當兵才是真男人), meaning that only soldiers are real men. This award-winning and widely promoted song and these common sayings exemplified the nationalist connections to martial masculinity in postwar Taiwan.

While the Kuomintang’s masculinity was defined by male military service in protection of the nation, the white masculinity of American modern dance highlighted the individual’s subjectivity with a sense of control and a religious spirit. Film theorist

Richard Dyer describes the ideal American white man as “a hard, lean body, a dieted or trained one, an upright, shoulders back, unrelaxed posture, tight rather than loose movement,” and “the white body and its handling display the fact of the spirit within.”6

Quoting this, dance scholar Ramsay Burt expands this idea of white masculinity to specify how underlying morality and personal control were based on Christianity.7 This religious emphasis on self-control, as Burt asserts, shaped both male and female

American modern dance progenitors, including Ted Shawn, José Limón, and Martha

Graham. These artists developed their dancing techniques to train dancers to control their bodies to execute specific aesthetics. However, this individual connection regarding

American white masculinity does not necessarily relate to the nation as a collective.

Instead, it addresses trained, individually controlled physicality, representing one’s own strong mind which upholds American individualism. This idea of masculinity is distinct from the Kuomintang’s military masculinity which relates to serving the nation without free will. In this sense, freedom of speech distinguishes American white masculinity from the Kuomintang’s.

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To further discuss how Taiwanese dancers and choreographers reconnected

American masculinity to their nationalist discourses through their dancing bodies during the late 1960s to 1970s, I use archival research and oral history. I analyze newspaper reports and dance criticism, archival materials including programs, photos, films of repertories, and oral history to explore how gender and racial representations of

American modern dancers were entwined with the Taiwanese perception regarding the

US during the Cold War era. I assert that this history of dance diplomacy not only represents the blooming of American dance modernity in a way that fit local contexts instead of being accepted as a universal whole, but also contributed to developing a certain bodily expression that calls for and builds upon local national consciousness through systemized dancing technique. The international transit of American modern dance was carried out by American dance companies’ tours and also by Chinese elites who traveled between Asia and the United States during this time. These local traces and global influences opened new aesthetics for Taiwanese dancers and audiences to overcome in addressing the national crises and to grow nationalism by embodying local history. In short, this entangled diplomatic history awakened Taiwanese national consciousness and imagination through dancing.

The 1970s and Postwar Generation of the Taiwanese

During the 1970s, Taiwan experienced significant changes regarding international recognition of its status as a nation. This affected its nationalism through various channels, such as literature, painting, and dance. The 1970s was a critical period in modern Taiwanese history, littered with multiple national crises. The Taiwanese

134 sociologist A-chin Hsiao terms it “the Axial Period.”8 He indicates that the shared postwar education experiences in the 1960s and social experiences of the national crises in the 1970s created what he terms the postwar generation. These national crises, including the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands dispute and the break in U.S.-R.O.C. relations, caused the elites in this postwar generation to distrust the Kuomintang. These collective feelings of distrust led to a variety of nationalist discourses as well as derivative cultural and political actions that determined the future of Taiwan.

As I discussed in Chapter 2, a similar trend to what dance historian Emily Wilcox calls kinesthetic nationalism,9 the aesthetics of forms and movement vocabularies that contribute to the formation of belonging within the nation, was applied in both Mainland

China and Taiwan after the Chinese Civil War (1945-1949). However, the two governments and their opposite positions in the Global Cold War shaped their kinesthetic nationalism differently. After the Kuomintang’s 1949 retreat, Chiang Kai-Shek secured

Taiwan as well as several islands in the Taiwan Strait, including , Mazu, and

Penghu, to prepare for future confrontations. Because of the Kuomintang’s participation in World War II against Japan, it was able to play a significant role in the United Nations.

During the following two decades, the R.O.C., as “Free China,” in the United Nations, benefited from the United States -led alliance in the Global Cold War struggle. However, since the U.S. normalization of relations with the P.R.C. under President Richard Nixon, the R.O.C. gradually lost United States’ support, and this led to two significant changes specific to international recognition. The Taiwanese people reacted to these changes through their discourses about the nation’s future and the related national consciousness.

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The first event that initiated changes in Taiwan’s international status was the

P.R.C. taking over as the “real” China in the U.N. During the 1960s, the P.R.C. worked to terminate Taiwan’s U.N. membership, which resulted in a series of political . In

1961 and 1968, U.N. Resolution 1668 was ratified to protect the R.O.C.’s representation against Communist China by requiring a two-thirds majority vote for Chinese representation to change. However, on October 25, 1971, Resolution 2758 was passed with 76 votes against 34. This resolution recognized P.R.C. as “the only legitimate representative of China to the United Nations.”10 This significant change fundamentally challenged the Kuomintang government’s legitimization of ruling Taiwan, as well as its long claim on the status of the nation-state. The Taiwanese people started to be aware of the needs of ideological discourses about the nation other than what the Kuomintang had been claiming. They lost trust in the Kuomintang government.

The second significant event that triggered the Taiwanese’s anxiety about the future of the nation was Richard Nixon’s trip to China. Before he served as president,

Nixon visited Taiwan six times. Chiang and the Taiwanese people always considered

Nixon a R.O.C. supporter, especially against Communist China. So when Nixon announced his visit to the P.R.C., R.O.C. Premier Yen Jiagan (嚴家淦) stated that “[they] truly felt shocked.”11 An editorial in Central Daily stated that “Nixon’s visit to China will undoubtedly leave negative influences on the Free Asia people’s anti-communist will.”12

The Student Council of National Taiwan University published an open letter to Nixon, indicating that “Nixon’s choice was unwise and irresponsible for history!”13 Nixon’s visit

136 to China dealt a heavy blow to U.S.-R.O.C. relations. The Taiwanese felt betrayed and the anxiety led them to question Kuomintang-built national identities.

In addition to the new U.S.-R.O.C relations, the U.S. diplomatic relations with

Japan also triggered Taiwanese anxiety and distrust of the Kuomintang’s rule. Following

Nixon’s visit to China, the territorial dispute of the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands eroded the

Taiwanese people’s confidence regarding working relations in the U.S.-Taiwan-Japan triangle. The Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands are deserted islands located 113 miles northwest of

Taiwan. Three months prior to the Treaty of Shimonoseki, signed after the First Sino-

Japan War (1894–1895), the Japanese government claimed these islands as part of the

Okinawa Prefecture. The Qing Empire (1636-1911) did not recognize this claim.

Nevertheless, these islands were ceded to Japan according to the treaty and were controlled by the Japanese government. After the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–

1945), while Taiwan was returned to the R.O.C., the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands fell to the

United States, as part of the Ryukyu Islands. When the United States terminated its occupation of Okinawa and the Ryukyu Island chain, the Senkaku Islands were returned to Japan instead of Taiwan. This result triggered Taiwanese anti-United States sentiments as it signaled that the United States preferred strong relations with Japan rather with

Taiwan. While the Kuomintang’s re-Sinicization polices portrayed Japan as an evil colonizer, the United States, which used to be a staunch supporter of Taiwan, chose to stand with Japan instead. This was confusing and unacceptable for the Taiwanese. The

Taiwanese people started to doubt the effectiveness of the Kuomintang and to advocate

137 for nationalist discourses that diverged from the government’s official Chinese nationalism.

The proverbial last straw was the termination of official U.S.-R.O.C. official relations, and concomitantly, the normalization of U.S.-P.R.C. relations. On December

16, 1978, President Jimmy Carter announced the normalization of U.S.-China relations.

This meant that the United States no longer recognized the R.O.C. as the legitimate representative of China. Hundreds of Taiwanese protested in front of the Headquarters

Support Activity, Taipei, destroying thirteen cars and shattering windows. On December

27, Warren Minor Christopher, then the Vice Secretary of State, as part of a U.S. delegation, met with the Kuomintang. Angry Taiwanese activists threw eggs and mud at the car that transported Leonard S. Ungar, the last U.S. ambassador to the R.O.C. This event terminated the decades of dependence on United States support and loosened

Kuomintang control over Taiwan as the people questioned its capacity to govern and to conduct diplomatic relations. This led to the beginnings of a democratic Taiwan with attempts at political and social reforms.

This series of national crises in the 1970s, as Hsiao argues, gradually changed

Taiwanese national identity. After the verbal silence in the 1960s, Taiwanese elites started to promote various nationalist discourses, whether they advocated for Leftist

Chinese nationalism or local Taiwanese nationalism. Diverse voices about

Chinese/Taiwanese nationalism rose in the 1970s. These voices took on a variety of forms, resulting first from literature and then expanding to other channels, such as visual arts and academic publications. Dance was one such channel. Next, I will explain the

138 development of these forms, especially those influenced by American modernism and choreographic experiments. I aim to elaborate how the forms related to American modernism bore the nationalist discourses and how the 1970s national crises stimulated these nationalist discourses.

Because of the distrust caused by the national crises mentioned above, the loosely organized Left-wing social movements emerged in the early 1970s and blossomed in

1976 with the Left-wing magazine China Tide (1976–1979).14 China Tide collected both political criticism and cultural followings, such as the Xiangtu Literature Movement, a social and literary movement that argued that Taiwan was the true mother land instead of

Mainland China—a line of thought the Kuomintang favored. Taiwanese sociologist Jin

Jou Kou argued that the 1970s was a new start for social ideologies after the political and cultural rupture in the 1960s because the Taiwanese readily and happily accepted

American cultural exports. These included upper-class and middle-class cultural and educational institutions, and arguably, dance performance.15 However, I question this view of historical rupture. As I discussed in Chapter 2, the Taiwanese audiences accepted

American modern dance modernity as free artistic expression but not necessarily the aesthetic statement as a whole. Because of the Kuomintang’s strict control over freedom of speech, the underlying changes in social order and control tended to develop in non- verbal forms, including concert dance. Following the previous chapter, I show that

American modern dance companies’ tours in the late 1960s and the 1970s invited

Taiwanese dancers to explore expressive forms linked to nationalist discourses. These unanticipated U.S. contributions to Taiwanese dance modernization were entangled with

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Taiwanese history and the change in Taiwanese international status. Within this context,

Taiwanese choreography awakened and strengthened national consciousness and imagination, which in turn blossomed in response to the national crises in the 1970s.

Paul Taylor Dance Company and Greenbergian Formalism

On March 2, 1967, the small troupe of the Paul Taylor Dance Company, including

Paul Taylor, Dan Wagoner, Carolyn Adams, Daniel Williams, Jane Kosminsky, Janet

Aaron, Molly Reinhart, and Eileen Croplay, arrived in Taiwan from Hong Kong.16 On the evenings of March 7 and 8, the Paul Taylor Dance Company presented five dances to packed Taiwanese houses. Each audience numbered two thousand spectators.17 The program included Taylor’s dances 3 Epitaphs (1956), Aureole (1962), Post Meridian

(1965), Duet (1964), and Junction (1961). Lin recalled that Taylor’s touring was

“significant to the ‘used-to-be cultural desert’” in Taipei.18 Lin stated that during the late

1960s, the cultural circle in Taipei, Taiwan, was surprisingly active, including the Paul

Taylor Company’s and Al Chungliang Huang’s visits. Some young painters, poets, and musicians “created new things for no reason…and all their experiments were possible.”19

This social and cultural atmosphere was welcoming to Taylor’s troupe.

One month prior to their arrival, the US Information Service in Taiwan announced the Paul Taylor Dance Company’s cultural presentation program through newspapers with a photo of Aureole, in which Taylor shows his masculine virtuosity with a leap into the air. His open arms showcase his muscular chest and his raised knee suggests endurance and expressive capacity.20 This image echoed the title of the short

140 introductory essay of Taylor’s choreography—“Paul Taylor’s Dance Expressing New

Ideas.”21 This essay was cited into a press conference one day before the troupe’s arrival.

In the press conference, Taylor stated that his works shared similar ideas with Limón’s dances though the latter belonged to the previous generation of American choreographers. He emphasized that the significant function of dance was abstract expression, and the dances were “his own creation of a new idea, which, like music, cannot be represented with words and requires the audiences’ own interpretation.”22 By distinguishing himself from Limón, with whom Taiwanese audiences were familiar, and touting his choreographic experimentation, Taylor provided an image of experimentalism that was similar to the Taiwanese cultural trend Lin identified in his review in the late

1960s.

Taylor’s Greenbergian formalist perspective on his choreographic logic influenced how the Taiwanese report discussed Taylor’s dances. However, this influence was formed in a more complicated way. American art critic Clement Greenberg addressed the main characteristic of postwar American modernism as art for art’s sake.23

Greenberg’s perspective on artistic autonomy shaped the work of American postwar modern dance choreographers, especially those based in New York, and their relation to

U.S. society.24 In addition to Greenberg’s influence, dance historian Gay Morris argues that American choreographers Merce Cunningham and Alwin Nikolais adopted and developed objectivism, a philosophy focusing on “the activity of moving,”25 and embodied those ideas through their choreography during the postwar era.26 Morris’s term objectivism is associated with the formalist idea of objecthood. Art theorist and critic

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Michael Fried proposed the theory of objecthood to explain the spectatorship of minimalist art, which refers to the spectator’s projection into the art object to form meaning.27 Serge Guilbaut termed the idea of art for art’s sake as Greenbergian formalism, “a theory that was somewhat flexible as it began clearly to define its position within the new social and aesthetic order that was taking shape during and after the war.”28 That is, Greenbergian formalism and abstract expressionism were not merely a set of ideologies about art; they were embedded into the American postwar ideologies of social order, especially “those of the progressive liberal ideology,” by highlighting freedom of expression.29 They connected artistic freedom to Cold War politics by pointing out that “Freedom was the symbol most enthusiastically promoted by the new liberalism during the Cold War” and “Expressionism became the expression of the difference between a free society and totalitarianism.”30 In this sense, Guilbaut seemed to restate the public media’s interpretation of U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower’s postwar cultural diplomatic policies.

Guilbaut overstated the role of abstract modernity in American arts diplomacy.

First, the Dance Panel considered various genres, including ballet, folk, musical, and modern dance, though they recommended American modern dance and ballet companies more often than others. Based on the Dance Panel’s recommendations, and guided by the

Operations Coordinating Board and CIA, the U.S. State Department sent ballet and folk dance companies abroad. Second, the Dance Panel tended not to recommend abstract dances, such as Merce Cunningham’s dance, for their purposes; their opinion that foreign audiences were not sophisticated enough to understand Cunningham showed bigotry in

142 the highest levels of the U.S. government.31 This evidence shows that sending dances of abstract expression was the result of selection from many choices. The local reception, as shown by Taiwanese reactions, indeed read these toured dances in the sense of

Greenberg’s rhetoric of freedom, but not necessarily in terms of formalism.

Taiwanese reactions to Taylor’s company were mixed. Some local press comments on Taylor’s dances were close to Guilbaut’s analysis of the connection between abstraction and the U.S. diplomatic agenda. A China Times report about the press conference claimed that Taylor “did not want to use jargon, such as ‘abstract,’ that was fashionable in dance field; instead, he only stated that ‘modern dance is an expansion of the possibility of dance.’”32 It further commented that modern dance “is ‘freedom of imagination’ in terms of dance creation.’”33 With this perception, Taylor’s introduction about modern dance was perceived as art for art’s sake—to self-critique and to show the freedom of creation. In contrast, Central Daily commented that watching Taylor’s concert is “like looking at a modern painting, reflecting [the audience’s] individual

‘creation’” and thus “everyone may draw a completely different conclusion.”34 Art critic

Chu Ge concluded his review by stating that “I believe [Taylor’s dance] will further influence modern sculpture.”35 These two comments connected Taylor’s dance to modern painting and sculpture to emphasize spectators’ own active engagement to interpret. This kind of engagement is similar to Fried’s theory of objecthood, which was in turn inspired by abstract modernist art. The diverse readings of Taylor’s dance may or may not have associated his work with abstract expression in American modern dance but all seemed to react to Taylor’s emphasis on newness and freedom of creation. That is to say, the kind of

143 freedom that American modern dance brought to the Taiwanese audience was not necessarily associated with formalism or abstract expression but with free artistic creation in general.

Beyond references to abstraction, by highlighting Taylor’s athletic background and his physical height, the Taiwanese reports produced an image of strong American white masculinity as a model. On March 3, 1967, the United Daily showed a photo of

Taylor’s group taken at the press conference. Taylor’s 6’1” frame stood out in the group.

His straight posture and serious facial expression gives off a sense of control. On March

3, China Times ran a photo of Taylor mid-leap, his body flexing and extending into a posture full of joy.36 This photo highlights Taylor’s physical ability and describes Taylor as “a tall and muscular dancer.”37 On March 4, China Times announced the Taylor

Company’s upcoming visit and celebrated Taylor’s background as a competitive swimmer.38 All these images and introductions promoted Taylor as a tall Anglo-Saxon male dancer with an exceptional physique. This imagery linked these racial and bodily characteristics of strength with the conception of a winner and a leader.

With the title “The Dance of the King” (王者之舞), Chu highlighted Taylor’s powerful masculinity.39 Chu described Taylor’s dance as wang zhe zhi wu—the dance of the king. By describing Taylor as wang zhe, Chu shows his admiration of Taylor’s stage persona by stating that Taylor’s presence “filled the stage with an atmosphere of devotion…[and] his dance expressed a kind of open and free aspiration.”40 “King,” used to refer to only males in Chinese, does not refer here to the king of an empire but as a winner with his captivating stage presence expressing humor and sincerity. This image

144 was consistent with Taiwan’s image of the United States during the Cold War. Both imaginaries of the United States and Taylor were seen as sincere and open leaders, sometimes humorous or even nice. Chu’s description of Taylor’s dance as the king’s dance represented the United States, the leader of the free bloc in the Cold War. Chu’s title aligns Taylor with this gendered image of masculinity and power and praises his stage persona as well as his representation of the United States. Taylor’s gendered image thus echoed the long financial and military support the United States afforded to Taiwan.

This relationship highlighted the United States as a reliable and strong leader, and thus framed the Taiwanese conception of an ideal man/nation as a masculine and powerful one.

Besides Taylor’s white masculinity, Chu considered how Taylor’s dance echoed modern American painting and exemplified dance as “a pure expression of vision.”41 He compared Taylor’s dance to Limón’s tours and stated:

In terms of dance, [Limón’s show] was to narrate more than to express. While

Concerto Grosso was a piece of pure ballet, other dances leaned to the side of

‘dance drama.’ They reminded us of the American abstract paintings in the early

period, comparable to the natural scenes […] Paul Taylor’s modern ballet is, in

contrast, completely expressive…There was no [backgrounded stage setting], as if

he feared that would spoil the purity of dance itself.42

Chu, as a painter and art critic, was aware of Greenbergian formalism, and as his comments shows, he appreciated Taylor’s objectivist dance, addressing “activities of moving” in contrast to “expressionist dance.”43 In his earlier review on Limón’s touring

145 show, Chu addressed the minimal stage design and costumes.44 Four years later, he highlighted similar artistic choices. Furthermore, Chu applied the same view on the relationship between dance movement and music by saying that the wholeness of the dance “is not from the dancers’ ‘keeping up with’ the melody of the music; instead, all the movements were born from the music.”45 Chu’s emphasis on minimalized visual elements on stage, and the wholeness of dance and music, shows his acceptance of

American artistic modernism, which by the late 1960s was stripped down to minimalist aesthetics.

Chu’s review also reflects the spectators’ free interpretation that Fried’s objecthood theory highlights. For example, he viewed the dancers in their full-body stretchy costumes and covered faces in 3 Epitaphs as ghosts who “brought certain theatrical metaphors and mythic meaning.”46 Chu intentionally highlighted the freedom given to the audience in making an interpretation, rather than attempts to find the meaning that the choreographer intended to produce. Therefore, he chose a way that loosely showed his personal interpretation and emphasized his feeling more than his reading of the narrative. In this sense, Chu’s emphasis on the artistic rather than on the narrative avoided censorship as if he advocated for apolitical artistic freedom but did not challenge the official control over speech. It also let audience members think and interpret freely.

In addition to the formalist characteristics in objectivism and art for art’s sake reflected in Chu’s review, Taylor’s choreography inspired Lin Lee-chen, the founder of

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Legend Lin Dance Theatre, to pay attention to the use of stage space. Lin recalled what she saw at that evening:

Every movement of [Taylor and his dancers] was clear and discrete [in terms of]

how the bodies created the lines on stage. Moreover, no spot on the stage,

including the corners was touched carelessly. Once the dancer touches a space,

[this touching] must be for a certain reason.47

Lin’s reading regarding movement and space gave her a whole new understanding about concert dance. She addressed the mysterious experience of watching Taylor’s dance in another interview in The Walker (2015), a documentary about Legend Lin Dance Theatre.

As she emphasized, Taylor’s consideration of the stage space in his choreography gave the Taiwanese choreographer a new perspective about dance. That is, stage space is a part of choreography in addition to limb movements to explore and express. Taylor’s dance expanded ideas about choreographic uses of space for Taiwanese artists.

Taylor’s landmark piece Aureole (1962) best showcases such use of space. Taylor departed from modernist music and formalist experiments by creating Aureole to George

Frederic Handel’s baroque music. Aureole is a 20-minute non-narrative piece that creates a lighthearted atmosphere. In 1980, Lin Hwai-min recalled that this piece interested the

Taiwanese audience during Taylor Company’s 1967 concert tour.48 The dancers in

Aureole effortlessly leap with their uplifted chest and open arms, showing joyfulness and lightness. They run across the stage in lowered centers and wider steps, swinging their arms and twisting their upper body, showing their physicality and enlarged personal space in a calm attitude, as if at ease.49 They form lines, triangles, and squares, as they

147 run on and off stage from the wings, creating geometrical shapes rather than representing emotions. The continuous changes of formation are reminiscent of fluid kaleidoscope- like images. Spatial design in this work showcases Taylor’s choreographic thinking about space, which shows formalist ideas that dance as an art form is about dance for dance’s sake, not representation.

Taylor’s formalist thinking about space in his choreography, like his experimental thinking about dance as a modern art form, provided Taiwanese audiences with an objectivist perspective regarding choreographic strategies. Before his arrival, creating new movement vocabularies occupied a major part of Taiwanese choreographers’ thinking about dance. From the 1950s minzu wudao, in which choreographers appropriated various styles of folksy movement, to Liu Feng-Shueh’s Chinese modern dance, which adopted movements from Chinese operas and martial arts, the development of movement vocabularies played a key role in Taiwanese choreography. Similar to Lin

Lee-Chen’s noticing Taylor’s usage of stage space, the Taiwanese utilized more formation changes in their concert dances in the 1970s. I will discuss T’sai Jui-Yueh’s work as an example later in this chapter. This choreographic change shows that Taylor’s modernist innovations aimed to treat dance as an independent art form, a characteristic element of American postwar dance modernism transmitted through Taylor’s Asian tour.

Martha Graham and Her Technique of the Body

Unlike Paul Taylor’s objectivist dance, Martha Graham brought her epic narrative choregraphy that emphasizes the human psyche to the Asian audience. Graham’s role as a leader, her choreographic narratives regarding her male dancers’ roles, and her dance

148 technique leading to powerful movements inspired Taiwanese dance practitioners to connect artistic expressions to masculinity in dance and to nationalist discourses. Lin

Hwai-min’s early creations exemplify Graham’s direct influences on Taiwan during the

1970s. Graham technique became the fundamental training for Lin’s Cloud Gate Dance

Theatre. Also, Graham’s two themes of choreographic narratives—Greek myths and

Americana—indirectly provided Lin and other Taiwanese critics reflective room to reimagine nationalism in Taiwan.

A leading figure in American modern dance, Graham created her technique as one of the early American modern dance training systems. In 1926, she founded the Martha

Graham Center for Contemporary Dance in . Many American dancers, including Paul Taylor and Merce Cunningham, enrolled in her school and performed in her dance company. Her technique emphasizes contracting and releasing of the torso’s core muscles. Dance critic Marcia B. Siegel describes how Graham “kept movement close to the center of the body; the dancer had to do more than move to another spot to change her relationship to others,” and in this way “Graham made dancers use their tension, show their power.”50 Graham’s movement vocabulary and technique builds trainees’ physical ability to control and to articulate powerful movements on stage, particularly through women’s bodies. Her positioning of men in her choreography starting in the 1940s introduced a sense of masculine power for those characters, as well as directly heteronormative relationships between the lead roles.

Graham’s belief in psychoanalytical theories presented a universalist perspective of mentality to Taiwanese audiences. A distinguishing characteristic of Graham’s

149 choreography was her Freudian focus on pathos or “the psyche,” which was considered universal experience at the time.51 Of Graham’s Greek legend-based choreographies,

Siegel states, “The psyche [Graham] probes is universal, interpreted by Freud, Jung, and the explicators of myth.”52 Siegel admires Graham’s dance by stating that “Graham’s dance is above all personal, and because it reflects a far-reaching mind and sensibility most of it traverses the nebulous line between work that is merely insular or eccentric and work of genius.”53 Although Siegel indicates that “Graham’s dances speak of the

American temperament,”54 they also, to Siegel, seem to transcend various cultural boundaries among American people from different racial heritages, genders and geographical regions. This belief traveled with Graham to Taiwan.

Graham’s 1974 trip to Asia was not her first state-sponsored tour. Graham was the first choreographer the Dance Panel recommended to send abroad in 1955. The U.S. State

Department Panel assigned Graham’s dance company to tour Southeast Asia, rather than acquiescing to Graham’s own request to tour Europe where the company could tour for profit. The Dance Panel’s decision to send her to Southeast Asia seemed to echo

President Eisenhower’s concerns about expanding communism in the region.55 In this sense, Graham’s 1955–1956 state-sponsored tour aligned with U.S. postwar propaganda that sought to establish friendly relations with Southeast Asian countries and to showcase the United States’ postwar achievement of modernization.

Graham’s company did not tour Taiwan in 1955–1956. Its state-sponsored tour arrived in Taiwan in 1974. Graham’s visit to Taiwan was received as a legend’s arrival for the Taiwanese audience instead of a diplomatic tour. Graham herself personally

150 visited in 1969 and mentioned that she might bring her company with her the next year.56

Prior to this personal visit, the Chinese American choreographer Yen Lu Wong, who had attended Graham’s school in New York, gave a workshop introducing the Graham technique (I will further discuss Wong in Chapter 4). Lin Hwai-min, the most well- known Taiwanese choreographer, also introduced the Graham technique after coming back from the United States in the early 1970s. Therefore, the Taiwanese dancers were not unfamiliar with Martha Graham’s background and her iconic position in American modern dance. Taiwanese familiarity with Graham fueled their excitement in seeing

Graham and her dancers perform.

The local agent, Far East Art Management, greatly valued Graham’s tour.

Graham’s shows in Taiwan were not presented in Zhongshan Hall; instead, they were presented in the Dr. Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall, the largest multi-functional hall at that time. Taiwanese dancer and dance educator Cheng Shu-gi recalled that Cloud Gate’s

1973 and 1974 concerts were still in Zhongshan Hall, where they had to set up additional light stands for concerts.57 She was surprised that Graham’s shows were allowed to be presented in the new theater. Cheng’s surprise did not mean she valued Graham’s dance less; instead, it shows that Graham’s tour was highly valued, more than the already successful Cloud Gate. Lin Hwai-min drew from his training in Graham technique in leading Cloud Gate, suggesting that Graham technique was highly revered. Her visit became the most important event for the Taiwanese dancers, and in extension, for

Taiwanese elites.

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In addition to Taiwanese audiences’ anticipation of Graham’s visit and the attention paid by the local agent, local cultural and art circles also promoted Graham’s tour. Lin translated one section of Graham’s autobiography and introduced her as his mentor.58 Wenyi (文藝) also published a translated article by dance critic Fernau Hall to introduce Graham and her dance.59 In addition to the translations, Lin himself also composed an article to reinforce Graham’s position in American modern dance.60 With other numerous reports announcing Graham’s tour, these articles increased the

Taiwanese’s expectation of Graham and her dance as a legend of American modern dance.

The Taiwanese government also valued Graham’s impact. On August 29, the

Ministry of Education held a ceremony, in which Minister Chiang Yenshi (蔣彥士) awarded Graham the Medal of the Arts to acknowledge her contribution to the field and

“her [deep] influences on the development of our country’s dance field.”61 Her name and her dance technique were well-known in Taiwan through the choreographers I mentioned. Even before Graham’s actual concerts, the atmosphere in Taiwan was electrified.

Graham’s dance concerts garnered extreme acclaim from the Taiwanese. Her troupe presented four shows from August 30 to September 2, 1974 in Taipei, and one on

September 4 in Taichung. The program included Cave of the Heart (1946), Diversion of

Angels (1948), El Penitente (1940), and Embattled Garden (1958). On September 2,

Graham gave a lecture-demonstration, interpreted by Lin Hwai-min, introducing the

Graham technique. Then, her dancers presented excerpts of (1944),

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Clytemnestra (1958), Cave of the Heart, and the full length of Diversion of Angels. The program partially overlapped with the first Asian tour as Cave of the Heart had received a powerful response from Southeast Asian audiences.62 Lin’s biographer Meng-yu Yang described how audiences filled the 2,500 seats and spilled onto the stairs in the auditorium.63 Journalist Cai Wenyi (蔡文怡) reported that the dancers showed their incredible technique and awed the audience “just like watching a magic show.”64

Graham’s tour was a smashing success in Taiwan. Because of this, the Taiwanese considered Martha Graham the embodiment of modern dance writ large, not only

American modern dance.

How the Taiwanese perceived Graham’s dance was highly connected to her representation of the United States. Cai reported that “everyone considered that Graham’s concerts introduced us to a new understanding of American modern dance and embodied the spirit of American culture.”65 Paul Yu indicated that Graham started from the inclusiveness of the American spirit to “develop works that show her empathy for mankind and a vision where all human beings are treated equally.”66 He further emphasized the importance of nationalism in dance by stating that the essence of nationalist discourses is universal and Graham’s dance is an explicit example.67 In this sense, the Taiwanese audience received Graham’s dance not only through the psychological matter of her dance but also through a reading of American nationalist aesthetics shaped by the state sponsorship.

In addition to Americanness in Graham’s works, the Taiwanese reviews highlighted Graham’s references to Asian cultural practices to establish an appreciation

153 of traditional Chinese theater as a national art form. This connection was established both through the Taiwanese perception and Graham’s own words. In the award ceremony held by the Ministry of Education of Taiwan, Graham indicated that she often told her students that it is easier to understand her dance through the understanding of Eastern culture.68 Although it is not completely clear what is included in her term “the East”—

Graham is widely known for fetishizing Asian aesthetics in her work—the Taiwanese interpreted it as “Chinese.” Cai considered that Graham’s use of the “strange-shaped” (奇

形怪狀) props as metaphors were derived from the East.69 By this, Cai meant the classic

“one-table-two-chair” characteristic of Chinese operas, in which the props consist of one table and two chairs but are used as various metaphors. Further, Cai stated that the little red umbrella in Embattled Garden “extremely shows the implicit charm of the East.”70

Paul Yu also connected the breath of Graham’s dance to Chinese movement practice. He stated:

Graham emphasizes breath. This is close to the East. The Chinese classic dance is

lost, but we still have a martial art of the highest standard—taiji. It relies on the

breath…one of the fundamental elements of Graham technique—artistic

expression through contraction and release led by breathing. It starts from the

invisibly inner breath to outer visible action…It shows not only pure technique

but also reaches the level of art.71

Yu’s interpretation connects Graham’s technique to Chinese martial arts practices and further to the arts. In this regard, he highlighted two physical movement forms that relate to certain nationalist ideas—Graham’s American modern dance and Chinese martial

154 arts—to a universal art that should be shared by all human beings. Such a connection is possible not only because of Graham—her work and her corporeality—represented the

United States, but because her dance enabled a dancing body to bear and distribute nationalist ideologies.

Moreover, although Graham’s gendered role as a female leader was not highlighted in the Taiwanese reports, Graham herself represented masculine power worthy of a master and leader. Dance historian Clare Croft argues that “Graham assembled a hybrid gender identity to perform an assertive female sexuality that borrowed from dominant mode of masculinity and denaturalized the typical feminine roles of the Cold War Woman,”72 through what she terms Graham’s “diva stance,” which is to “describe how Graham deployed physical action to ‘disorder’ gender, critiquing and re-imagining gender norms through the body.”73 In this respect, Graham’s role as a female leader reversed the binary gender conception and empowered women with her masculine aura of dominance. Also, the dancers’ physicality presented in her works was clear. After watching Graham’s concert, Paul Yu, an expert of Chinese opera, compared minzu wudao and movement forms in Chinese opera to Graham’s dance and concluded that “the Western dance is masculine. No matter if it is about affects or thoughts, it goes to the extreme. Chinese dance is relatively implicit. Such a characteristic is good for some forms of dance, but it needs to learn from the Western movement vocabularies for strong expression.”74 According to his definition of the East as introverted instead of feminine, Yu’s conclusion shows his admiration of the masculine power within Graham’s movement vocabularies and her dance technique’s strong expression. He further

155 connected such expressive masculine power to the cultural root that Graham emphasized to encourage Taiwanese dancers to look for their Chineseness and to be “Chinese Martha

Grahams.”75 In this sense, the dominant power Yu saw in Graham’s work is linked to a nationalist push for the Taiwanese to vigorously modernize Chinese dance and, potentially, to assume American power. Yu’s call opened the way for Taiwanese choreographers to artistically speak during the era of martial law. Such freedom of artistic speech was possible because it was for the nation, as was the urge towards the modernization of dance.

Graham’s assumption of masculine power in form and content thus influenced

Taiwanese dances. Her Appalachian Spring, one of American modern dance’s clearest examples of Americana with a narrative about white American pioneers pushing into the

West, underscored by ’s music, showcases such dominance. The dancers express their Protestant spirit through controlled movements. From lying down to kneeling, lightly shuffling in plié, or simply clapping, the women contract and release their core muscles to initiate movement. Such dynamics resulting from the cycle of contraction and release present articulate movements. This directness represents a strong intention toward movement and by extension toward their life as pioneers in Puritan

America. “[A] man and a woman building a house with joy and love and prayer,” as the program note introduced.76 Through their controlled, articulate, and powerful movements, these self-disciplined dancers show their strong physicality and mentality to build a home on the new land. It is their will that drives them and it is possible because of their self-reliance. Graham’s mythic drama of Americana staged white American subjects

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“without the mediation of bodies marked as culturally other.”77 In this sense, Taiwanese audiences would be able to find connections between Graham’s American myth and their own life experiences. This dance posed possibilities for Taiwanese audiences to similarly find power against imperialism and overcome national crises through dance.

Graham’s influences were distributed not only through the touring concerts but also by her personal visits offstage. For example, Graham visited the Cloud Gate Dance

Theater. Lin recalled that the dancers were practicing the Graham technique when

Graham dropped by. Graham watched the rehearsals of three of Lin’s pieces and then showed her admiration to Lin and his dancers by stating that “I have not seen such great students outside of the US for a long time.”78 Yang states that Graham’s visit was most memorable in terms of the development of Cloud Gate and Taiwanese dance generally.79

Cloud Gate as the first professional dance company in Taiwan inspired and trained many dancers that later contributed to Taiwanese concert dance. Graham’s influence deeply shaped the development of Taiwanese modern dance; her dances represented the United

States encouraging Taiwanese dancers to represent their land through their dancing bodies.

Similar to Graham’s Appalachian Spring, Lin’s Legacy (1978) is centered on

Taiwanese pioneers. In this story, the Southeast Chinese crossed the Taiwan Strait and migrated to Taiwan, which Lin illustrated as a deserted island. In Lin’s Legacy, dancers show the manual labor needed to endure high ocean waves, represented by the wavy cloth, and their lack of resources in establishing a new home. Both Graham’s and Lin’s frontier stories represent the migration history from the perspective of the settlers,

157 neglecting and erasing the memory of the Indigenous people who had been there the whole time. Shea Murphy argues that this choreographic strategy of absent indigeneity supports a unified national identity, as in Graham’s Appalachian Spring.80 This unified identity was implied in the way Lin highlighted pioneers—and, as did Graham in

Appalachian Spring, Lin covered over indigenous representation in Legacy. Yet, Lin had shared the stage with Taiwanese Indigenous performers back to 1974 as he stated in an interview.81 Later, amazed by a revived ritual of the Cuo Indigenous group in the early

1980s, Lin re-visited the village for the ritual several times and recorded their songs.82 In

Nine Songs (1991), Lin used recorded Indigenous voices of accent songs, and in Portrait of the Families (1997), Taiwanese Ingenious accents appeared with other recorded voices narrating the oppression of White Terror.83 However, not until his last choreography prior to his retirement, Formosa (2017),84 which I describe and analyze in the

Conclusion, did Lin adopt Taiwanese Indigenous dancing gestures of crossed hands, stamping steps, and swinging torsos in parallel to other Taiwanese dominant cultural elements. Compared to Legacy in the Cloud Gate press release, Formosa presents Lin’s multiculturalist revision of his statement about Taiwan.85 Lin, in an interview about

Formosa, said that “living in the moment is along with an entangled feeling of frustration and hope; we hold out hope for Taiwan.”86 Although Lin did not directly mention

Taiwanese indigeneity, Lin expressed a sense of moving forward to a better future in his statement about Taiwan. In this sense, Lin’s revision from Legacy to Formosa seems to be a form of Lin’s confession about overstated cultural unity and covering over indigeneity in his earlier choreography.

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Beside the narratives, in Legacy, Lin adopted Graham’s dance technique as fundamental training for his dancers. One of the best examples of this adaptation includes a group of bare-chested male dancers jumping up and hovering with their curved chests facing the floor. This difficult movement demands top-notch core strength from the dancers. The dance allowed them to emphasize how their muscles moved and flexed. In this sense, masculine power in the narrative merged with the movement quality of strength. Lin adopted both kinds of masculine power in his pioneer story.

This narrative and the dancers’ masculine power in Legacy allowed Lin’s choreography fit into but also challenge the official nationalism. Taiwanese historian

Ken-Chuan Yeh points out that the exploration and execution of dancing body and bodily movement in Legacy, on the one hand, represented the collective consciousness for solidarity, which fit into the official narratives during the national crisis of normalization of the U.S.-China relationship. On the other hand, the narratives related to local

Taiwanese identity is “to walk in the fine line.”87 Ya-ping Chen commented that “Lin

Hwai-min had to find a fine balance as a strategy to express.”88 In this sense, the call-for- solidary and self-strengthening in the narratives and the masculine power that Lin adopted from Graham’s dancing technique became his strategy to avoid censorship in his exploration of the national consciousness of Taiwan.

In addition to masculine power within his story lines, Lin also incorporated the

Graham technique into his compositional practices regarding the universal psyche and merging nationalist experiments with modern dance. Paul Yu, after watching Lin’s Wu

Lung Yuan (烏龍院; 1973), a piece adapting a classic scene of Chinese opera, considered

159 that Lin successfully expressed “the primitive affections of human beings and the complicated changes (that is, the male character’s envy and the paradoxical feeling of the female figure) within a couple of minutes.”89 Similarly, Lin’s The Tale of the White

Serpent (1975) takes basis on a well-known Chinese legend. The dancer Cheng Shu-gi plays the character of the Green Serpent, as the White Serpent’s maidservant. While the

White Serpent and the Scholar are interacting intimately behind the prop, Cheng rolls along the stage, floor bound, exaggeratedly shuddering while reaching out with her four limbs, to show her envy of the White Serpent. This movement relies on the incredible strength of the core muscles to stabilize the lying body and to initiate the shuddering.

This demonstrates how the Graham technique created specific vocabularies of movement for Lin to express the psyche—the inner lives of human beings. By staging the psyche,

Lin presented a modern dance work based on Chinese subjects. This success of his experiment went along with his manifesto in the 1970s: “The Chinese people choreograph and the Chinese people dance for the Chinese audience.” On the one hand,

Chinese subjects offer a common narrative background for the Taiwanese audience already familiar with the Chinese stories. On the other hand, the movement coming from and revealing the psyche invoked Taiwanese audiences’ modern experiences regarding envy, conflicts, and difficult predicaments. With his manifesto highlighting Chineseness,

Lin’s Chinese modern dance succeeded in arousing the Taiwanese people’s national consciousness during the era of an international recognition crisis.

Alwin Nikolais and His Unaccepted Innovation

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Unlike the Taiwanese audiences’ amazement with Taylor’s “new idea” of choreographic experimentation and Graham’s dance expressivity as part of American modernism, Alwin Nikolais’s visits in the second half of the 1970s did not receive

Taiwanese audiences’ direct admiration despite his innovative theatrical aesthetics.

However, the traces of Nikolais’s choreography and his German Ausdruckstanz lineage appeared in Taiwanese choreographers’ works. Ausdruckstanz (dance of expression) refers to German modern dances between the two world , distinguishing from classical ballet and American modern dance at that time.90 In 1976, two years after the successful touring of Martha Graham’s company, Nikolais presented his modernist aesthetics in Taiwan. As performance theorist Philip Auslander argues, Nikolais’s aesthetics in concert dance aligned with those of other postwar artists.91 The postwar aesthetics across different artistic forms was parallel to Clement

Greenberg’s modernist emphasis on the flatness of American modern painting. That is, these artists focused on the artistic medium, or the form, as the content. Aligning with this artistic trend, Nikolais rejected the traditionalist narrative, unlike Graham’s and

Limón’s epic dances, and responded to the modernist artistic movement, of which the most well-known slogan was art for art’s sake. He developed his own strategies, including stage design, costumes, and technical training, to “decentralize” and

“dehumanize” dancers on stage and to highlight motions rather than emotions or pathos.

For example, Noumenon (1953) covered the dancers with stretchy, full-body costumes.

Such a style of costume might be similar to Graham’s early solo of grief, Lamentation

(1930), but the dancers’ facial expressions are covered in Noumenon, so they do not look

161 human—closer to Taylor’s Three Epitaphs but without their personalities. Also the way

Nikolais’s dancers move distinguishes his aesthetics from Graham’s cycled dynamics of contraction and release since he specifically fought them. Instead, Nikolais emphasized body motion, instead of movement driven by emotion. Nikolais “pursued neutrality, even objectivity,” as dance scholar Rebekah Kowal states.92 By defining dance as motion,

Nikolais viewed dance movements the same as motions of all objects.

Nikolais’s working methods and use of improvisation as a choreographic method reveal his German Ausdruckstanz lineage, from figures such as Rudolf Laban, Mary

Wigman, and . Nikolais studied with Holm and later became her assistant.

Holm studied with Wigman, Laban’s student, and came to the United States to establish the New York Wigman School.93 Dance historian Susan Manning illustrates the impact of Ausdruckstanz on American modern dance through Holm’s emigration to the United

States.94 She argues that “improvisational methods entered American modern dance during the 1930s”95 with Holm’s establishment of the New York Wigman School in

1933, later becoming Hanya Holm Studio in 1936. Holm utilized improvisation as one of the primary tools to train her dancers, although she also codified movements from

Wigman’s repertoire as her way to Americanize dance education.96 Although Manning argues that the American modern dance field marginalized improvisation in the 1940s to

1950s,97 Nikolais adopted Holm’s approach to improvisation through his close working with Holm. Besides improvisation as the primary tool, Nikolais’s theory of motion also relates to this European heritage. Morris states that “His aim was not to teach steps to be learned as a factory worker might learn the motions of an assigned tasks. It is rather to

162 teach a theory of motion that would enable his dancers to help produce his vision on stage.”98 Decentralization was a central premise of his theory. Nikolais and his partner

Murray Louis’s training mobilizes the center of motion to make it fluid and flexible, in contrast to the fixed or held center of the body in ballet and American early modern dance training.99 His dance theories and his followers’ contributions to dance education aimed to “train his dancers as artists.”100 This goal for empowered experimentation manifests in his compositions.

Besides Nikolais’s lineage of German Ausdruckstanz, his aesthetics in concert dance are often linked to the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, or total theater.

Gesamtkunstwerk is a theatrical aesthetic ideal first used by K. F. E. Trahndorff and later proposed by Richard Wagner for his opera in the mid-nineteenth century, which proposed that a theatrical art should be an assembly of multiple art forms within a theatrical space.

Based on this aesthetic idea, Nikolais integrated multiple elements, such as music, dance, lighting, costumes, puppetry and installation for his experimental compositions.

Therefore, dancers are not the only focus of Nikolais’s dance; they are one part of the complete environment, providing sensational stimuli to the audience, parallel to other theatrical elements. Lin published an essay to introduce Nikolais’s dance and theatrical aesthetics of Gesamtkunstwerk and to announce his company’s visit. Lin stated that

Nikolais had developed his own training method and technique for his dancers to “move fluently” rather than to “perform.”101 Lin also commented on Nikolais’s choreography based on his dancers’ improvisations by stating that “there is no clue in terms of choreographic structures but always surprise,” and that “abstract arts are a mirror that

163 everyone can interpret and that reflects the interpreter’s mind.”102 Nikolais’s German dance heritage provided Lin with thoughts about modern society with an urban scene composed of “people, vehicles, lights, rushing, and moving” from an outsider’s perspective.103 In other words, Nikolais’s dance, unlike Graham’s, turned Lin’s attention to a different time—from the ancient and mythical to the contemporary.

Lin’s interpretation regarding the urban in Nikolais’s dance with the

Ausdruckstanz lineage later appeared in Lin’s work Rite of Spring, Taipei, 1984 (1984).

This is a piece based on ’s composition for Vaslav Nijinsky’s 1913 ballet with the same title. Nijinsky’s version was based on a fabricated Slavic myth about a female sacrifice, while many choreographers have taken up in different ways. For example, German tanztheater progenitor changed the folk elements of costumes and stage. Her dancers are in one-piece dresses and the stage is covered by dirt in her Rite of Spring (1975). Paul Taylor also choreographed a version set during a rehearsal scene wherein escapades ensue. Lin’s Rite of Spring, Taipei, 1984 moved the story to an urban scene, as shown by the costumes and set. Lin’s dancers wore solids- colored shirts, pants, and skirts, and operated in scenic designs resembling urban Taipei with various-sized neon-lighting sign boards standing on the top of buildings. Taiwanese dance scholar Yatin Lin considers that Lin’s cosmopolitan turn on top of a primitivist story represents his choreographic flexibility to respond to the Taiwanese society

“without the cultural baggage of Chinese cultural heritage.”104 Lin turned the primitive into the psychological, which focused on desires and survival. In Lin’s version, the dancers all are the sacrificed character.105 Five dancers struggle to hold their extended

164 arms but become exhausted after many failed attempts. Their failures recall Albert

Camus’ existentialist myth in which Sisyphus’ continuous attempts to push a rock up the mountain.106 In another section during the climax of the music, a female dancer climbs through the dancers that gather and lie on the floor, in a tangled heap, who grasp and kick in efforts to stop her. Lin’s Rite of Spring connects the most primitive of human desires to a contemporary movement, “not relevant to the Russian sacrificing rite of virgins.”107

Compared to his Legacy, Lin Hwai-min’s Rite of Spring showcases Taiwanese cosmopolitanism, replete with the psychological problems of modernity.

Lin’s turn from Chinese cultural heritage to contemporary urban Taiwan was similar to dance critic Chu Ge’s comments about Nikolais’s dance. Chu stated that

Isadora Duncan’s free dance and Martha Graham’s modern dance “basically originated from [ancient] , as extensions of the spirit of Americana, with strong European colors;” in contrast, “Nikolais truly represents American culture, and [his dance] was a product of highly industrial civilization.”108 Chu Ge’s emphasis on Nikolais’s representation of American “modern” society as a rupture from its European heritage centers on U.S. nationalist subjectivity, in its proported turn away from its Europeanist roots. Such a rupture also occurred in Lin’s Rite of Spring. In this sense, Lin’s work exhibits a similar nationalist call looking for the cultural independence of Taiwan.

Nikolais’s tour was officially intertwined with the U.S.-Taiwan diplomacy in the

1970s. Nikolais’s troupe of more than 30 dancers and staff arrived in Taipei on May 14,

1976. They presented three shows in Taipei on May 15, and two shows in Taichung on

May 22. This tour was reported as part of a special program for the United States

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Bicentennial, celebrating the two-hundredth anniversary of the founding of the United

States.109 Nikolais also gave two workshops introducing his dance technique in the

Lincoln Center of USIS in Taipei.110 More than 70 young Taiwanese dancers participated in these events.111 In this sense, Nikolais’ company and his modernist aesthetics undoubtedly represented the United States for the Taiwanese.

Nikolais’ innovative concert dance did not arouse the Taiwanese dancers’ interests much compared to other tours. For example, Tina Yuan (原文秀), a Taiwanese

American dancer who danced for Alvin Ailey, critiqued Nikolais’ decentralization of dancers in an interview: “Nikolais’ [company] cannot be counted as a dance company; instead, its [shows] should be considered as theatrical or lighting shows. They did not contribute to dance […] Calling it a dance company is pejorative to dancers.”112

Taiwanese dancer and dance educator Cheng Shu-qi expressed similar thoughts about

Nikolais’ dance.113 The reports also showed that Nikolais’s 1976 and 1979 touring concerts did not satisfy the Taiwanese audiences. The 1976 and 1979 programs included

Masks, Props and Mobiles (1953), Sanctum (1964), Crossfade (1974), and Temple

(1975).114 After the first show on the 1979 tour, Nikolais changed the program because

“the audiences’ responses were not good.”115 It is clear that Nikolais’s avant-garde innovation, which treated dancers as moving objects, was not appreciated by the

Taiwanese. American artistic modernism, with its characteristics of self-criticism and innovation, no longer satisfied the Taiwanese dancers of the late 1970s, compared to earlier reactions to Taylor’s experimental ideas. In this sense, local contexts deeply

166 shaped Taiwanese receptions, and in the late 1970s, Taiwanese dance artists had developed their own ways of arousing national consciousness through dancing.

However, the diverse opinions regarding Nikolais’s avant-garde dance showed the heterogeneity of local audiences. The painter-art critic Chu Ge composed an essay to counter Yuan’s dissatisfaction about Nikolais’s decentralization of dancers. In addition to his assertion about Nikolais’ true representation of the U.S. culture, Chu admired two contributions of Nikolais’s dance modernity. First, Chu states that Nikolais’s dance prioritized “ideas” (觀念). As a result, individual dancing ability becomes less important and the theater is open to everyone who has an idea. Chu stated that this is “one of results of the revolution of modern arts.”116 Second, Chu considered Nikolais’s concert dance to be purely entertaining with all its sensual stimuli. Plus, the audience had no statement or narration to reject. Chu argued that Nikolais’s dance “makes people accept modern designs and colors through the theatrical medium without assumptions or preconceptions.”117 In this sense, Chu valued a kind of modernity that broke boundaries between elites and the general public, and “high” and “low” arts. Chu, as a painter, took a different perspective compared to dancer-choreographer Yuan.

Ausdruckstanz Lineage in Taiwan

Nikolais’s failure in garnering acclaim in Taiwan does not mean that he and his

Ausdruckstanz lineage had no place in Taiwanese dance. Ausdruckstanz has a long history in Taiwan since the Japanese colonization. During the Japanese colonization,

Taiwanese dance pioneers, such as Li Ming-de (李明德), T’sai Jui-yueh, Li Chao-er (李

秋娥), went to Japan to study modern dance with Japanese followers of German

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Ausdruckstanz. A handful of them stayed in Japan while others returned to Taiwan to further contribute to the first wave of Taiwanese dance modernization.118 Feng-Shueh

Liu, whom I introduecd in Chapter 2, studied at Folkwang University of the Arts,

Germany, from 1970 to 1972. During this visit, Liu met Wigman and exchanged thoughts regarding choreography and dance. Later, Liu completed her Ph.D. program at the Laban

School in London, which was founded by Kurt Jooss, a student of Laban. Among these

Taiwanese choreographers, Liu and T’sai were active in the 1970s. Their choreography was related to Nikolais’s ideas about dance abstraction.

Unlike Liu’s articulate Chinese identity and Lin’s famous heritage, T’sai’s national identity is hard to clearly articulate as she experienced oppression during both

Japanese colonization and martial rule under the R.O.C. T’sai was born in 1921, while

Taiwan was ruled by the Japanese Empire. Growing up in Tainan, the historical southern city of Taiwan, T’sai craved a career in dance after watching the Japanese modern dance choreographer Baku Ishii’s performance in the Miyako-za Theatre (宮古座戲院). After graduating from high school, she went to Japan to study modern dance with Baku and later his follower Midori Ishii.119 Baku was a ballet dancer from the Imperial Theatre, who studied under the Italian ballet master Giovanni Rossi. However, he questioned

Rossi’s artistic originality and was forced to leave. Then, his friend Kosaku Yamada, a composer studying in Germany, introduced Baku to European modern dance. Interested,

Baku studied Eurhythmics in Germany and contacted Wigman during his two-year

European tour.120 After his return to Japan, Baku established his dance school in 1928

168 and started to teach and choreograph modern dance. Here, T’sai, and some other

Taiwanese dance pioneers, started their dancing careers.

T’sai’s dance career and her personal life showcase the challenges of an artist living in a society without freedom of expression. In 1945, T’sai finished her studies in

Japan only to return to a Taiwan under martial law. T’sai’s desire to return home pushed her to give up her personal concert and to reject Midori’s offer of staying. She took the last ship to Taiwan and established her dance school in Tainan. However, because of the continuing war in Mainlaind China, the Kuomintang’s take-over did not change Taiwan’s oppressed social position. Instead, the Kuomintang took all resources in the country to support the war and treated the indigenous as the traitors. As a result, the people were angry. Triggered by a local disagreement over cigarette sales in 1947, a series of conflicts erupted between the local people and the Kuomintang. This resulted in the February 28

Incident, which stimulated the Kuomintang to tighten control with the armed forces.

Following this, Mao’s Communists defeated the Kuomintang, which prompted the latter’s retreat to Taiwan in 1949. The resulting White Terror lasted decades. Control of speech was strongly enforced. T’sai’s husband Lei Shiyu (雷石榆) was arrested because his friend in Hong Kong wrote him a letter to suggesting to him that he emigrate. Then,

Lei was forced to leave Taiwan. Several months later, T’sai was arrested and sent to prison for seemingly no reason. After serving time, T’sai went to Taipei and opened her dance school to make a living. However, the Kuomintang constantly monitored T’sai’s activities.121

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Unlike T’sai’s other works in which movement vocabularies play a major role,

Moonlight (1976), a 20-minute non-narrative piece highlighting choreographic use of stage space, showcases not only her Ausdruckstanz training heritage but also her exploration of national consciousness beyond Chinese aesthetics and kinesthetic nationalism. Moonlight begins with six dancers lying downstage left. They turn onto their sides and wiggle their fingers like sparkling stars.122 Once standing, three dancers wind through the entire stage, ending with their limbs extended into the fine balance required of an arabesque. Another group runs in tiny steps to the opposite corner and takes the same position to mirror the first group. This spatial symmetry gives a sense of harmony, especially under the pale blue light. At another moment, two men and one woman, appear in one of the corners and repeat the previous section to show the symmetry of choreographic structure spatially as well as repetitions in the choreographic structure. In the next section, the dancers wind through the entire stage space again. None of their movement phrases bears a clear symbolic meaning, but as a whole, the dance presents delightful joy and a variety of spatial traveling paths, as the moon glows and stars shine in the dark blue sky. T’sai’s choreographic choices in Moonlight highlighting the use of space and non-narrative movement depart from Chinese aesthetics and instead show her adoption of Austruckstanz aesthetics.

T’sai’s Moonlight was not the only Taiwanese dance that showcased the dance modernity of Ausdruckstanz. Liu Feng-Shueh’s work Nilpotent Group (1977) presents similar choreographic thinking. This work, according to a program note, “is rather abstract and explores the aesthetics of movement and space inspired by mathematical

170 concepts.”123 The 1977 program stated that Liu “has left it to the audience whether to appreciate the dance in its abstraction or extract a more personal interpretation.”124 This introduction is similar to the idea of abstract expression in American artistic modernity.

As Liu herself stated, Nilpotent Group was the first mature work in which she successfully achieved the ideal combination between modern form and the Chinese traditional spirit.125 On the one hand, use of abstraction allowed the work to escape from censorship during the White Terror era; on the other, it signaled the successful modernization of dance in Liu’s work.

Nilpotent Group, as the title suggests, is a piece inspired by abstract concepts in mathematics but also presents Chinese progressive nationalism through its movement vocabulary adopted from Chinese martial arts. This dance begins with twelve dancers in an arrow formation pointing downstage. They compress the space between their hands in a staccato rhythm as a signal of the event beginning. Then, they spread out and perform

Chinese martial arts movement vocabulary, such as turning jumps and airborne somersaults, as if fighting, moving in symmetrical formations, as if a phalanx. Culturally recognizable movements in this sense play a key role in Liu’s choreography. The dancers travel with jumps and arm gestures that signify warriors, and demonstrate their incredible core strength. The dancers also perform yunshou, or the cloud-hand gesture from Chinese performing arts, where two hands circle each other while the wrists stay together. At the end, the dancers form a semi-circle and present the same air-pressing movement in plié, echoing but retrograding the opening hands from the beginning. In this work, there is no obvious story, but Liu adopts Chinese movement vocabulary and creates various

171 formations, symmetric use of space and a retrograding ending through careful calculation. In one sense, this seems like the kinesthetic nationalism that Wilcox identifies: the shapes or forms of Chinese dance. Yet, with Liu’s specific evacuation of

Chinese legend, or other detachment of narrative meaning from these gestures they take on a more abstract quality that served Taiwanese nationalist goals. Taiwanese dancer scholar Yuh-Jen Lu, as well as the premiere cast, concludes that “Nilpotent Group represents a positive belief in national progress.”126 Liu’s choreography, like calculation with abstract symbols in mathematics, provides a sign to connect to a concrete signifier to an abstract referent. For Taiwan, her choreographic decisions presented an image of progressivism highlighting abstract knowledge of pure science. Her movement vocabulary in turn presented Chineseness reflected through traditional movement practices. In this sense, Liu’s choreographic choices and conceptual abstraction highlights a progressive imagination about the development of the nation through the representation of dancing bodies and their relationship with space.

Multiple Modernities or Competing Reiterations

As I discussed above, American dance modernity, represented by Paul Taylor’s,

Martha Graham’s, and Alwin Nikolais’s choreography and dance technique, inspired

Taiwanese choreographers to develop their own types of “modernization” of the dancing body. Modernization is central to the ideological competition of the Global Cold War.

The United States and the Soviet Union intervened in various regions to modernize all social aspects.127 However, the overall theme of Cold War competition does not mean there are only two sets of social ideologies from which people could choose. Cold War

172 historian Odd Arne Westad points out that local governments exploited the global situation through various degrees of interactions and negotiations within and/or between the campaigns.128 Similarly, locals also received and reiterated various social ideologies to form and distribute their vision regarding social modernization. These ideologies were negotiated not only within the global context but also interacted with the local rule. Gay

Morris argues that American postwar modern dance choreographers drew attention to movements rather than to content they may represent to survive during the Cold War.129

They developed certain aesthetics of the dancing body that involved articulate torsos, flexible and extended limbs, bare feet allowing a sense of weight, and a professionally trained and distinguishable dancing technique.130 The aesthetics reveal various ideas about abstraction that can be associated with universalism, mainly based on the influential critic John Martin’s modernist theory of dance. Martin framed modern dance as an expressive art form that has the power to reach all audiences, regardless of their cultural heritage. That is because, he claimed, modern dance movements represent emotions that all human beings share.131 Furthermore, as Morris points out, the assumption of Martin’s was “if life experience was not organized and abstracted through form, it was not communicable, or as Martin termed it

‘intelligible.’”132 In this sense, to abstract it was to express a universalized life experience. As a result, the abstract expressionism of American modern dance became a spectrum having two ends—abstraction and expression—with American modern dance works located in different positions between the two ends. This tension signaled aesthetic modernity.

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While artists create to express, political surveillance becomes an external factor shaping artistic expression. Dance scholarship has pointed out how the Cold War created chilling effects and the U.S. government’s postwar surveillance of certain American modern dance choreographers shaped the development of the dance created.133

Surveillance during the Cold War era was not limited to the United States. The binary theme of the Cold War set up an environment for global powers to be on guard against espionage. As a member of the United States-led bloc, the Kuomintang in Taiwan exerted serious social control over the people. Although the Cold War theme for the campaign of freedom was against the Soviet communist bloc, the main purpose of the Kuomintang was to consolidate Chiang’s power. Taiwanese historian Hou Kun-hung points out that the major reasons for the political arrests during the White Terror were to root out communist spies and to secure Taiwan independence. Apparently, communist spies and

Taiwan independentists “were in strong opposition to the government’s policies.”134 To suppress the anti-government thoughts of the people, the Kuomintang monitored everybody’s daily activities through policing, education, national security agencies, and other individual informers. The total number of individuals involved in monitoring was around 300,000.135 This comprehensive surveillance campaign caused Taiwanese people to be systematically censored and self-censored.

Dealing with censorship and self-censorship was always a task that postwar

Taiwanese choreographers had to keep in mind. T’sai renamed her work after her experience of imprisonment. Her concert exemplifies how censorship shaped Taiwanese choreographers’ choices. In 1962, T’sai presented a dance piece titled Prison and Rose to

174 reflect the separation from her husband. 136 At the beginning of the piece, dancer Chen

Weicheng (陳偉誠), sitting on the floor, shows his frustration and depression by slowly shaking his lowered head while leaning against a gray brick wall, which separates the two halves of the stage. He then rolls away from the wall as if giving up the opportunity to see the other dancer on the other side of the wall. Later, Wu Su-chun (吳素君) approaches the wall, holding a red rose in her mouth. Her gesture shows the iconic posture of dance with her outward-twisted arms, one bent and the other lifted.

Chen seems to notice Wu’s approach. He quickly shuffles toward the wall to seek her but his sight is blocked. They start to spin and perform flamenco simultaneously as if connected though separated. Wu tosses the rose to the other side and covers her face with her hands to mourn silently. Chen notices the rose. He picks it up and holds it tightly, as if giving a hug to its sender. By tossing the rose over the wall to the male dancer, T’sai, dancing in the premiere cast, presented her love to her separated husband in this choreography, adopting a flamenco movement vocabulary. T’sai stated that this work was inspired by a Japanese student, when she visited Tokyo in 1960.137

However, this original title “The Prison and The Rose” hinted at the connection to her husband who was charged with defection. In 1966, this work was renamed “The

Wall.” 125 The renaming helped to avoid the surveillance campaign, and her use of flamenco served a similar evasive purpose. Since flamenco is a foreign dance genre associated with passion,138 T’sai, through this work, displays a romantic story without presenting the specific context. In this sense, The Prison and The Rose becomes apolitical but personal through her renaming of the title and her adoption of a foreign folk dance

175 vocabulary. T’sai’s renaming shows her concern over the political environment. In a similar way, her abstract dance Moonlight takes the strategy that Morris points out in her argument about American modern dance. T’sai’s Moonlight features the choreographic use of space instead of centering on a narrative or culturally recognizable movement vocabularies. In this sense, the surveillance campaign shaped choreographers’ strategies such as choosing to make more abstract dances in order to avoid political attention.

T’sai was not the only Taiwanese choreographer who adopted abstraction in choreography. Feng-Shieh Liu’s concert presented her ten-year experiment with Chinese modern dance, which included the abstract piece 24 Hours and A Second, Op. 63 (1968).

“This is an abstract dance, [expressing] the response of marine life to the human world with dance,” according to the 2007 restaging program brochure. Movements in this work show qualities that recall moving through water. At the beginning, the dancers form a line from upstage to downstage. They wave their arms to the sides successively as if mimicking floating movements of a jellyfish. They jump and land softly, as if there is no gravity underwater. Part of a trio, a male dancer effortlessly lifts one of the female dancers up to his shoulders, while the other circles her arms in front of her face as if to mimic a clownfish or a sea anemone. In this sense, abstraction in the program brochure does not refer to abstract concepts or non-representation. As the brochure states, these dancers clearly represent marine life, without narrating an interpretable story. This dance departs from T’sai’s choreography that featured famous Chinese stories and folk dances, as in earlier stages of her Chinese modern dance experiments. Her exploration in dance abstraction differed from other works that addressed recognizable Chinese cultural

176 element, through narration and/or movement vocabularies. Liu’s abstract dance dehumanized her dancers to portrait other creatures without a culturally-specific story.

Although it does not exactly fit into Manning’s definition modern dance abstraction, with which “choreographer represented dancers as inhabitants of abstract worlds,” Liu’s 24

Hours and A Second, Op. 63 still “figured a universal subject” that everyone could access.139

Different choreographers developed various strategies to deal with censorship issues. Yuh-Jen Lu argues that the dances of these Taiwanese choreographers, especially

Liu and Lin, showcased the multiplicity of modernity. They showcased the multiple faces or modes of modernity that shaped different histories, through their choreographic strategies shaped by their different generational experiences under the censorship policies.140 She indicates that Liu and Lin, in the 1970s, spoke through their choreography, yet somehow managed to side-step censorship during the fifty-year-long

White Terror era. However, although Lu claimed that Lin and Liu erased and replaced the

American and Japanese cultural markers with Chinese traditions and nativism, as shown in Lin’s Legacy and Liu’s Nilpotent Group, I have shown how the cultural markings of

American modernity were adopted in these works. That is, Liu and Lin utilized certain modes of American dance modernity to tell stories about the community they imagined.

Besides the erasure of American and Japanese cultural markers, Lu’s emphasis on the multiple modernities shows two sides of the same coin: modernization and nationalism. Lu argues that Legacy and Nilpotent Group showcase a modern dimension within a decolonizing statement between progressivism and nativism. She indicates that

177 the migration story and the images of the working class represented a nativist discourse aligning with the Taiwanese nativist Literature Movement. This movement influenced the

Taiwanese elites, including those in the field of dance. Since the 1950s, the USIS proposed U.S. modernization through educational exchange and sponsorship through the public media. For example, the Fulbright scholarships facilitating educational exchanges imported U.S. social ideologies to Taiwan through the teacher and student migrations.141

USIS-sponsored journals and magazines also exposed Taiwanese readers to postwar U.S. modern life. Moreover, through the Department of Foreign Literature, the National

Taiwan University and the journal Modern Literature, postwar Taiwan modernist literature merged with U.S. liberalism as the weapon to resist Chiang’s official Chinese nationalism.142 However, in an article published in 1972 Chen Shaoting criticized the modernist focus on forms of modern and appealed for Taiwanese subjects, including Taiwanese peasant lives under the ruling of Japanese colonization and

Taiwanese contemporary society.143 This and other criticisms emphasized the responsibilities of literature in contributing to the nation and the society.144 As a result, the modernist poets defended their modernist literatures from these criticisms. In this sense, this literature nativist movement turned Lin’s attention to local history and provided the underpinnings of Lin’s Legacy.

On the other hand, Lu considers that Nilpotent Group represented Liu’s modernist thinking about Chinese traditions. While Lin’s Legacy showed the continuing growth of

Taiwanese society, Nilpotent Group advocated the progressivist celebration of the nation.

Lu concludes that these two works indicated “a process of modernization in terms of

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‘Third World modernisms’ and modernities.”145 In this sense, the multiple modernities that Lu addresses indicate multiple nationalist discourses about the modernization of the nation, especially for modern nations after being colonized.

However, Lu’s argument for multiple modernities takes a risk in reifying the concept of modernity, by distracting our attention from who does what. John Kelly and

Martha Kaplan criticize Benedict Anderson’s imagined community, for Anderson globalized his nationalism theory by setting up a - continuum.146 Anderson’s argument of modulation of European and Latin provides a useful understanding of the circulation of nationalism in the twentieth century but limits our imagination about the nationalism of formerly colonized countries between the dichotomous ends of non-Western traditions and Westernized modernization. Kelly and Kaplan’s ethnographic approach to the nationalism of Fiji suggests a nationalist mode that was neither traditional nor Western but a marked change emerging from Fiji’s history of labor migration and British colonization. This bottom-up approach points to possibilities for nationalism other than what developed from the West.

Nationalism in this bottom-up approach grows up from the local in response to the community’s historical and modern context, as well as globalization (i.e. the Cold War).

In this sense, understanding without reification of modernity may present a different view of Taiwanese nationalism in its own context and its reactions to its international recognition crises.

Instead of considering Legacy and Nilpotent Group as representations of

Taiwanese multiple modernities, as Lu concluded, I argue that these works generated the

179 choreographers’ nationalist discourses that shaped Taiwanese society regarding national consciousness in the 1970s. As Jinlin Hwang argues, the Qing Empire (1636-1911) initiated social and military modernization by weakening Chinese family ties and preparing its people for nationhood.147 In this sense, the modernization was nationalist.

Following this nationalist project of modernization, the Kuomintang continued strengthening the people’s national consciousness to form modern China. These nationalist policies were brought to Taiwan as the Kuomintang retreated. Following this

Chinese history of modernization, nationalism in Taiwan during the 1970s was not merely a module that had appeared in the West, but it is a unique product emerging from

Taiwanese history. Taiwanese choreographers, including Liu, Lin, and T’sai, struggled to speak and to express their ideas about dance modernization and the nation. This occurred while the national crises challenged the officially constructed legacies of representation of China and instituted control over free speech. Reflecting on their different life experiences regarding the nation, which shaped their national consciousness, they sought to express their various nationalist discourses during the era of national crises.

From this understanding of nationalist discourses as competing forces that shaped the people’s national identity, Liu, Lin, and T’sai revealed their national discourses in different ways. Lin, from a local Taiwanese elite family, provided a vision of Taiwan as a nation through the pioneers’ story, even though it was actually not shared by everyone who lived in Taiwan. Liu, a Chinese-born Taiwanese choreographer, aimed to create connections between the Taiwanese people and foreign dance practitioners by merging

Chinese and German-origin dance aesthetics, which she perceived as modern. In this

180 sense, Taiwan, as a nation, for her, is modern China. T’sai, a local Taiwanese born during the Japanese colonization period who experienced the Kuomintang’s oppression, explored her ideal nation by attempting to connect the Taiwanese to abstract aesthetics.

These choreographers reiterated various nationalist discourses. In this sense, Taiwan as a nation during the 1970s was built from a few internal discourses.

Therefore, instead of considering these nationalist discourses as merely multiple modernities, the choreographic contest about nationalism during this era showed that dancing bodies helped loosen social control over speech. This reiteration of national discourses follows American dance modernity, circulated to Taiwan through U.S. dance diplomacy. Whether or not American modern dance choreographers intended to reinforce their U.S. nationalism through their dances, the diplomatic force involved with multiple agencies and selection processes tint these American modern dances with an American image for their audiences abroad. At the same time, since modernization has been nationalist in Chinese and Taiwanese histories, these nationalist statements by American modern dance inspired Taiwanese choreographers to express their nationalist ideologies through their dancing bodies. In this sense, the idea that a body can speak about the nation is the modernity that the Taiwanese dancers perceived from American dance diplomacy.

Conclusion

My analyses of local spectator receptions and responses to Taylor’s, Graham’s, and Nikolais’ tours in Taiwan demonstrate how American modernism with its related masculinity-as-modernity was adopted by the Taiwanese dancers in dealing with the

181 social and political matters that they faced in the 1970s. Taylor’s white masculinity and innovation reflected Greenbergian self-criticism. Taiwanese choreographer Lin Hwai- min’s choreographic methods combined Graham’s technique with the narrative of

Americana and contributed to the development of Taiwanese dance. The Taiwanese audiences’ diverse reactions to Taylor’s and Nikolais’s dances also prove that American avant-garde innovations were not unconditionally accepted after the Taiwanese had developed their own ways to dance.

Taiwanese choreographers contested to express their various imaginations about the nation in response to the national crises in the 1970s. Taiwanese choreographers, exemplified by my analysis of Liu Feng-Shueh’s, Lin’s and T’sai’s dances, experienced different burdens of censorship. T’sai, as a Taiwanese who had experienced Japanese colonization and as a spouse of a scholar charged with defection, adopted foreign dance vocabularies and, later in the 1970s, the abstract expressionism of American modern dance, like Taylor’s, to avoid censorship. Liu adopted mathematical ideas in her choreography to present rationalism and progressivism. Lin, in contrast, adopted

Graham’s technique in his Taiwanese migrating story to raise national consciousness.

While they all dealt with the same ruling power, they exhibited different responses to ideas about the future of dance and of the nation through their bodily practices.

1 The photo of this scene can be seen on Cloud Gate Foundation online archives: http://archive.cloudgate.org.tw/. File title: 06301-ph005-198501010001. Photographed by Li Mingxun in 1985. My analysis is based on Lin Hwai-min, Legacy (Taipei, Taiwan: Jingo, 2007), DVD, 100 min. Lin’s participation in International Writing Program at University of Iowa, which was indirectly sponsored by Central Intelligence Agency of the U.S., allowed him interact with other writers from Communist China. For detailed history

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of the International Writing Program, see Eric Bennett, “Paul Engle: The Creating Writing Cold Warrior,” in Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing During Cold War (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2015). 2 “在台灣風雨飄搖的年代裡，這共同的心跳穿越了時空，也穿越舞台與觀 眾的界線，將台上和台下的人們透過祖先的奮鬥緊緊地結合在一起.” Ya-ping Chen, “舞臺灣的歷史、跳新民的故事: «薪傳»” [Dancing History of Taiwan, Dancing Stories of Ancients: Legacy], in «雲門.傳奇», edited by Chang Daguang (, Taiwan: Jingo, 2003), 42. 3 Arne Westad, Global Cold War, 3-4 (see Chap. 1, n. 6). 4 “哥哥爸爸真偉大/名譽照我家/為國去打仗/當兵笑哈哈.” 5 Ying-Chao Kao, “Doing Soldier, Rituals and Men: A Masculinities Study on Service Process of Conscriptive Soldiers in Taiwan (2000–2006),” (master’s thesis, National Taiwan University, 2006), 4-6. NDLTD in Taiwan. 6 Quoted in Burt, Male Dancer, 88 (see Chap. 2, n. 23). 7 Burt, Male Dancer, 88. 8 Hsiao, Return to Reality, 1 (see Chap. 1, n. 10). 9 Wilcox, Revolutionary Bodies, 6 (see Chap. 1, n. 48). 10 United Nations General Assembly Session 26 Resolution 2758. Restoration of the lawful rights of the People's Republic of China in the United Nations A/RES/2758(XXVI) page 1. 25 October 1971. http://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=A/RES/2758(XXVI). 11 “深感詫異.” “對尼克森宣布訪匪區事 嚴院長昨發表聲明” [Premier Yen issued a statement regarding Nixon’s announcement of his visiting plan to communist bandits in China], Central Daily (Taiwan), July 17, 1971. 中央日報全文影像資料庫. 12 “尼克森總統的大陸之行，對於亞洲自由人民的反共意志，無疑的將有不 良影響!” “我們的立場與忠告” [Our stance and advice], Central Daily (Taiwan), Feb 18, 1972. 中央日報全文影像資料庫. 13 “台大學生促尼克森勿與共匪妥協” [National Taiwan University students urged Nixon not to compromise with communist bandits], Central Daily (Taiwan), Feb 18, 1972. 中央日報全文影像資料庫. 14 Jin Jou Kou, «七〇年代臺灣左翼運動» [Leftist movement in Taiwan of 1970s] (Taipei, Taiwan: Cross-Strait Academy, 1999), 6. 15 Ibid., 5. 16 “保羅泰勒芭蕾舞團一行定今抵台” [The Troupe of Paul Taylor Dance Company Scheduled To Arrive Taiwan Today], United Daily (Taiwan), March 1, 1967, Udndata; “保羅泰勒芭蕾舞團今晨抵達臺北” [Paul Taylor Dance Company Arriving Taipei This Morning] , United Daily (Taiwan), March 2, 1967, Udndata. According to these reports, Bettie de Jong toured with Paul Taylor Dance Company for the 1967 East and South east Asia tour. However, she went back to the US prior to their arrival in Taipei, due to an injury during the tour. 17 “美國保羅泰勒芭蕾舞團 演出芭蕾舞恍如現代畫” [American Paul Taylor 183

Dance Company presented like modern paintings], Central Daily (Taiwan), March 3, 1967, 中央日報全文影像資料庫. 18 Lin, “看保羅泰勒: 一個文藝青年的成長與認知” [Watching Paul Taylor: The Growth and Recognition of A Young Art Enthusiast], China Times (Taiwan), October 4, 1980, 中國時報五十年報紙影像資料庫. 19 Ibid. 20 USIS, “保羅泰勒舞蹈團的舞姿” [The dancing of Paul Taylor Dance Company], United Daily (Taiwan), February 4, 1967, Udndata. 21 “保羅泰勒之舞 表現新的意念” [Paul Tayler’s dance presents new ideas], United Daily (Taiwan), March 3, 1967, Udndata. 22 “是他個人創造的一個新的意念，這個意念有如音樂一樣，無法用語言于 以闡釋表現，而必須由觀眾自己去領略欣賞.” “舞出文明的苦惱 創造明日的形式: 美現代舞蹈家保羅泰勒 率團來台預定表演兩場” [Dancing the modern predicaments, creating the Future Forms: American modern dancer Paul Taylor planning to present two concerts with His Company], China Times (Taiwan), March 4. 1967, 中國時報五十年報 紙影像資料庫. 23 Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” The Collected Essays and Criticism, edited by John O’Brian, vol. 4 Modernism with a Vengeance 1957–1969 (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, [1960]1993), 85–6. 24 See Morris, A Game for Dancers, xv–xvi & 3–4 (see Chap. 1, n. 30). 25 Ibid., 206. 26 Ibid., 167. 27 Michael Fried, Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968), 127. 28 Guilbaut, “Avant-Garde in America,” 61 (see Chap. 1, n. 61). 29 Ibid., 62. 30 Ibid., 76. 31 Prevots, Dance for Export, 53–7 & 67 (see Chap. 1, n. 32). 32 “…不願使用舞蹈界所流行的術語如「抽象」之類的形容詞來解釋這種舞 蹈。他只說：「現代舞是舞蹈可能性的一種擴大。」” “出神入化現代舞 周遊列國娛 嘉賓: 保羅泰勒率團來台 將公演兩場” [Amazing modern dance, toured around the world: Paul Taylor leads his company to Taiwan, presenting two concerts], China Times (Taiwan), March 3, 1967, 中國時報五十年報紙影像資料庫. 33 “想像的自由.” Ibid. 34 “每個觀眾都可下完全不同的結論…正如憑著個人的「創造力」去看一幅 現代化.” “演出芭蕾舞恍如現代畫.” 35 “我相信它也將進一步影響現代的雕塑藝術.” Chu Ge, “王者之舞: 保羅泰 勒現代芭蕾舞觀後” [The dance of the king: reflection on Paul Taylor’s modern ballet], Min Zu Evening News (Taiwan), March 13, 1967. 國家圖書館全國報紙影像系統. 36 “出神入化現代舞 周遊列國娛嘉賓.” 37 “身高而強壯的舞蹈家.” Ibid. 184

38 “舞出文明的苦惱 創造明日的形式,” China Times (Taiwan), March 4. 1967, 中國時報五十年報紙影像資料庫. 39 Chu, “王者之舞.” 40 “他的出現，使整個舞台充滿虔誠的器，他的舞蹈表現一種自由開闊的胸 襟.” Ibid. 41 “一種純粹的表現給于我們的視覺.” Ibid. 42 “以舞蹈來說，他們是「敘述」多於「表現」，除了「歌德城市幻想曲」 這一個節目是除於純粹的芭蕾舞蹈之外，其他節目多偏屬「舞劇」的性質，使人想 起美國早期的抽象化，是可以和自然的景物對照去看的…而保羅泰勒的現代芭蕾 舞，則完全是屬於表現的…他們不用任何布景，像是唯恐因此而減低了他們舞蹈本 身的純粹性一般.” Ibid. Unlike the usage of ballet in English to indicate narrative dances or a dance genre, ballet and modern dance in Chinese at that time were sometimes interchangeable. 43 Morris, A Game for Dancers, 206. 44 Chu, “用動作寫詩” (see Chap. 2, n. 123). 45 “每一個運動，每一結構都像是從音樂的韻律誕生出來的，而不是舞蹈者 「配合」音樂的旋律而動作的.” Chu, “王者之舞.” 46 “如果它們帶來了什麼戲劇性的隱喻和謎的話.’” Ibid. 47 “他們每個動作都很嚴謹、清楚，身體如何在舞台上化出現線條，而且舞 台上任何一片地方、任何一個角落都不能隨便去碰他，舞者碰上它必需要有他的意 義.” Quoted in Chuo, “不要忘記你的雨傘: 寫在林麗珍舞展之前” [Do not forget your umbrella: writing prior to Lin Lee-Chen’s dance concert], China Times Weekly, June 11– 17, 1978, 22, 國家圖書館. The original text uses “meaning” (意義). However, from my understanding, it should be translated into “reason.” 48 Lin, “看保羅泰勒.” 49 My analysis is based on Taylor, Aureole, reconstructed by Liz Walton, performed by Rita Jerkins, Maria Musso, Molly Watson, Cark Ebbert, and James A. McFadden (Columbus, Ohio: The Ohio State University Dance Company, 1987). Bureau Extension for Education and Research Archives. 50 Marcia B. Siegel, “The Harsh and Splendid Heroines of Martha Graham,” in Moving History/Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader, edited by Ann Dils and Ann Cooper Albright (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), 308. 51 Ibid., 310. 52 Ibid., 308. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid. 55 Prevots, Dance for Export, 44–5. 56 Chen Changhua, “瑪莎葛蘭姆: 美國現代舞的代表” [Martha Graham: The representative of American modern dance], United Daily (Taiwan), November 22, 1969. 57 Cheng Shu-qi, interview by the author in New Taipei City, on August 2, 2018. 58 Martha Graham, “瑪莎葛蘭姆論現代舞” [Martha Graham’s discussion on 185

modern dance] trans. Lin Hwai-min, United Daily (Taiwan), August 30, 1974, Udndata, first published in .1937; Hwai-min Lin, “Lin Hwai-min, “永遠的瑪莎葛蘭姆” [Martha Graham forever standing], «擦肩而過» (Taipei, Taiwan: Yuan-Liou, 1989) , 43–64. First published in 1974. 59 Fernau Hall, “舞壇祭酒: 瑪莎葛蘭姆” [Offering wine at the altar of dance: Martha Graham], trans. Cao Jinling, Wenyi 63 (September 1974): 106–111. 60 Lin, “永遠的瑪莎葛蘭姆.” 61 “葛蘭姆獲贈文藝獎章 認為是一種畢生難忘的榮譽” [Graham was awarded Chinese Literary Award, considering it as unforgettable honor], Central Daily (Taiwan), August 30, 1974, 中央日報全文影像資料庫. 62 Prevots, Dance for Export, 47. 63 Meng-yu Yang, «飆舞: 林懷民與雲門傳奇» [Dancing: Lin Hwai-min and Cloud Gate’s Legacy], 2nd Edition (Taipei, Taiwan: Global Views-Commonwealth Publishing, 2008), 93. 64 “真有些像看魔術一般.” Cai, “葛蘭姆舞團公演 展現高水準技藝” [Graham’s company concert showcasing high-quality technique], Central Daily (Taiwan), August 31, 1974, 中央日報全文影像資料庫. 65 “已讓我們對美國現代舞的型態，有了新的認識，也深深體會出美國文化 的精神.” Ibid. 66 “創造出對人類充滿同情心，把人類看成平等的作品，就是一個很好的例 子.” Paul Yu, “我們從瑪莎葛蘭姆吸取什麼” [What we learnt from Martha Graham], China Times (Taiwan), October 9, 1974, 中國時報五十年報紙影像資料庫. 67 Ibid. 68 “葛蘭姆獲贈文藝獎章.” 69 Cai Wenyi, “葛蘭姆舞團公演.” 70 “極具東方韻味.” Ibid. 71 “葛蘭姆強調呼吸。這點與東方相當接近。中國古典舞失傳了。但我們還 有全數，境界最高的是太極拳。它配合呼吸…葛蘭姆技術的基本原理，也透過呼吸 導致肢體的伸與縮，而作藝術的表達…整個技術由內在的看不到的呼吸出發，達到 有形的外在活動…不僅是純技術也達到藝術的境界.” Yu, “我們從瑪莎葛蘭姆吸取什 麼.” 72 Croft, Dancers as Diplomats, 119 (see Chap. 1, n. 39) 73 Ibid. 74 “西洋的舞蹈是陽剛的，無論感情、思想都走極端。中國比較含蓄。這種 特性適合某些舞，比較激烈的表達還需借鏡西洋的肢體語言.” Yu, “我們從瑪莎葛蘭 姆吸取什麼.” 75 “中國的瑪莎葛蘭姆.” Ibid. 76 Quote in Manning, Modern Dance Negro Dance, 123. 77 Ibid., 118. 78 “有很長的時間，在美國以外的地方，我不曾見過這麼優秀的學生.” 186

Quoted in Yang, «飆舞», 93. 79 Ibid., 94. 80 Shea Murphy, The People Have Never Stopped Dancing, 168 (see Chap. 1, n. 57). 81 82 Chang Ziwu, “林懷民:從緘默的歷史中探索家族記憶” [Lin Hwai-min: exploring family memories from the silenced history.] The Reporter (Taiwan), December 9, 2018, https://www.twreporter.org/a/family-dialogue-lin. 83 Ibid. 84 Lin Hwai-Min, Formosa (2017), performed by of Taiwan, March 9, 2018, the Center for the Arts at George Mason University, Fairfax, VA. 85 See Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan’s Facebook Page, Introduction to Formosa, October 9, 2017, www.facebook.com/cloudgate/posts/10154895107131361/. 86 “活在當下，會有一種挫折、憧憬交雜在一起，我們對台灣總是懷抱希 望.” 87 “遊走在危險邊緣.” Ken-Chuan Yeh, Technology of the Body as a Practice of Self-Cultivation: Askesis and Body in Taiwanese Modern Theatre, 1960s to 1990s (Taipei, Taiwan: Taipei National University of the Arts Press and Airiti Press, 2016), 156. 88 “林懷民必須找到微妙的平衡做一種策略性的表達.” Quoted in Ken-Chuan Yeh, Technology of the Body as a Practice of Self-Cultivation, 156. 89 “他把人類原始的感情和它的複雜變化(也就是劇中男性的嫉妒、女性的 矛盾心理)在幾分鐘內都表現出來了.” Quoted in Yang, «飆舞», 83. 90 Susanne Franco, “Ausdruckstanz: Traditions, Translations, Transmissions,” in Dance Discourses: Key Words in , eds. Susanne Franco and Marina Nordera (London: Routledge, 2007), 80–81. 91 Philip Auslander, “Motional Abstraction: Alwin Nikolais’ Formalism,” in The Return of Alwin Nikolais: Bodies, Boundaries, and The Dance Canon, edited by Claudia Gitelment and Randy Martin (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007), 154. 92 Kowal, Performing Change, 85 (see Chap. 1, n. 53). 93 Tresa Randall, “Hanya Holm and an American Tanzgemeinschaft,” in New German Dance Studies, edited by Susan Manning and Lucia Ruprecht, (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 83–85. 94 Susan Manning, “Ausdruckstanz Across the Atlantic,” in Dance Discourses: Keywords in Dance Research, edited by Susanne Franco and Marina Nordera (New York: Routledge, 2007), 52. 95 Ibid., 47. 96 Ibid., 49; Randall, “Hanya Holm,” 94. 97 Manning, “Ausdruckstanz Across the Atlantic,” 49. 98 Morris, A Game for Dancers, 186. 99 Ibid. 100 Ibid., 185. 101 “技巧不是用來表演的，技巧只是讓人動作流利.” Lin Hwai-min, “怪傑尼 187

克” [Geek/Geezer Nikolais], in «擦肩而過», 78. 102 “舞蹈的結構無跡可尋，瞬息萬變，總有出人意表的發展.” “抽象的藝術 是一面透亮的鏡子…映出的卻只是自己的新向.” Ibid., 78 & 80. 103 “人群、車輛、燈光、匆忙、流麗。尼克宛如街角的旁觀者.” Ibid., 80. 104 Yatin Lin, “Choreographing a Flexible Taiwan: Cloud Gate Dance Theatre and Taiwan’s Changing Identity,” in The Routledge Dance Studies Reader, edited by Alexandra Carter and Janet O’Shea (New York & London: Routledge, 2010), 257 105 “都是犧牲者.” The official website of Cloud Gate Dance Theatre, http://cloudgate.glis.ntnu.edu.tw/works.asp?src=galleryVideo&workNameEng=Rite%20o f%20Spring%20/%20Taipei,%201984 106 Albert Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus,” The Myth of Sisyphus & Other Essays, translated by Justin O’Brien (1955; repri., New York: Knopf, 1964), 121. 107 “本舞與史特拉汶斯基的俄國原始部落處女祭無關.” Ibid. 108 “艾文・尼克萊斯才真正代表了美國的文化，它是高度工業文明的產物.” Chu Ge, “視覺的盛宴: 艾文尼克萊斯到底在搞什麼名堂” [The visual feast: what Alwin Nikolais is doing] (Taipei, Taiwan: Artist Publishing, 2013), 320. First published on August 16, 1980. 109 “美現代舞團 十四日來華” [American modern dance company going to visit China on the fourteenth.] United Daily (Taiwan), May 4, 1976, Udndata. 110 USIS played a key role in the US Cultural Presentation Program in many ways. Specifically, while these American dance companies visited Taiwan, USIS, Taipei distributed the information to the local press and organized press conferences and workshops. Generally, USIS also held routine activities introducing US music and dance. For example, Cheng Shu-gi, interview by the author in New Taipei City, on August 2, 2018, recalled that she took American modern dance classes in USIS, Taipei in the 1970s. For the detailed discussion on USIS’s role in the US Cultural Presentation, see Fosler- Lussier, Music in America's Cold War Diplomacy (see Chap. 1, n. 1). 111 “艾文尼可萊斯講解舞的藝術哲學” [Alwin Nikolais lectured aesthetics of dance], United Daily (Taiwan), May 19, 1976, Udndata. 112 “我覺得，尼克萊不算舞團，算是 Theater 或是 Lighting Show 吧！…他 們對舞蹈本身的幫助並不大，只是像隨便到街上抓個人…如果他們叫舞團的話，對 舞者是一種輕蔑.” Quoted in Pan, “花開的聲音: 原文秀與青年朋友談舞蹈” [The sound of blossom: Tina Yuan discussed about dance with the youth] Taiwan Times, September 19, 1979. 國家圖書館全國報紙影像系統. 113 Cheng, interview by the author (see n. 57) 114 This is not an exhausted list. The translated titles of Nikolais’s works in the newspaper reports need further research. 115 “觀眾反應不好.” “尼可舞團首場演出欠佳 決定更改節目爭取觀眾” [Nikolais Company’s First Show Not Satisfying, Deciding Change the Program to Win Over the Audience] United Daily (Taiwan), September 26, 1979, Udndata. 116 “現代藝術革命性的成果之一.” Chu, “視覺的盛宴,” 321. 188

117 “是把現代的造型和色彩，透過劇場的磨界，使人們無條件的來接納它.” Ibid., 322. 118 Chen, “身體的歷史,” 310–313. 119 To distinguish Baku Ishii and Midori Ishii, I use their first names instead of the family name. 120 Mariko Shiba, “Modern Dance in Japan: The Influence of the Western Culture and What Japan Created on its Own,” Journal of Cultural Studies (Japan) 6, n. 1 (November, 2006):112. 121 For detailed information, see Ya-ping Chen, Enquiry Into Subjectivity: Modernity, History, Taiwan Contemporary Dance [in Chinese] (Taipei, Taiwan: Taipei National University of the Arts Press, 2010). For example, the Taiwanese composer Ma Sicong (馬司聰) composed a musical and designated T’sai to choreograph. However, after T’sai’s two-year devotion into this musical, the Kuomintang government arbitrarily assigned National Taiwan University of Arts to take over the musical and changed the title for the 70th anniversary ceremony of the ROC in 1982. Other examples included, to name some, the fire of T’sai’s dance school for unknown reason, and the exit bans for her touring to Japan. 122 My analysis is on the recorded version restaged by T’sai Jui-Yueh in 2001, danced by male dancers Li Mingzheng (李名正) and Lin Weizhe (林維哲), and female dancers You Zhanting (游杉婷), Lu Jiapei (呂佳霈), Hou Yiling (侯怡伶), Liao Xiaoting (廖筱婷), Hou Dangli (侯當立), and Cai Chingcheng (蔡晴丞). 123 Program Note of “1957 A.D.” presented by Neo-Classic Dance Company. 2008. National Theatre. May 16-18. Page 2. 124 Quoted in Yuh-jen Lu, “Decolonized Imagination: Modernity and Modern Dance in 1970s Taiwan,” Arts Review 21 (2011): 27. 125 Li, “劉鳳學訪談,” 79–80 (see Chap. 2, n. 150). 126 Lu, “Decolonized Imagination,” 2. 127 Arne Westad, Global Cold War, 4. 128 Ibid., 6 129 Morris, A Game for Dancers, 33–37 130 Kosstrin, Honest Bodies, 19 (see Chap. 1, n. 32). 131 John Martin, John Martin: The Dance In Theory (1939; repri. Princeton, NJ : Dance Horizons, 1989), 22–25. 132 Morris, A Game for Dancers, 68. 133 See, for example, Morris, A Game for Dancers; Kowal, Performing Change; Constance Valis Hill, “Katherine Dunham’s Southland: Protest in the Face of Repression,” in Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance, edited by Thomas DeFrantz (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), 289-316. 134 Hou, “戰後臺灣白色恐怖論析”, 140 (see Chap. 1, n. 8). 135 Ibid., 149. 136 This analysis is based on the restaged work in the 2000 concert “牢獄與玫 瑰” (laoyu yu meigui, meaning the prison and the rose). 189

137 Kuo, “Tsai Jui-Yueh,” 166 (see Chap. 1, n. 26). 138 Dance theorist Marta E. Savigliano illustrates how dance forms are taken up in international currents of presented or appropriated ideas of passion. See Marta E. Savigliano, and the Political Economy of Passion (Boulder, Colorado: Westview, 1995). 139 Manning, Modern Dance Negro Dance, 118. 140 Lu, “Decolonized Imagination,” 19–21 & 31. 141 Chao, “美國政府在台灣, ”122 (see Chap. 1, n. 15). 142 Chen Fang-ming, Postcolonial Taiwan: Essays on Taiwanese Literary History and Beyond (Taipei, Taiwan: Rye Field, 2002), 175; Chen Fang-ming, A History of Modern [in Chinese] (Taipei, Taiwan: Linking. 2011), 347. 143 Cited in Hsiao, Return to Reality, 164. 144 Hsiao, Return to Reality, 165. 145 Lu, “Decolonized Imagination,” 31. 146 Ibid., 45 147 Hwang, «歷史、身體、國家», 28 (see Chap. 2, n. 158).

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Chapter 4

American Dreams, Chinese Moves

Chinese-born American choreographer Yen Lu Wong (王仁璐) shifts her weight onto one crouched leg and extends the other, as if to launch. Her palms alternatively press skyward and downward, as if practicing Chinese martial arts. Her armor-like costume and helmet with two long elastic decorations recall soldiers in Chinese opera. Wong’s next moves exemplify cultural hybridity. After drawing a circle with straight arms as if practicing taiji quan (太極拳), Wong quickly shifts her posture by standing straight up and clapping twice. This gesture looks similar to a praying gesture that Japanese worshippers make in front of religious shrines. Next, she extends her limbs simultaneously and, after stamping the floor, slightly shakes her head up and down, presenting a familiar image from the classical Japanese dance-drama form kabuki. In this video excerpt of her 1983 work titled Cicada Images, Moulting, Wong presents a fusion of East Asian cultural practices with her modern dance trained body to an American audience. Wong, as a Chinese-born immigrant to the United States, confirms her Asian

American-ness by combining Chinese and Japanese cultural practices, two of the most recognizable cultural markers of East Asia in the United States.

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Wong is not only an Asian American. With her tour to Taiwan and later to China, she is also a successful Chinese figure identified by the public media as carrying

“Chinese culture” forward. Wong’s story as an American citizen and a celebrated

Chinese figure, similar to Chinese-born American choreographer Al Chungliang Huang

(黃忠良), represents the transnational history of dance during the postwar era.

Transnational history is not simply stories happening in two locations; it is a joint story about journeys of migrating people connecting one social network spanning multiple nation-states. The idea of migration involves instability in terms of both geographical and psychological status. This instability may result in hybridity and fusions within the social network, while the choreographers continuously negotiated within it.

While the previous two chapters discuss American dance companies founded by

U.S. citizens and their influence in Taiwan, this chapter focuses on choreographers immigrating from East Asia to the United States and their trips back to Asia. In 1966–

1968, intellectuals and dance artists in Taipei invited two first-generation Chinese

American choreographers, Huang and Wong, to teach American modern dance workshops and to present their dance works. Both Huang and Wong were born in China and later became U.S. citizens. They experienced Chinese traditional performing and martial arts during their childhoods in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, and were educated and trained in American modern dance. In this sense, their migrations, in terms of their physical bodies but also their embodied practices, connect with histories across the Pacific Ocean.

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This chapter explores how Huang’s and Wong’s “transnationally migrating bodies” contributed to dance history in both Taiwan and the United States. I propose the idea of a “transnationally migrating body” to explore how transnational migration shapes cultural and national identities and further influences others by flexibly reiterating national ideologies. With the term “transnationally migrating bodies” I refer to two layers of meaning. The first layer comprises Wong’s and Huang’s physical bodies traveling from one nation to the other and back again. Both artists were born in China and later immigrated with their families to other Sinophone regions after the Chinese Civil War

(1945–1949). After multiple travels back and forth, one not only experiences the adjustment of one’s physical body to different surroundings, but also the shifting and struggling with one’s national identity. Chinese American dance scholar SanSan Kwan has argued, in her monograph Kinesthetic City: Dance and Movement in Chinese Urban

Spaces, that Chineseness is plural and transnational because of ongoing changes in community imaginations. She shows how the history of a Sinophone urban region is an entanglement of motion, time, space, and identity.1 That is, people’s bodies archive their experiences of their regional histories. Moreover, she explained, plural Chineseness is represented physically and spatially in residents’ daily lives and in their dance works, in urban Sinophone regions under global capitalist and cultural flows.2 In this sense, the transnationality of plural Chinese community imaginations in Sinophone cities has shaped the body in terms of dancing and of residents’ daily life.

Plural Chineseness results in various aesthetics within dancing bodies. Taiwanese dance historian Yatin Lin argues that the histories and environments of various

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Sinophone cosmopolitan cities result in unique aesthetics of physicality and embodiment.

She terms this idea of multiple bodily and movement aesthetics related to Chinese languages and cultural practices as “Sino-corporeality.” In her book Sino-corporealities:

Contemporary Choreographies from Taipei and Hong Kong, Lin addresses how unique aesthetics of the body and embodiment emerge from multiple cosmopolitan cities.3 The aesthetics reflect their own history from other Sinophone regions and also from their own historical periods. Lin’s idea of Sino-corporeality thus connects the core value of

Sinophone studies to dance. However, while Lin’s research mainly focuses on contemporary dance in certain cities to exemplify how corporeality blooms from regional history, transnational migrations also shape corporeality. In this sense, boundaries between regions seem to be reified, and so do the Sinophone regions and cities. Similar to

Lin’s reification of Sinophone “societies,” Kwan’s research reiterates accepted national connections instead of bottom-up connections of transnational identities and bodies. In this sense, the capitalist and cultural flows seem to be reified as concrete limits that shape the residents’ identities. Acknowledging her assertion about the plurality of Chineseness,

I focus on Chinese American choreographers’ migrations between Taiwan and the United

States to explore the influences of their dance movements and migrations within these flows.

The second layer of meaning of transnational migrating bodies refers to embodied practices. By migrating, both Huang and Wong conducted shifts of kinesthetic movements. Huang and Wong not only brought ideas from one place to another with their embodied practices but simultaneously learned and absorbed from what they

194 experienced on the journey. In this sense, transnationally migrating bodies are the media to archive cultural practices and create new aesthetics by merging what has been absorbed through embodied practices. These Sinophone regions are not absolutely separated from each other but are somehow connected through transnationally migrating bodies.

To supplement Lin’s idea of Sino-corporealities and Kwan’s transnational imagination of Chineseness, considering how transnational migrations contribute to the development of body politics in multiple Sinophone sites helps us further understand a different but significant way Sino-corporeality and the plurality of Chineseness emerge: from individuals’ migrating stories. The idea of a transnational body thus highlights the multiple histories against the conventional homogeneity of Chineseness as constructed through the Kuomintang’s nationalist projects and censorship policies against different interpretations of Chineseness in Taiwan. In comparison to literature, bodily practices rely less on spoken languages to transfer meaning. In this sense, dancing bodies with transnational histories present cultural markers to audiences with cultural heritages from their own.

To further analyze Huang and Wong’s transnationally migrating bodies and their embodied practices, I first sketch the outline of existing scholarship to show what dialogue scholarship has made about Asian American as a political identity. I also discuss

Chinese diaspora, which focuses on practice and cultural identity related to Chinese heritage. In this chapter, I then discuss how the elites’ postwar migration drove American

195 influence in the Cold War. This driving force moved Chinese immigrants to the United

States to seek better lives.

Al Chungliang Huang and Yen Lu Wong moved into exile in the United States under social drives from Taiwan and Hong Kong. To provide the historical context of the exile, I use the scholarship on the racialization of Asian Americans in the 1960s and

1970s. Scholars mostly focused on the Asian Americans’ engagement in the Civil Rights

Movement and how it contributed to the racialization of “Asian American” as a social category in the United States. The racialization history was illustrated through scholars’ analyses about how the second and later generations of American citizens of Asian heritage called for a social consciousness to shape U.S. policies regarding race. However, the roles of Huang and Wong, as first generation immigrants, are often overlooked in this racialization process. Based on scholarship about the Chinese postwar diaspora and the racialization of Asian Americans, I aim to offer a historical basis for understanding

Huang and Wong’s immigration experiences, their trips to Taiwan in 1967–1968, and the

Taiwanese audiences’ reception to their visits.

After reviewing the literature, I sketch their transnational biographies and discuss their transnationally migrating bodies through the analyses of Taiwanese reception of their dances and their embodied practices in the United States. These analyses display how their bodies and embodied practices absorbed what they encountered in their migrating journey and then produced fusion embodied cultural practices that shaped

Taiwanese dance history and the racialization history of Asian Americans. Huang’s and

Wong’s physical migrations between the United States and East Asia provide

196 opportunities to explore their Chinese/Asian American identities. In this sense, the body is never disassociated from identity because the body locates time and space in the migrating journey. On the other hand, the migration of embodied practices of Chinese movement forms, taiji quan, Chinese opera, and American modern dance facilitated their journey to identity exploration. It is their transnationally migrating bodies that experienced and reiterated their identities and social ideologies about nations.

Through my analyses of Huang’s and Wong’s transnationally migrating bodies, I argue that their earlier East Asian-U.S. migration experiences shaped their Chinese and

Asian American identities and the dance histories of Taiwan and the United States. Their migration experiences and their Chinese identities were entangled while they continuously negotiated with the Taiwanese reception, the Asian American social movements, and other individuals and agencies. Huang’s and Wong’s stories exemplify how human migrations connect the histories of multiple nation-states and nationalisms through their cross-regional moves and moving bodies. Huang’s and Wong’s migrating histories, including their physical moves and identity struggles, not only literally connect social networks across nations but also lead to aesthetic and social changes.

By examining how these transnational migrations shape the histories of multiple regions, I respond to dance historian Susan Manning’s call for “an intercultural historiography of twentieth-century theatrical dance.”4 In the twentieth century, especially during the interwar and post-war eras, modern nation-states became the most significant phenomenon in forming the contemporary world. However, nation-state building also framed historians’ perspectives and limited their analytical scope to the

197 nation-state unit. These writings tend to create histories that frame “culture” within national boundaries and thus fail to capture the process of inter-cultural mixing. To counter the nation-state-based historiography, the idea of a transnationally migrating body draws attention to how the body crosses both geographical and conceptual national territories to form a contemporary global social assemblage.

Although neither Huang’s nor Wong’s visits was supported by the U.S. State

Department, their visits facilitated significant cultural interactions of American modern dance and embodied practices of Chinese heritage. Facilitations that met similar goals to the U.S. State Department’s postwar foreign policies were supported by private foundations with connections to the U.S. State Department. Huang’s 1966–1967 visit to

Taiwan was supported by the Ford Foundation. Scholars have indicated how the Ford

Foundation aligned with the State Department in shaping international relations, especially through the private-state network between Dr. Shepard Stone, the director of the International Affairs program of the Ford Foundation, and the Central Intelligence

Agency.5 Additionally, in the 1960s, U.S. postwar McCarthyism was gradually replaced by the State Department’s political and cultural interests in China. Huang’s Ford-funded trip aligned with the State Department’s diplomatic policies. Similarly, although Wong’s visit to Taiwan was actually accidental due to the Chinese and the

Hong Kong 1968 riots, her visit following her husband’s research trip to Hong Kong pursued the same interests of the U.S. State Department in pan-Chinese situations.

Huang’s and Wong’s trips, just like the U.S. State-sponsored American modern dance companies’ touring, connected American and Taiwanese dance history in unanticipated,

198 unexpected ways. This chapter highlights the dancer-choreographers’ influences on their social networks and explores how their embodied reiteration of national ideologies created transnational history.

To tell Huang and Wong’s migration stories and trace their influences, I use oral history, archival research, and performance analysis. Their dancing histories include

American modern dance, which is related to their Chinese embodied practices of taiji quan and Chinese American concert dance. Both Huang and Wong traveled to the United

States for higher education during the Cold War era. Later, they pursued careers as professional dancers and ended up emphasizing their Chinese heritage in their practice.

Huang’s and Wong’s stories exemplify how individual actors shape transnational dance history and nationalism through their cross-regional moves and moving bodies. They embody what they experience and carry these embodiments with their kinesthetic memories from one location to the other. They adapt to, resist, and respond to various changes and challenges that they face and, as a result, develop different strategies to act within different social networks. In this sense, Huang’s and Wong’s migrating histories, including their physical moves and identity struggles, literally connect social networks across nations with borders.

Huang’s and Wong’s 1967–1968 trips resulted in the blooming of American modern dance in Taiwan and further influenced the Asian American communities in the

United States. As discussed in the previous chapter, in the late 1960s, after two American modern dance companies toured Taiwan under the support of the State Department,

Taiwan’s dancers eagerly sought to learn more about this new dance genre. Taiwanese

199 elites and dance practitioners invited Huang and Wong to teach American modern dance workshops and to present their dances in Taipei. These two Chinese American choreographers contributed to the new chapter of Taiwanese dance modernity, what

Taiwanese dance historian Ya-ping Chen considers as the second wave of dance modernization.6 However, while their contributions to Taiwanese dance history arising from their 1967–1968 visits were acknowledged, much of the scholarship ignores Huang and Wong’s influence on the West Coast of the United States. This invisibility is a common issue that has to do with their Asian heritage in the United States.7 As Asian

American dance scholar Yutian Wong argues, Asian American dance is American dance.8 In other words, only by researching Asian American dance history can we provide a full picture of American dance history. Extending Wong’s argument, I further connect Taiwanese dance history and American dance history by telling Wong’s and

Huang’s stories. Their migrating journeys, initiated by the Global Cold War and ending up in the United States as members of the Asian American community, contribute to the fusion of dancing aesthetics and social ideologies in both regions.

The Global Cold War and Exile of Chinese Diaspora

The postwar international political climate stimulated global migrations, especially in Chinese communities. During the Cold War (1947-1991), the post-World

War II competition between the U.S.- and Soviet Union-led blocs was the main factor of this international climate. This competition between the two superpowers shaped other countries’ social-political development on all levels, as well as their own. In other words,

Cold War shaping forces were neither one-way nor on a certain social scale. Wong’s and

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Huang’s postwar migrations between East Asia and the United States exemplify these complicated, multi-directional influences. Their migrations were results of, but also resulted in, a reformation of the Chinese diaspora.

The Cold War leaders’ competing interventions with other countries shaped the global political and social developments, including the United States and the Soviet

Union. Cold War historian Odd Arne Westad proposes the idea of the Global Cold War to address the competing interventions of the two Cold War leaders and their effects on other countries.9 Challenging the conventional definition of the Cold War that focused on the roles of the United States and the Soviet Union, Westad argues that other countries also influenced the policies of Cold War leaders. Because the two superpowers competed for influence abroad, other countries were able to play the United States and the Soviet

Union against each other.

Westad’s analysis illustrates how the world interacts through nation-states as analytic units. Human migration was not fully stopped by the forms of modern nation- states. In fact, migration was even encouraged during the Global Cold War. A common saying in 1950–1960s Taiwan goes like this: “Come, come, come to NTU, and go, go, go to the United States.”10 “NTU” stands for National Taiwan University, the top school in the country. However, elites were encouraged to further their studies in the United States and later became U.S. citizens. Taiwanese sociologist A-chin Hsiao points out that the

Kuomintang’s official Chinese nationalism and the Chinese diaspora it led played a significant role in this migration trend. This is especially true for the Mainlanders, a group of Taiwanese residents with roots from Mainland China. According to Hsiao’s

201 ethnographic reports, these elites experienced a “rootless” depression, feeling restricted on a small island while longing for Mainland China. This kind of diasporic imagination toward Mainland China was one of the key tenets of the Kuomintang’s official Chinese nationalism.11

In addition to the encouragement of migration during the Global Cold War, local politics also shaped global migration flows. In postwar Taiwan, the Kuomintang’s military rule and the White Terror (1949–1991) shook Taiwanese elites, both

Mainlanders and Islanders. The Kuomintang’s strict control over free speech oppressed intellectual ambition regarding social change. Nevertheless, some still attempted to advocate through media. Free China Journal (1949–1960) was the most significant venue. As the name suggested, this periodical was originally sponsored by the

Kuomintang-led government to deliver liberal thoughts against communism and the

P.R.C. in Taiwan. However, since the mid-1950s, the intellectuals’ anger against Chiang started to appear in this journal. In 1954, Lei Chen (雷震) published an article criticizing the Kuomintang’s Party-State education, a one party state ideology built into an education system. Since 1957, Free China Journal published a series of articles criticizing Chiang and his rule. In June 1960, the main authors and editors of Free China

Journal attempted to found a new political party. Three months later, the Kuomintang government arrested Lei and banned Free China Journal. Hsiao points out that this event furthered the Taiwanese elites’ disappointment.12 The political atmosphere restricting free speech about social change pushed self-exile as an attractive option.

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At the same time, U.S. financial and military aid made the United States an attractive destination. After World War II and the Chinese Civil War, Mainlanders migrated to Taiwan after losing most of their property. They struggled for a stable life.

Similarly, the Islanders’ properties were expropriated after the Kuomintang retreated to

Taiwan. By the 1950s, both groups were in dire straits. U.S. financial aid as mandated by the Sino-American Mutual Defense Treaty provided the Taiwanese government a total of

USD $1.48 billion from 1951 to 1965.13 This financial aid helped postwar Taiwan and made the Taiwanese regard the United States as some sort of paradise nation. Hsiao states that this rosy image encouraged many intellectual families to convince their children to study in the United States as a way to emigrate.14 The desire to self-exile and ideas about the American dream were defining interests for postwar Taiwanese elites.

This kind of atmosphere also influenced how these elites would receive Wong’s and Huang’s dance. Huang and Wong left East Asia to study in the United States when the social situation drove Chinese people into exile. These same elites projected their own exile desires onto Huang and Wong’s migration experiences and viewed them as heroes.

Huang’s and Wong’s childhood memories in terms of Chinese movement practices were nurtured by this diasporic feeling and went on to shape their dance in the United States.

At the same time, when they visited Taiwan, their dances were perceived as both Chinese and American modern, as I will show below. This perception, along with masculinity and freedom of artistic speech discussed in the previous chapters, offered the Taiwanese choreographers a new way to advocate for their national consciousness and their

203 imaginations about the future of the community. Their experiences in the United States also influenced their national and ethnic identities as Asian Americans.

Neither Black Nor White But Asian American

The Global Cold War facilitated Huang’s and Wong’s postwar migrations as well as their participation in the racialization of Asian America. “Asian American” is a political identity of diverse groups composed of different Asian heritages in the United

States. Asians immigrated to the United States in various historical contexts, starting from the 19th century. Since then, U.S. immigration policies, an anti-Asian climate in the

United States, and later the Civil Rights and Asian American Movements all influenced how Asians settled in the new land, and contributed to repercussions of Asian American racialization.

The first wave of Asian immigrants, mostly from East and Southeast Asia, who settled in California, Hawaii, and the American South, attracted public attention in the mid-1800s.15 These Asian males worked in labor-intensive industries, such as gold digging in San Francisco and working on sugar plantations in Hawaii. The Chinese were the first wave of immigrants from Asia to mine for gold on the West Coast.16 As a result, in Chinese Mandarin, San Francisco has been translated as “jioujinshan” (舊金山), literally meaning the old golden mountain. Chinese were also the first group of contracted laborers to plant sugar in Hawaii. Following the Chinese’s gold-digging and plantation

“American dreams,” white Americans formed a stereotype about Asian Americans:

“heathen, exotic, and unassimilable[,].” They were “from a different shore,” as historian

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Ronald Takaki states.17 This stereotype of all Asian immigrants labeled them as Other and grouped them into one social category as Asian Americans.

White Americans formed a negative perception about these Asian male immigration workers and fueled anti-Asian sentiment and racism. White Americans considered these Asian male workers threatening to white men’s job opportunities and intimate relationships. The U.S. government passed a series of discriminatory immigration laws to restrict Asian wives from accompanying their Asian husbands to the

United States. As the first wave of Asian immigrants, Chinese immigrants were targeted first. The Page Act of 1875 banned all Chinese women from immigrating to the United

States. Based on this, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act prohibited all Chinese labor immigrants. Similar to the Chinese Americans’ situation, South Asian immigrants were targeted after the increase of immigrants to the United States. By the end of the 19th century, a large number of South Asian males were also recruited to the West Coast for plantation and railway construction. As a result, the 1917 immigration law prevented

Indian males from bringing their wives.18 These laws show how the United States dehumanized Asian immigrants.

Besides these immigration bans, Asian Americans faced discrimination especially in comparison to European immigrants. Japanese Americans were forced to move to internment camps during World War II, but Italian Americans and German Americans did not face such consequences. Discussing Japanese choreographer and dancer Michio

Ito’s case, Yutian Wong argues that white Americans racialized Asians in a way that bound ethnicity, race, and nationality together. Wong terms this as “a ‘double

205 racialization’—the first being that of visible racial difference and the second, that of assumed mandatory ‘ethnic identity.’”19 That is to say, Asian American was not a social category at the time. The label “Asian” represented the assumed ethnicity and nationality.

In this sense, the American perception of Asian American citizens during war time shows a denial of their U.S. citizenship and the exclusion of Asian Americans from the formation of Americanness.

It was not until the 1960s that a second wave of Asian immigrants came, amid gains in racial awareness and social equality. The Civil Rights Movement, which addressed the civil rights of Black Americans, also assisted all racial minorities. Due to the ban of labor immigration, many Asian immigrants came to the United States as international students. Their naturalization was possible due to immigration law reforms.20 For this reason, many of the second wave held college degrees and attained higher economic and social status. As a result, Asian Americans were viewed as a model minority: “an ideal minority group that moves up economically, taking advantage of the so-called American dream.”21 Reforms in immigration laws and civil rights produced extended racial definitions of Asian immigrants in the United States. With these extended definitions, Asians were not necessarily attached to their national origins but were instead labeled a racial group of U.S. citizens.

However, the “model minority” label on Asian Americans puts down other people of color. Since the 1980s, public media started to discuss how and why Asian American children achieved the best scores in school. This discussion quickly expanded to the political realm to highlight Asian Americans’ success.22 Legal scholar Angelo N.

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Ancheta indicates that this model minority racialization put a racial image on Asian

Americans as having higher educational outcomes and life incomes.23 Dance scholar

Priya Srinivasan argues that the myth of a model minority dehistoricizes the Asian- embodied practices in the United States, restricts these culturally diverse groups to one social category, and keeps them distant from the mainstream.24 In this sense, “Asian

American” is a social label specifically created in the context of U.S. racial history and all social minorities, especially other Americans of color, were discriminated against and shaped by this label.

The shared experiences of diverse cultural groups in the United States stimulated a series of social movements that aimed to raise awareness of racial identity and recognition. Asian Americans started to actively advocate for social change, particularly during the anti-Vietnam War movement. Later on, college-educated Asian Americans began to stand with the racial liberation movement and the New Left student movements.25 According to William Wei, Asian Americans were “neither Asian nor

American, but Asian American.”26 This definition represents the shared experience for those who were born in, or, at least, moved to the United States at a young age and were educated there. Labeled as the model minority, they later participated in the pan-Asian social movement. In this sense, the definition of Asian American excludes those Asian immigrants with childhood experiences in Asia, not in the United States. They are, in

Ancheta’s term, the “foreigners.”27 By this logic, the framework of Asian American does not apply to Al Chungliang Huang and Yen Lu Wong’s immigration stories. As first- generation immigrants born and educated outside of the United States, Ancheta’s

207 foreigner racialization, which refers Asian immigrants as foreigners, may be useful in considering Huang’s and Wong’s immigrating stories.

The migration stories of Huang and Wong, as Chinese-born Americans, are also associated with the idea of Chinese diasporas. Chinese diasporas point to the massive and scattered population of ethnic Chinese outside China. The history of Chinese migration to other regions from the Chinese mainland can be traced back to the 15th century, when the

Great Ming Empire sent the Eunuch Zheng He to explore the South China Sea and the

Indian Ocean. During the Qing Empire, the Chinese people, mostly from the southeast coast, regularly migrated by ship to explore resources for plantations and mining in

Southeast Asia. As mentioned above, during the mid-nineteenth century, many Chinese laborers went to the West Coast and Hawaii and became the first wave of Chinese

American immigrants. Some of them eventually returned to China, while others stayed in the used-to-be foreign locations, including the United States (sometimes abandoning their families back home).

The Chinese emphasis on kinship over nationality in the modern era is further represented through citizenship with dual nationalities. Transnational anthropologist

Aihwa Ong examines how the transnational mobility of ethnic Chinese with dual passports and the adaptation of Asian governments created the accumulation of capital and power.28 Ong refers to transnationalism as “the cultural specificities of global processes, tracing the multiplicity of the uses and conceptions of ‘culture.’”29 The idea of

“Chinese” for Chinese immigrants, as well as for the original governments of these immigrants, is flexible in claiming their cultural and national identities. This citizenship

208 flexibility thus challenges political borders and national identity in terms of modern nation-states. Ong’s definition of transnationalism is thus useful for my further discussions on Yen Lu Wong and Al Chungliang Huang. Wong and Huang’s claims regarding their Chinese identity, as well as the Taiwanese government’s claim about their

Chinese-ness, provide flexibility of interpretation. They are arguably both American and

Chinese.

While Ong’s idea of transnationalism benefits my analysis of Wong’s and

Huang’s visits to Taiwan and their influence in the United States, the recently proposed academic field, Sinophone Studies, also provides a useful framework to connect

Chineseness to Asian Americanness. Asian American theorist Shu-mei Shih, who was born in South Korea and studied in a Taiwanese university, proposes Sinophone as a new framework to explore Sinophone literatures and films outside of China. As the title

“Against Diaspora” suggests, Shih addresses the diversity of Sinophone arts as reflections on their locality against the imperialist central-peripheral perspective within China and between China and Sinophone regions outside of China.30 Shi’s advocating for

Sinophone studies is based on the multiple histories of Sinophone languages in Taiwan,

Hong Kong, Malaysia, and the United States, highlighting these languages’ diverse developments. For example, Sinophone Taiwanese literature points to multiple colonization experiences and the merging of multiple Sinophone languages. Sinophone

American literature as a cultural minority language reflects Chinese Americans’ experiences in the United States. All these factors are related to locality and have been shaping different histories.

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Placing embodiment in terms of both Chinese origin and American modern dance at the center of the discussion, this chapter recognizes not only the “becoming Asian

American” stories of two Chinese-born dancer-choreographers, but also their facilitation of the second-wave modernization in Taiwanese modern dance history. Dance ethnographer Angela K. Ahlgren points out that practices of movement forms of Asian origin, such as taiko, “prompts awareness and interrogation of multiple and overlapping identities, both individual and collective” of Asian America.31 In a similar idea regarding how embodied practices shape not only the practitioners’ but also collective identities,

Huang’s and Wong’s migrating bodies exercising both their American and Asian identities further challenge the conventional imagination regarding national boundaries.

Al Chungliang Huang and the East/West Culture Synthesis

Al Chuangliang Huang’s postwar transnational migration from Taiwan to the

United States facilitated his dance career and his training in American modern dance technique. Huang encountered American modern dance during his collegiate studies in the United States. Under American modern dancer-choreographer Ted Shawn’s support,

Huang’s debut in New York and Los Angeles attracted the attention of many dance critics. His 1966–1967 visit was the first time a Chinese citizen brought American modern dance technique and choreography to Taiwan. Before that, Taiwanese audiences had only seen de Lavallade-Ailey’s and José Limón’s tours. These tours were short, lasting only a few days before the dancers moved to their next stop. In contrast, Huang spent one year in Taipei. He taught at the Chinese Cultural College (now Chinese

Cultural University), gave a short-term program downtown, and held concerts of his

210 dances for Taiwanese audiences. Huang was the first to foster American modern dance in

Taiwan. On his return, Huang brought his experience back to the United States and devoted his life to East/West cultural synthesis through movement education.

Huang was the youngest son of General Huang Zhenwu (黃珍吾), born in

Shanghai to an educated family in 1937. His father was born in China and followed his elder brother to Melaka, Malaysia to be a journalist and later established a Chinese elementary school in Melaka as the president. In 1924, the Kuomintang selected Huang

Zhenwu to join the first class of the Republic of China Military Academy in Huangpu,

Guangdong, also known as Whampoa Military Academy (黃埔軍校).32 Both Huang

Zhenwu and his wife Fu Kunying (符坤英) were fans of Chinese Opera. They particularly adored Mei Lan-Fang, a famous Chinese Opera master. After several years of moving from village to village due to the Sino-Japanese War and later losing the Chinese

Civil War, the Kuomintang retreated to Taiwan. At this time, Huang’s family moved to

Taiwan and settled in Yangmingshan, the countryside of Taipei City, where his father served as a general and chief of the Military Police Office in Taipei. Huang expressed his appreciation for these migrations in an interview by stating that “if we hadn’t been at war,

I would have grown up in city environment instead of experiencing the beauty and traditions of the rural countryside.”33 Huang’s early life was filled with migrating memories. So was his adulthood.

After graduating from high school, Huang was awarded a scholarship by the

Ministry of Education to study architecture on the American West Coast. This journey facilitated his career in dance and movement practices. He participated in musical theater 211 shows, including Oklahoma!, while studying at the , before transferring to the University of California, Los Angeles. In 1958, Huang attended the

Perry-Mansfield Performing Arts School & Camp in Colorado, where he received training in American modern dance from , , and Harriette

Ann Gray. Later on, he received ballet training from Mary Clare Sale and Carmalita

Maracci. During these years, he performed a solo for Tamiris Dance Company and started working as a choreographer.34 His experience in dance led him to further study choreography in the master’s program of UCLA and later at . After completing his M.F.A degree in 1963, he founded the Al Huang Dance Company with his life partner, Suzanne Pierce, a dancer in his company, and he taught as an instructor at

UCLA until 1968.

Huang’s own career journey and his kinesthetic experience in American modern dance as a male dancer deeply shaped his gender ideology of masculinity. Graduating from college, Huang worked for a few years with Lotte Goslar, who studied dance with

German expressionist dancer Mary Wigman and . Dance historian Karen

Mozingo points out that Goslar’s experience of exile in both her life and choreographic traces “broadened the boundaries of American and German definitions of modernism and subverted the representations of gender that were integral to both dance traditions” through her female clown roles.35 Goslar’s wartime exile migration contributed to the transmission of dancing bodies from Germany to the United States and also led to reformation of the German and American dance traditions. Sharing similar Cold War exile experiences with and probably influenced by Goslar, Huang started to challenge the

212 conventional idea of masculinity through his devotion to dance. He also broadened

American modern dance with his own choreography featuring his Chinese heritage later in his career.

Huang’s collaboration with Goslar broadened his own career and facilitated his encounter with his lifelong mentor. Huang performed at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival several times after his debut in the summer of 1961. On July 4 to 8, 1961, Goslar, a good friend of Ted Shawn since 1954, brought her small company from Hollywood to present her dances in the festival, where Huang danced with Goslar in her Irish duet For Feet

Only (1961).36 In the following year, Shawn invited Huang to dance in his master work

Kinetic Molpai (1935), featuring an all-male cast.37 In the short clip of the 1962 version restaged by Norman Walker, Huang and other male dancers presented a solemn image with proud, chest-forward walking. They form symmetrical formations, and presented powerful arm gestures, while bearing their muscular chests.38 This experience inspired

Huang to choreograph a piece with an all-male cast, with three of his male dance students.39 Although he did not initiate this all-male dance project immediately due to a lack of male dancers, Huang revived his idea for an all-male dance when he returned to

UCLA as a faculty member. Huang started teaching taiji as a kind of Chinese martial arts to upend the feminized stereotype of dance and to encourage males to participate in this activity.40

As an international student, Huang’s dance career was difficult because of his immigration status as a nonresident alien. He went to the United States, holding a student visa, which was terminated after his enrollment in educational programs ended. This

213 issue forced him to give up the opportunity to tour Europe with Goslar’s company.41 Out of lasting concern regarding his immigration status, Huang contacted Silvio O. Conte, the former Senator of Massachusetts, seeking a solution.42 Luckily for him, the immigration reforms in the Hart-Celler Act were in progress. By 1963, when the Hart-Celler Act went into effect, Huang was able to apply for a Suspension of Deportation, with the support from significant institutions and individuals, including Ted Shawn and Bill Bales, then the chair of Dance, at Bennington College.43 In late 1965, Huang applied for U.S. permanent residency. He was finally able to travel outside the United States and return freely. Huang’s anxiety towards his career and his immigration status was a shared experience among most immigrants. Like other foreigners in the United States, Huang faced unequal opportunities in respect to his career development while other dancers were allowed to tour internationally and gain repute. Huang also had to maintain his reputation as a well-behaved student and dancer to apply for residency. Although he taught at Bennington College as a master’s student to earn his tuition and stipend, he could not live without support from his family. Taiwanese dance sociologist Hsu Wei- ying argues that the dance careers of Taiwanese dance pioneers depended heavily on their families’ capital.44 Huang’s transnational dance career thus represents how a family’s economic, cultural and political capital provided opportunities in terms of education and financial support.

The mentorship between Shawn and Huang not only influenced Huang as a dancer but more specifically as a male dance practitioner. Huang’s debut at Jacob’s

Pillow Dance Festival in 1961 initiated this mentorship. Since then, Huang continuously

214 communicated with Shawn through mail to share his artistic thoughts and to ask for advice. Out of his full respect for Shawn, Huang invited Shawn to attend the commencement of Bennington College in 1963 in place of his parents.45 In postwar East

Asia, being a performer was not appreciated. This was doubly true for male performers.

The East Asian public commonly viewed dance as entertainment and considered it as an activity for non-intellectuals and women. In order to pursue a career as a dancer, Huang mailed his father a biographical book of Ted Shawn, which included a mention of the

Chinese Opera master Mei Lan-fang. This connection between Shawn as a male dancer and Mei as a male master of a Chinese artistic form successfully persuaded his father that dance is an art and not merely entertainment. This also meant that male dancers had an intellectual purpose.46 Huang’s struggles to open up to his parents about his dance career and his success in persuading them indirectly transmitted Ted Shawn’s revision of masculinity in American modern dance to East Asia with Huang’s 1966–1967 visit.

Huang later contributed to this revision of gender and class issues in dancing in

East and Southeast Asia through his dance tours. Huang received his U.S. permanent residency in 1965. Residency allowed him to travel outside the United States with peace of mind. After dismissing his concern about his immigration status, Huang applied for grants from the Ford Foundation to research Chinese Opera in Taipei. In the fall of 1966, he and Suzanne Pierce took a one-year leave to go to Taipei with the support of the Ford

Foundation to research Chinese theater. That year, Huang taught in the Department of

Dance at the College of Chinese Culture (now Chinese Culture University). In the following May, he gave dance workshops in Humphrey-Weidman technique at T’sai Jui-

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Yueh’s dance studio and presented his modern dances of Chinese narratives. Before the concert, his father wanted to give free tickets to his friends. A commentary by Taiwanese writer He Fan (何凡) stated that giving tickets reflects the traditional Chinese value on friendship and scholarship.47 However, Huang persuaded other well-known artists to persuade his father to stop giving out tickets. He further indicated that giving out tickets is “the unmalleable between old and new concepts.”48 For Huang, a U.S.-trained professional dancer and choreographer, concerts tickets represented his professional efforts that deserved compensation. In addition, he pointed out that giving out tickets might bring chaos to the auditorium.49 At that time, the public was not familiar with professional dance concerts (see Chapter 2), and how the sale of tickets benefits the development of professional performing arts, in terms of financial support and respect.

Huang’s concerts directly contributed to the social value of performing arts in

Taiwan. In the press concert on May 14, 1967, Huang raised the misunderstanding regarding dance as an artistic form. He stated: “Currently, the society holds a misunderstanding on dance. They consider dance can only exist in night clubs, rather than viewing dance as art, resulting in their ignorance about dance.”50 He brought attention to the development of artistic dance and addressed the creativity in art works. In

Chapter 2, I discussed Feng-Shueh Liu’s Chinese modern dance since 1957. Other

Taiwanese choreographers also presented their works related to their thinking about dance modernity. At that time, modern dance was growing in Taiwan. However, since

Huang was a son of a well-known general who had ruled Taipei, he was able to reach out to more people.

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Despite Huang’s own interests, the press portrayed Huang’s 1966–1967 visit as nationalist heroism. In postwar Taiwan, heroism was a significant narrative since it fit in with authoritarian nationalism. Slogans in the schools, on the streets, and in the public media framed Chiang Kai-Shek as minzu jioxing (民族救星, meaning a national savior).

Such heroism in the official propaganda also influenced theatrical practices. Suzanne

Pierce, accompanying Huang to Taiwan, was aware of both aspects of authoritarian heroism. She stated that “[t]he government’s censorship on all forms of entertainment gives a sameness on the ‘hero, heroine, save the country’ type of drama—the mainstay of the Opera’s repertory.”51 Ironically to Pierce, her husband’s return to Taiwan was also framed in a similar narrative of heroism. Liu Ruilin (劉瑞林), a China Times journalist, described Huang as “one of the five most outstanding masters in the United States” and exaggerated Huang’s teaching at UCLA by stating that Huang was the only full professor who held a master’s degree while others with those degrees can only be associate professors.52 While Liu’s report distorted facts (Huang was an associate professor then), these exaggerations made Huang an influential figure. In this sense, the press promoted

Huang as a Chinese hero who significantly influenced the United States with his cultural heritage. His promoted heroic image distracted people from the national sentiment of failure.

In addition to these exaggerations of heroism, the reports also emphasized

Huang’s heritage of authentic Chineseness. Most of the local reposts repeatedly introduced him as the son of General Huang Jenwu who had served as the National

Policy Advisor to Chiang, even though his father was dismissed from the commander

217 position due to the 1957 anti-American riots. During the Cold War, Chiang competed against Communist China for the right to represent China. Huang came from an orthodox

Chinese family in the sense that he had a Mainlander lineage and that his father served as a general in the Kuomintang army. His family passed down to him the “authentic Chinese culture” that fit into what Chiang’s government claimed. Huang’s heritage was not only inserted into a Chinese nationalist discourse but also into a Cold War anti-communist discourse.

Because of Huang’s promoted image as an authentic Chinese hero, the 1967 concerts attracted huge attention. According to a news report, Far Eastern Art

Management, the company that hosted U.S. cultural diplomatic events in Taiwan, facilitated this concert. Because of this invitation, Huang called for dancers publicly to audition for the concerts in Zhongshen Hall on May 19 and 20.53 In the concert, Huang,

Pierce, and fourteen Taiwanese dancers presented eight pieces, including Kite (1963),

Cicada Song (1963), A Cloud Passed (1966), Butterfly Dream (1966), O, Vaporous Heart

(1966), Yin and Yang (1966), Dandelions & Sunflowers (1966) and Suites (1967).54

Suites was the that Huang choreographed for the Taiwanese dancers. Huang and Pierce auditioned Taiwanese dancers, most of whom were Huang’s students in the

Dance Department at Cultural College. Huang offered a six-week workshop in T’sai Rui-

Jueh’s dance studio in downtown Taipei. Xie Huirong (謝惠容), one of the Taiwanese dancers, recalled that Huang taught them several fundamental movements, including breathing, running, and collapses. She felt that these all required balletic training to achieve the desired aesthetic value.55 The silent video of Taiwan Television News

218 documenting the press conference also showed one of Huang’s trainees demonstrating

Western dance vocabulary with small and quick tendus, a leg movement extending outward while the toes remain on the floor, and relevé lent, a leg lifting movement.56

Among these demonstrations, some specific movements exemplified American modern dance technique. In one movement phrase, the female dancer draws a figure-eight with her leg, initiating with the knee and letting the rest of her moving leg, including her pelvis, follow. This pelvic movement is a classic example from the American modern dance repertoire. In another phrase, the same dancer spirals in until sitting down and draws a full circle with her upper torso to demonstrate “fall and recovery,” the main theory of Humphrey-Weidman technique which sought to negotiate gravity and to create

“the arc between two deaths.”57 In this press conference, Huang clearly introduced

American modern dance technique to the Taiwanese.

Despite Huang’s workshop on American modern dance techniques, public media oriented his dance towards a Chinese direction. Central Daily introduced Huang and

Pierce’s dance as “the embodiment of Chinese culture.”58 In the report, it further stated that the most salient characteristic of Huang’s dancers was “modern dance in Chinese themes, instead of modern dance from the West.”59 For example, this report introduced that Huang’s solo Cicada Song presented “metaphors struggling for life by miming a cicada transforming.”60 The Taiwanese audience knew the metaphor of cicada transformation that originates from Chinese Taoist scriptures. By pointing out the

Chinese themes in Huang’s choreographies, the public media highlighted Huang’s insertion of Chineseness into American modern dance.

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The Chinese narratives in Huang’s dance also stood out in the public media’s reports. This solo dance starts with Huang struggling to balance while standing on his bent left foot, holding the other leg to the side in a slightly twisted posture.61 From there, he gradually straightens the lifted leg and lifts his chin up, as if waking up from sleep.

Then, Huang awakens his muscles by shaking his arms while bending his upper body down toward the floor. He stretches, turns freely, now enjoying the mobility of his body at full range. While a cicada nymph’s long underground life is often the metaphor of efforts leading to success in Chinese stories, Huang’s dancing shows American modern dance technique without necessarily referring to Chinese cultural markers. This report intentionally ignores the way that Huang dances and addresses the Chinese narratives in

Huang’s works, in order to turn Huang into a Chinese modern dance choreographer.

However, not all of Huang’s dances in the 1967 concerts were purely American in style or technique. Instead, he appropriated a movement phrase from Chinese Opera. In the group piece Dandelions & Sunflowers, nine female dancers are in tight tops and skirts, barefoot. They perform a pivot and then a royale, a codified balletic movement that involves beating the legs while jumping in the air. As they land, the dancers follow the momentum to continue spinning downward until sitting on the floor with legs crossed. This spiraling move is famous in Mei Lan-Fang’s Drunk Madame Yang (貴妃醉

酒, gui fei zuo jiou) to show that Madame Yang, a historical female figure in the Tan

Empire, is intoxicated by alcohol. This movement phrase combines recognizable movements from both Western dance and Chinese Opera. In another section, four male dancers beat their legs while leaping horizontally with their right hands on the ground as

220 support. This movement is seen often in minzu wudao, specifically the invented

Mongolian dance. These movements show that Huang integrated recognizable movements from his dancing experiences in the United States with kinesthetic and aesthetic memories from his East Asian history.

Huang and Pierce’s visit undoubtedly opened a new vision for Taiwanese dancers and choreographers, as well as for Huang himself. In an article that expressed admiration of clarity and fluency in Huang’s choreography, Central Daily reported the comments of

Yu Da-Gang (余大綱, also known as Paul Yu), a well-known scholar of Chinese theater, saying that he believed Huang’s dance inspired many Taiwanese choreographers and that

“there will be new creations appearing in Taiwan within two years.”62 Xie Huirong indicated that while many Taiwanese elites watched American modern dance companies’ concerts in the past, more Taiwanese dancers and choreographers went to Huang and

Pierce’s concerts; as a result, many Taiwanese choreographers started to create their own modern dance.63

Huang’s visit to Taiwan also shifted his own career and his thinking about dance.

During the year of his visit, Huang studied Chinese Opera, taiji quan, and other Chinese martial arts. Huang stated that “I came back [to the United States] with a new understanding of my dancing…The breakthrough for me was to realize dancing doesn’t have to be a strain. You don’t have to push to show the individual ego.”64 These Chinese practices allowed Huang to experience the fluency and passiveness of Chinese Taoism, which changed his body.

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After his 1966–1967 visit, Huang’s career changed for two reasons. The first is due to his practice of taiji and Chinese martial arts. As Pierce noted, Huang learned taiji and Chinese martial arts from the masters every morning while they lived in

Yanminshan.65 This continuous practice differed from his childhood experience, when he learned taiji for fun. Practice imprinted taiji movements and qualities in Huang’s body and thus transformed his American modern dance body. This transformation was possible because of his physical migration. This transformation merged with his American modern dance training.

Huang embraced not only Chinese but also Japanese philosophies and cultural practices. After his return to the United States, the American idea of Asia further led

Huang to add Japanese philosophies to his practice. After his last year teaching at UCLA, he completed a residency at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Illinois and taught in and chaired the Asian Theater division of the School of the Fine

Arts at York University in Canada. During this period, his dance company also consistently presented his works at Jacob’s Pillow, , and at

Delacorte Theater in New York. Another major shift in his artistic life was due to his encounter with Alan W. Watts, a popular student of Zen philosophy. Watts invited Huang to co-lead seminars to bridge the Western and Eastern philosophies at Esalen Institute in

Big Sur, California. Huang was encouraged to expand the kinds of philosophies and the genres of his movement practices to include taiji and Taoism, Zen. Huang revisited taiji and Taoism during his Taiwan trip. Zen was the popular Japanese philosophy practiced on the West Coast of the United States. Actually, Huang was not versed in Japanese

222 cultural practice. Because Asian American was considered one single social category,

Japanese Zen philosophy was mingled with Chinese and Taoism.

While Huang’s Chinese heritage and his revisiting of Taiwan provided him a different view on the East Asian philosophies from the West, Huang’s discourse on taiji revealed the historical Chinese imperialism toward other East Asian countries by centralizing China as the origin of East Asian philosophies. Often, he used the binary comparison between the East and the West to show how “Chinese culture” could harmonize with the Western syndrome of the body-mind dichotomy. In this sense,

Huang’s taiji represented the East, and Eurocentric philosophy represented the West.

Furthermore, he pointed out that Japanese Zen Buddhism was developed from Chinese

Ch’an Buddhism.66 This statement highlighting China as the origin of the East Asian philosophy not only ignored the South Asian birth of Buddhism, but also neglected the heterogeneity of Chinese philosophies, such as Buddhism and Taoism. Thus, through blurring the distinction between Chinese and Japanese philosophy, Huang legitimated his representation of the East—the Asian—in contrast to the West—the American—and presented himself as an Asian American.

While Huang discussed Chinese influences on Japanese Zen, he aimed to legitimize his “Chinese” authority over Japanese cultural practices, which were popular in the San Francisco Bay Area during the 1960s and 1970s. For example, choreographer

Simone Forti recalled that with dance educator and choreographer they played NEZ Plays—Zen spelled in reverse.67 By situating China as the origin of the popular Asian philosophy, Huang thus included Japanese elements to meet the American

223 imagined Asia-ness and successfully merged multiple East Asian bodies into his practices.

The emphasis on Chinese origins of the East and Southeast Asian civilizations in

Huang’s words is not surprising. Chinese literature and modern discourses adopt similar ideas of imperialism toward other East and Southeast Asian countries.68 However, instead of fully following the Chinese thinking, Huang proposed a new path for exploring taiji.

He stated that his style is not from a specific lineage but “comes out of all these other styles, and [he had to] develop to the point that it becomes [his].”69 Huang’s statement against the traditional emphasis on master-pupil lineages reflects not only his own childhood experience in taiji quan but also his study in Bennington College, the same progressive higher educational institution where followers of John Dewey and American modern dance pioneers gave workshops. According to a propaganda film made by USIA in 1951, the method at Bennington College was that “teachers guide education, [and] they do not impose it. Everything at Bennington was based upon recognition of the student as an individual.”70 This student-centric pedagogy provided Huang an American path of learning and teaching, which is different from the Chinese martial arts tradition.

Another piece of evidence is the series of photos in Huang’s taiji book.71 These photos show the “Westernized” imagination toward practices of taiji by Huang and his friends in terms of locations, costumes, and movements. The scenes present a nostalgic stance toward nature, similar to German expressionist dance, which influenced American modern dance through the followers of Rudolf Laban. Another photo of Huang in a

Japanese style robe demonstrates a Western fusion of Chinese and Japanese costumes.

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This photo is for Western audiences, not East Asian audiences. Third, the practitioners’ movements in these photos are not in unison. Instead, they raise their arms at various angles. Their torso does not necessarily align with their lower body. They hold hands to make a circle. They push their hands upwards and forwards but the momentum does not come from their legs as commonly emphasized in taiji training. They run and chase each other with their arms at their sides, as if playing a game. These photos show that Huang’s taiji is different from its Chinese origin. Instead, his taiji is a result of his migration across the Pacific Ocean. His migration shows his own shifting of bodily practices between taiji, Taoism, Zen, and American modern dance, as well as the accumulation and circulation of the hybridity of Asian traditions through his migrating body. In this sense, his body is a part of both Sinophone East Asian and American history.

Yen Lu Wong and Female Asian America

Yen Lu Wong’s migration exemplifies similar transformations and hybridizations of Asianness and Asian Americanness. Wong was born in Kunming, Yunnan, where her father was the chief manager of the Bank of China. Wong started to learn ballet when she was eight. After high school, Wong was sent to the United States to study pre-med at

Tufts University. Defying her parents’ expectation to be a doctor, she spent her time taking dance classes at Robert Cohen’s New England Conservatory of Music. Even when she got accepted into Columbia University, she continued taking dance classes at the

Martha Graham School in New York and later won a 2-year fellowship from 1961 to

1963. After four years studying dance with Martha Graham, she taught “stage movement” in the theater department at the University of Kansas to inspire students to

225 explore movement.72 Wong’s trip to Taiwan was an accident due to her and her husband’s rerouting to Taiwan from Hong Kong during the Hong Kong 1967 Leftist riots. However, her workshops during this trip inspired many Taiwanese dancers and also herself as a choreographer.73

Wong’s 1967 visit, and in extension her contribution to Taiwan, was a historical coincidence. Wong and her husband, anthropologist Herbert Shore, planned to travel to

Hong Kong for Shore’s research on young people in Hong Kong and their struggles over career dreams and reality. However, due to the Cultural Revolution in China and the

Hong Kong 1967 Leftist Riots, they were forced to stay in Taiwan to wait for entry permission. Wong’s uncle, who lived in Taipei, was a friend of Paul Yu’s and introduced her to Yu. After listening to her words regarding her background, training in dance, and also her enthusiasm in Chinese Opera, Yu recommended that Wong give a lecture about

American modern dance and later prompted her to hold a workshop. Mid-way through the six-week workshop, Yu further pushed Wong to hold a showing. Thus, both the trip and the work Wong did in Taiwan were triggered by unexpected geopolitical and personal networks.

Wong’s lecture in 1968 unexpectedly contributed to dance modernization in

Taiwan. She recalled that in the lecture “there were more than six hundred persons, some of which were leaning against the wall because there were no more available seats.”74

Many influential Taiwanese dance educators and all the first-generation Cloud Gate dancers were at the lecture.75 Wong stated, in front of the Taiwanese audience, that

“modern dance is to present freedom, without the restriction of traditional techniques, to

226 endow movements with new meanings.”76 Wong’s emphasis on artistic freedom not only echoed the rhetoric of the United States-led campaign but also challenged the nationalist restriction of artistic creation under martial rule.

Following the success of the lecture, Wong’s workshop provided the Taiwanese dancer-choreographers examples of Taiwanese/Chinese dance modernization through her own American modern dance experiences and the program of diverse cultural elements.

This workshop thus opened a new venue for Wong to choreograph Chinese narratives.

Wong worked with Taiwanese dancers that had no experience in modern dance and staged six pieces on June 5, 1968. In this concert “An Evening of Dance: Choreography of Yen Lu Wong,” seven works were presented by Wong and her trainees, including

Hsüeh-T’ung Ch’en (known as H.T. Chen in the United States), Ta-Fei Chin, Chih-Ming

Lu, Mei-Ye Ch’en, Hsieh-T’ung Ch’en, Hsiu-Mei Chang, Chieh Kuo, Aliza Bethlahmy,

David Bethlahmy, Liang-Chih Chang, Patricia Chang, Ping-Ping Kuo, and Chris Watten.

These works were Winter’s Companions, Lotus, Notes For Composition, Between Two and One: Indecision, Call of Ancient Voices, Between Man and Man, and White Snake, all of which premiered on this 1968 concert.77 This program provided a mix of cultural elements for the Taiwanese audiences. For instance, the dancers in the third section of

Between Man and Man wore long one-piece skirts and tall brimless hats patterned with vertical stripes. They walked with their limbs in stiff clown-like gestures. The documented photos recall Western mime comedies.78 In contrast to these Westernized dance aesthetics, the second section featured an erhu soloist, Chen-tung Li, and the fourth section centered on a well-known Taiwanese folk song.79 The mixture of Taiwanese with

227 other elements was unusual for the increasing nativist awareness in the 1970s. Wong, different from Huang, had never stayed in Taiwan prior to her accidental visit. She was not directly influenced by the Kuomintang’s postwar Chinese nationalism. The oppression of Taiwanese local cultural practices and elements—Chinese classicism—was not seen in her choreography and choices of music. On the contrary, she used various cultural markers that she and her dancers had experienced. This mixture of Taiwanese local elements echoed what she stated in the lecture that modern dance reflects its time and space.80

However, the Chinese elements attracted the press’ attention more than Wong’s

American modern dance technique and choreography. China Times highlighted White

Snake and Lotus for their Chinese elements. It stated that White Snake was based on an ancient Chinese story and Wong’s choreography in Lotus adopted “purely Chinese movement ‘yunzho,’” a wrist rotating movement showing two hands moving around each other, and that the music was “originally Chinese and transmitted to Japan during the

Tang Dynasty.”81 Huang Shan also stated that Wong’s dance expressed “the Chinese’s philosophy and affects.”82 Only the June 5 report mentioned the “local folk song,” which was a Taiwanese song, as a part of Chinese music said to “harmonize music and dance to express traditional Chinese beauty.”83 These reports specifically highlighted the Chinese references, such as the narrative of the White Snake, the movement vocabulary from

Chinese operas, and historical and , and ignored her dance technique or her hybridity of styles in her choreography. In this sense, Wong’s dancing experience in the

United States was downplayed in favor of her Chinese heritage to appreciate her

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Chineseness. These reports showed the influences of official Chinese nationalism that elevated Chinese cultural orthodoxy.

The cultural hybridity in Wong’s choreography manifests through her thematic mixing of Chinese symbols with classical Western music. Winter’s Companions was performed by Wong, Liang-Chih Chang, and H.T. Chen, to J.S. Bach’s music. The printed program framed the dance in this way: “In the winter, when all the other plants are dormant, the bamboo, pine, and plum thrive and remind us of the approaching spring.”84 The three plants, bamboo, pine, and plum are classic Chinese symbols; they represent three friends of winter, in the words of ancient Chinese writer Lin Jiangxi, referring to an idealized Chinese intelligentsia.85 Wong, as the bamboo, H. T. Chen, as the pine, and Liang-Chih Chang, as the plum, form a circle by hooking their arms together back to back; by spinning in this formation they represent their tight friendship protecting them against the harsh winter. Following their disentangling, Chen lifts Wong up, laying her on his shoulder and then gently places her on the floor, while Chang leaps behind them. Cheng’s arm swings become the supportive strength of pines, the flexibility of bamboo, and the magnificent flowering of plum blossoms. They both open their arms to the sides as a welcoming gesture and give each other a friendly look. Following that,

Chang joins the duet, strolling around them and open his arms wide, as they, the three friends of winter, introduce the coming of the spring. Wong’s choreography, exemplified by Winter’s Companions, shows Chinese aspects through her ballet and modern dance trained body and compositional tactics. Wong’s choreographic blending of Martha

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Graham technique and Chinese elements reflected her dance training in the United States, her childhood education, and the Taiwanese expectation on her Chinese heritage.

The press often highlighted Wong’s White Snake to address her dance modernization. Wong took a well-known romantic and moral story about two serpent spirits, a scholar, and a Buddhist monk to choreograph this piece. The story is that the white serpent spirit and her maidservant, the green serpent spirit, give themselves human appearances to repay the young male scholar’s help. The scholar falls in love with the white serpent spirit. However, because religious rules prohibit a partnership between a human being and a spirit, the Buddhist monk imprisons the white serpent spirit under a tower. Wong chose William Russell’s, ’s, and John Cage’s music to present this Chinese legend. There is no video recording available to further analyze this work, but Wong’s utilization of her modern dance training can be seen in the photos.86 In one of them, H.T. Chen, as the scholar, leans backward to pull Wong, the white serpent spirit, to help her balance while she fully extends her body horizontally. Her fully stretched body does not reflect Chinese aesthetic preferences, which value roundness. In the second photo, Chen, in a dark full-body costume, flips his full body to his right midair, while

Wong stands at the back, slightly leaning into the back curtain. Chen’s turn is more similar to the cavalier’s balletic leap in Balanchine’s Nutcracker than to a turning leap from Chinese opera, which a performer executes with bent legs. Also, Wong’s active gaze projects to Chen and her posture shows that she takes control over him, instead of simply waiting passively. In this way, Wong portrays the white serpent spirit’s subjectivity in the story as a woman. The last photo shows Wong hanging on a ladder and

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Lu, as the monk, leaping into the air, attacking with his staff. Comparing to the monk’s costume that clearly represents his character’s identity, Chen and Wong were in leotards.

Gu Xianliang admired how Wong omitted complications in terms of narrations, props, and costumes to address the climax of the story since audiences were familiar with it.87

To appreciate her choreography, Gu further addressed that Wong “did not follow the path of imitation, which leads to failure… [but] creates in her own way completely.”88 Gu’s review echoed Wong’s lecture on modern dance and Martha Graham, wherein Wong stated that the goal of modern dance is “to get rid of the limitations of traditions, to explore the possibilities of movement, and to give new understanding of movement.”89

Gu highlights Wong’s dance as a modern creation presenting the contemporary instead of imitating tradition, and, at the same time, is easy to read for Taiwanese audiences. In this sense, Wong’s dance, just like her belief about modern dance, reflects its own time and space, as well as a progressive idea of women as subjects.

Wong’s 1968 Taiwan trip initiated her choreographic efforts working with non-

American modern dance-trained dancers. Wong stated that “it was my first time working with persons without a dance background, and I found that the so-called ‘professional training’ often ‘misleads’ and set limits.”90 Wong repeatedly mentioned Graham’s influence on her as providing inspiration and encouragement to seek Wong’s own cultural roots. Wong thus described her 1968 visit to Taiwan as a gathering for young artists to explore new ways of dancing and choreographing. However, she recognized that these initial attempts often romanticize traditions—“when finding a path to tradition at the beginning, one considers this is good in all ways.”91 However, after she left Taiwan

231 for the United States, she had to find another path to her own cultural identity as a

Chinese American, both internally driven and pushed by U.S. racism. She started to work with Irmgard Bartenieff, a student of Rudolf Laban, and became a Certified Movement

Analyst in Laban theories. In 1976, she visited the P.R.C. as a “patriotic young artist.”92

Her experience in this “homecoming” adventure distinguished herself from other people in China who lived in a society without freedom of speech (her visit was also monitored).93 After that, Wong presented her first American modern dance piece based on the memories of Chinese American immigrants, Golden Mountain (1977).

Golden Mountain “is about Chinese and it’s about American,” as Wong stated in an interview.94 In the reconstructed dance video, the dancers enter the Salk Institute Plaza in San Diego, California in procession. One dancer beats an Asian drum hung on a bamboo pole that he, along with the others in front of him, carries. Several male dancers spin sticks around themselves, that recall some kinds of Chinese martial arts. A group of female dancers end the procession. They follow the line while slightly shifting their weight left and right, like foot-bound Chinese women of the Chin Dynasty walking in a way the Chinese called “yiaoyishenzi” (搖曳生姿, meaning that swaying postures represent beauty). Wong narrates that “Golden Mountain, like many of my other works, is a ritual and a ceremony, employing metaphors and .” She explains the title:

“Golden Mountain is what the Chinese called America in 1848.”95 Such an image of

Golden Mountain is represented by one dancer standing on another while they spread out a huge piece of orange cloth. This piece represents American modes of composition. In the interview, Wong said that she worked with the students in a course entitled “The Art

232 of Movement” at the University of California, San Diego. She did not teach the dancers the dance steps; instead, she asked questions to inspire the students to explore their own ways of moving. This images in Golden Mountain represent the Chinese Diaspora’s

American dream for a prosperous life.

Apart from the Kuomintang’s Chinese nationalism addressing the Zhongyuan cultures, Golden Mountain reveals the migrating history of the Southeast Chinese. In the section titled “Journey,” a female dancer kneels on the floor and tensely reaches out her right arm toward the group that is expanding the cloth, as if trying to call them back.

Wong’s narration explains that this female dancer represents Mazhu, a goddess of the sea in the southeast Chinese religion, trying to call the ship back because she sees the pain and suffering in the journey crossing the Pacific Ocean. However, the men, in Wong’s words, do not hear her calling. They hold the taut cloth while facing outward until they fall out and roll onto the ground. Mazhu is not in the Zhongyuan culture, but is the religious center of those Chinese who had moved to the United States. In this sense, this dance challenges the authenticity of homogeneous Chineseness.

Furthermore, this dance shifts the focus to the migrating process after their arrival in the United States. In the section “Landing and Persecution” the dancers lie on the floor, thrust their torsos upwards with an impulse, and then twist their torso. These struggling postures represent the immigrant experience of discrimination. They lie on the floor helplessly and gradually move toward each other to form a group, making snaking movements under the cloth. Next, the female dancers kneel on the floor, bounce up and down and put their palms together, as if praying for their husband’s safety. At the same

233 time, the men sweep alongside the ditch of the plaza, as if digging for gold. Then, a male dancer holds his bamboo hat, onto which a tail is attached. He hops and spins his hat, using the tail to lash the working men. Wong narrates: “He is the middle man, the broker, who contracts laborers from his village and profits from them.” At the same time, the women start to perform a spinning hand gesture with two wrists touched, as if practicing martial arts in order to protect their home. Wong claims that “they too built the railroad in the America. All these immigrants moving across the Pacific Ocean labored to construct the country that they chose to stay in.” In this sense, Golden Mountain is a Sinophone

American modern dance which tells a story of the United States.

Wong’s choreographic traces migrated from American modern dance with

Chinese stories, to Laban-informed and Ausdruckstanz inspired work, to explorations of

Chinese American history, and later embraced Japanese elements in her Asian American dance. In 1983, Wong presented Cicada Images, Moulting, the dance with which I opened this chapter.96 It is a solo composed of four sections, based on a story somehow related to her biographical traces while migrating between East Asia and the United

States. Wong, in an Asian-style cotton robe, holding a bamboo pole on her shoulders in a stooped posture as if bearing the Chinese cultural heritage, gradually sings a semi- autobiographical story: “I was named Mary Adonis Wong.” Remaining her uplifted gaze as if pondering, she slowly lowers her weight halfway down and gestures as if whispering a secret to the audience about her story. Finally, she stands up again and sings that “and

Wong is the wrong ending” as if intentionally leaving the audience to wonder if this is her own story. Wong delivers semi-autobiographical information in a humorous way and

234 expresses a feminist attitude in that she refuses to be an oppressed traditional woman who follows men. In the next excerpt, Wong loses her balance due to the heaviness of what she bears; this imbalance leads her to meander around and to pull off all the hung cloth, as if rejecting the traditional values that force housekeeping tasks upon women. Los

Angeles Times critic Chris Pasles describes this scene as “the slender narrative thread of a

Chinese girl emerging from self-hatred generated by encounters with Western education and religion.”97 Pasles reads it as not only Wong’s biography but also as a generalized immigration experience of those like her who were raised in Asia and educated in the

United States. The later section, which is accompanied by music from a Chinese Qin instrument, reminds me of funeral rituals in Southern East Asia, in which people are in similar white robes kneeling on the ground. In an interview with Los Angeles Times editor Bevis Hillier, Wong expressed that “she was still irked by references to her as ‘the

China-born choreographer’ or ‘the Chinese-American choreographer” ten years after her naturalization.98 This sweeping movement represents the anger and frustration of being excluded from being labeled a real American.

The third excerpt, “Calendar Girl,” reflects Wong’s training background in

American modern dance and Laban/Bartenieff studies. In this section, Wong, in a light pink sleeveless dress with a headscarf, kneels down. Her gesturing hands illustrate an invisible thread between her thumbs and forefingers. Suddenly, she swipes her arms and contracts her upper body forward as if expressing sentiments out of nowhere. The strong contraction of her core muscles leads her to audibly exhale. Pausing less than one second,

Wong scurries backwards to the curtain to pose, leaning delicately, like a calendar girl or

235 a pin-up model. This short movement of core muscle contraction clearly shows her training in Martha Graham technique and the expressive movement honed from her

Laban training. Wong’s American modern dance trained body and her later investment in

Laban/Bartenieff studies transform the Asian woman that bears the cultural heritage in the first section into a woman embodying powerful and yet emotional movements as expressing her own subjectivity.

The last excerpt of this work titled “Warrior Woman” is the section that I analyzed at the beginning of this chapter. In this section, her armor and helmet and her movements represent the fusion of various cultural markers in her life experience.

Although the costumes seem to suggest Chinese Opera, the solid texture and the sharp architecture of the design differ from the cloth-based Chinese Opera costumes. Her adaptation of taiji and Japanese dance-drama movements displays a general Asian image to American audiences. Pasles in his review interpreted this section as Wong’s

“ceremony of self-baptism after transcending a hated-loved Nun figure.”99 Pasles perceived Wong’s movement as Japanese due to his familiarity and ignored the taiji and

Chinese Opera elements. Pasles’ selective attention to specific culturally marked movements represented a possible perspective of Americans who are more familiar with

Japanese practices but not Chinese ones. In this sense, for these Americans who are not familiar Chinese practices, Wong represented Asians as a whole.

Whether it is conscious, like Wong’s works about Asian Americans, or unconscious, like Huang’s Sinophone American taiji, Chinese-born American dancers contributed to the writing of American dance history and to the second wave of

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Taiwanese modern dance. Their transnational migrating bodies made these contributions possible. On the one hand, Huang and Wong carried kinesthetic memories into their transnational relocations while pursuing an American modern way of dancing. They were trained in American modern dance technique and choreographic methods. They drew on kinesthetic memories of Chinese embodied practices as the resources to show not only their cultural identities but also their differences, as minorities within the U.S. mainstream. On the other hand, they embodied their American experiences as Chinese through the forms and themes of their corporal practices. In this sense, they blended their understanding and exposures about both American modern dance and Chinese movement experiences and practices. This blending is possible through their migrations back and forth from the United States and East Asia. Their re-exposure to Chinese cultural practices in Taiwan during the 1960s shaped their bodies in terms of embodied practices and identities. Their “Chinese-ness” was different from that of those who lived in China and may have also differed from each other’s due to individual factors of their migrations, their personal choices and experiences.

Lin Hwai-min and His Narrations of Chinese Modern Dance

Besides their choreographies about their transnational Chinese American stories,

Wong’s and Huang’s visits also contributed to Taiwanese dance modernization by combining American dance modernity with Chinese stories. Lin Hwai-min’s early choreographies best represent these influences. Lin witnessed José Limón’s 1963 touring concert when he was 14 years old and later showed his passion for modern dance by attending as many dance classes and events as possible. He, as a college student in

237 journalism, even exhausted his stipend purchasing a ticket for Paul Taylor’s 1967 tour.

When Huang publicly called for participants in his 1967 workshop, Lin auditioned.

Because of his unsystematic dance training, he was not selected. He chose to sit in the workshop to observe Huang’s teaching.100 The next year, Lin attended Wong’s lecture and workshop but he did not participate in the training then, either.101 Lin, at that time, had two concerns: dancing as a career and being male in this profession. Wong recalled that Lin asked him what he should do about dance. She replied that only he could answer that. She further told Lin, “but you should know you are male, and dance is very difficult

[for a male], isn’t it?”102 By telling her story about Lin to the audiences from the

Department of Dance, National Taipei University of the Arts, which Lin founded and served as the first chair, Wong pointed to her influence on Lin and more broadly her contribution to Taiwanese dance. Indeed, the 1960s American modern dance events in

Taiwan opened Lin’s career as a choreographer.

The American modern dance events discussed earlier initiated Lin’s career in dance and choreography in an unforeseen way. In an interview with Jiang Sheng, Lin recalled that he experienced dancing and performing since his childhood. As a child, he liked Taiwanese opera and often performed in his own way. After watching the British ballet film The Red Shoes (1948) no less than seven times, he fell in love with dance.103

Although he performed minzu wudao at a small event in primary school, Lin took his first dance class, ballet, in high school. He enjoyed dancing, but he never thought it could become a career. Since Lin had published some short essays while in junior high school, he picked up writing instead. After publishing his first novel, during his military

238 , Lin went to the University of Missouri to study journalism and later transferred to the M.F.A program in creative writing at the University of Iowa.104 There, he took Marcia Thayer’s modern dance course for the required credits in non-literature arts. With Thayer’s encouragement, Lin started to choreograph.

Lin’s early choreography was similar to Huang’s attempts to express Taoist philosophy through American modern dance vocabularies. Specifically, Lin’s first creation is based on the same Taoist story and shares the same title Butterfly Dream

(1970) as Huang’s work. Butterfly Dream is a fable from ancient Taoist philosopher

Chungzi’s Chiwuluan (齊物論). Chungzi provides philosophical thinking about subjectivity—whether it is him dreaming of a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming of him.

Dancer and dance critic Ernestine Stodelle described Huang’s Butterfly Dream (1966), at the American Dance Festival in New London, Connecticut: “The climax comes with the transformation of the insect back into human form with memories of its insect-past still visible. Mr. Huang’s inventiveness sustained the imagery throughout, giving his innate lyricism fresh and exciting overtones.”105 In this solo work, Huang was in a large, culturally non-specific robe with two strips connecting to the sleeves and a tall hat.106 He expresses his anxiety and confusion by repeatedly swaying his limbs around, and sometimes pulling up the large triangular collar as if it restricted him, like a cicada enclosed in its shell. As he gallops and hops around, he swings his opened robe as if to take off the cicada’s shell. Later, after removing the robe and the hat, Huang runs into the space wearing only a leotard, as if celebrating his freedom. However, Huang starts to show his confusion by mimicking a butterfly as if wondering if he is a butterfly dreaming

239 about being human, or the opposite. Huang used the robe (on or off) to distinguish between the two roles of the transformation process. His struggles while balancing, his stumbling, and his trotting all show the influences of Humphrey-Weidman technique, which he demonstrated in the press conference.107 He used typical American modern dance movement vocabulary to express imagery of bewilderment from a Chinese fable.

Similarly, Lin’s version of the Chungzi-butterfly story utilizes a robe as a costume-prop and American modern dance vocabularies as well. Although there is no video recording of the dance, Taiwanese psychologist and theater educator Jing-jyi Wu

(吳靜吉, Wu Jingji) watched Lin’s Butterfly Dream during a summer course for educators in New York in 1971. As the organizer of the summer course, Wu invited Lin to perform as an introduction to Asian cultures. Wu commented that his “impression of

Butterfly Dream is a set of beautiful American modern dance vocabularies, but every movement is so emphatic that earns the audience’s applause.”108 Wu had taken classes in

Martha Graham’s and Merce Cunningham’s schools in New York, so he was familiar with these American modern dance vocabularies and recognized them in Lin’s work. Wu admired Lin’s utilization of a robe as the prop by stating “[Lin] properly utilized the prop—using one robe as the prop and using it surprisingly well.”109 Wu’s description of

Lin’s Butterfly Dream displays some similarities between Lin’s and Huang’s versions.

Both are solos featuring a male dancer in a robe to express the same Taoist story and both adopted American modern dance vocabularies. These similarities exemplify the inspiration from Huang to Lin’s first choreographic attempt.

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Lin not only adopted the Chinese fable Butterfly Dream that Huang had shown to the Taiwan audiences in 1967–1968, but Lin also chose the Chinese legend of White

Snake in his experiment of Chinese modern dance, as Wong did.110 In addition to

Graham’s influence, Wong’s White Snake and, generally, her 1968 showing, also had an effect on Lin’s choreography in The Tale of White Serpent (1975).111 (See Chapter 3.) His version alters the sequence of the tale and he presents only four main characters, like

Wong’s abstracted story. Taiwanese dance historian and critic Ya-ping Chen states that the foregrounded abstract symbolism of Graham’s choreography and the mixture of

Graham technique and Chinese opera movements were the most significant artistic value of this work.112 Similar use of symbolism and abstraction appear in Wong’s version, as I analyzed above. Wong and Lin both enrolled in Graham’s school though the latter was not directly taught by Graham. It is not surprising that Graham’s American dance modernity influenced both of them. However, choosing the same Chinese tale as a choreographic base is not merely a coincidence. Wong’s White Snake indeed sowed the seeds of Chinese modern dance in Lin’s mind.

Wong’s and Lin’s choreography shared another characteristic: the folding of

Chinese opera elements into modern dance. In previous section, I have discussed how

Wong inserted Chinese opera movement, such as yunshou, in her 1968 and later choreographies. This use of Chinese opera movements was a way for Wong to recall childhood memories of Chinese opera and to further Sinicize her work. Similarly, Lin also adopted Chinese opera movements in his story-telling. For example, when Wu Su- chun (吳素君), as the white serpent spirit, and Cheng Shu-gi (鄭淑姬), as the green

241 serpent spirit, come onstage, Cheng stands from kneeling in front of Wu into a low-level position, slightly twisting to look to the right as if observing Wu, playing her mistress.

Cheng’s vivid posture and her codified hand gesture, where the tip of the thumb gently touches her middle finger with the hand remaining flexible, in contrast to Wu’s stillness, presents a symbolic gesture in Chinese opera of a female maidservant.113 Later, Wu quickly performs a free-floating yunchou, showing her expertise and familiarity as well as her deep-rootedness of Chinese cultural heritage. In this sense, Wu, as the white serpent spirit, is a symbol of authentic Chineseness not only through her role in the

Chinese legend but also through her codified movement extracted from Chinese opera.

Paul Yu, the Chinese opera expert who introduced Chinese opera to Lin, indicated that

Lin adopted Chinese opera movements with some adjustments, some actually performed in a reverse way.114

Besides movement vocabularies, Lin further adopts the story-telling style of

Chinese opera. Differing from Wong’s reverse order of telling the story, Lin has the four main characters come to the stage in order of the original tale, to show their personalities and relations. I have discussed above how the mistress-maidservant relationship is shown through the choreography. Then, Yeh Taichu, as the scholar, comes to join the two spirits. He stands in back, holding a bamboo umbrella skeleton, gently looks at Wu, and then slowly turns toward Cheng, showing his pedigree as a scholar. Jing-Jyi Wu considers that this story-telling mode in Lin’s The Tale of the White Serpent is similar to

Chinese opera.115 In this sense, Lin not only utilized Chinese opera movements but also the story-telling mode in his experiments of Chinese modern dance to echo the manifesto

242 in Cloud Gate’s 1973 debut: “The Chinese people compose, the Chinese people choreograph, and the Chinese people dance, for the Chinese audience.”116 Chinese opera became the common elements for Wong and Lin to explore their Chinese identities and

Chinese themes provided a sense of Chinese modernity. At this point they did not need

Americans’ influence or references necessarily because, Cloud Gate’s manifesto shows, they can make their own, drawn from Chinese/Taiwanese forms.

White Snake/Serpent shows how Lin was inspired by Wong’s choreography and how the similar narratives and images connect the two choreographers. In Chapter 3, I discussed how Graham’s Appalachian Spring provided Lin a narrative model for his

Legacy. Similar to the abstract symbolism, Wong also played an important role in this connection. Wong’s Golden Mountain, as I analyzed above, tells a migrating history about crossing the Pacific Ocean. Lin’s Legacy narrates a migrating story crossing the

Taiwan Strait. In “Crossing the Black Water,” a section of Legacy, a group of dancers appears stage left, while a white curtain spread across the entire stage sways as wind or waves. The group of dancers sways in union, representing a sailing ship, heading to the new land. Lin’s utilization of the curtain is similar to the image in Wong’s Golden

Mountain when the male dancers expand an orange curtain, like the sail of a boat crossing the Pacific Ocean. Although Wong’s Golden Mountain was never presented in

Taiwan, Lin visited Wong when he was artist-in-residence at UCLA in 1977.117 Yuh-jen

Lu indicated that Lin recalled in the interview with her that Wong showed him a photocopy of Golden Mountain, which presented “a wide-open sailing image by a dancer standing on top of two others.”118 Lu argues that “Legacy’s subject matter, storylines, and

243 the stream of imagery inevitably harks back to Lin’s one-time teacher Yen Lu Wong’s

Golden Mountain.”119 While I agree with Lu’s argument regarding Wong’s influence on

Lin’s choreography, I argue instead that Legacy’s movement vocabularies and choreographic methods differed from Wong’s Golden Mountain. As discussed above,

Wong inspired the dancers to generate movements from their own memories instead of teaching them phrases she made. Lin’s choreography is the opposite, showing his own design based on Graham technique. This choreographic difference yields contrasting endings; Golden Mountain ends with the idea of remembrance and Legacy with ideas of celebration and self-reliance. In this sense, all the American modern dance events in

Taiwan, as well as the network created by these events, nurtured and influenced Lin’s choreography and the broader Taiwanese dance field, as in Wong’s statement to the audiences of TNUA Dance. Lin absorbed Huang’s and Wong’s choreographic tactics to embrace Chinese subjects as a way to rethink Chineseness in his dance.

Identity, Nationalism, and Embodied Exploration

As the focus of this dissertation is on how the Taiwanese received American modern dance events, I have focused on direct influences of American modern dance state-sponsored diplomatic tours on Taiwanese choreographers and on Taiwanese perceptions about the United States. However, more people-to-people connections were bridged through these diplomatic events between the Americans and the Taiwanese. For example, H.T. Chen, after dancing in Wong’s 1968 workshop and graduating from the

College of Chinese Cultures, subsequently studied at Martha Graham’s school, The

Juilliard School, and New York University. He founded Chen Dance Center in

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Chinatown, New York, to teach Chinese American dancers. His dance company also toured the United States. Broadly speaking, Tina Yuan Lam went to the United States to study dance because of Taiwan’s dance modernization wave in the late 1960s. She entered the American Dance Center and Martha Graham’s school, became a dancer with

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, founded her own dance company on the West

Coast, and retired from the Sharon Disney Lund School of Dance at California Institute of the Arts. These Taiwan-born dancers, choreographers, and dance educators continuously contributed to U.S. dance history after being nurtured by these events.

Moreover, Huang’s and Wong’s ethnic identities shaped and were shaped by their experience in the United States. When they arrived in the United States, they were attracted to American modern dance. They were both inspired by their mentors to seek insights into their Chinese heritage. This led them to pay attention to Chinese movement practices, such as Chinese opera and taiji, to explore their Chineseness. At the same time, the social movements of Asian America led to a cultural fusion in their works. Evidenced by my analyses of their later works, Wong’s and Huang’s embrace of pan-East Asian cultural elements mirrored the development of Asian American formation in the United

States and the ideas of non-Asians about Asians. Their migration in terms of ethnic identity and their specific experiences echoed events in the American Civil Rights movements between the 1950s and 1970s.

Wong and Huang have shared their embodied explorations regarding identity and cultural practices to many American students. Wong taught at the University of Kansas and the University of California, San Diego. Huang taught at Esalen Institute in Big Sur

245 and founded the Living Tao Foundation to distribute Taoism through taiji. These fusions were responses to and contributed with shifts in the United States that formed the social category of Asian American, with various cultural markers.

Their transnationally migrating bodies thus created the transnational history of dance between East Asia and the United States. Responding to Manning’s call for transnational historiography on the 20th theatrical dance, I have shown how Huang’s and

Wong’s transnational migrations provided them opportunities to engage in various cultural practices in East Asia and the United States. In return, their bodies became the site that held and transmitted a fusion of embodied practices. This fusion further shaped the histories in each geographical region of their migrations.

My analysis ends with the early 1980s. However, Wong’s and Huang’s transnational influences continued. They contributed to broader Sinophone history with their travels. The of China published Wong’s letter to the magazine’s editorial committee, in which Wong shared her thoughts about Chinese traditions and

Chinese modern dance.120 In 1990, she held the first workshop of Laban Movement

Analysis in Taipei. Huang shortly conducted his doctoral research about Chinese Taoism in Academia Sinica, Taiwan, and founded the Lan Ting Institute in 1984 at Wuyi

Mountain in , China. Their transnational migrations did not terminate, nor did their writing of Sinophone histories in various regions. Wong’s and Huang’s transnationally migrating bodies, from the 1950s to the present, archive various cultural practices and identity formations. They continuously transform these archives, sharing them throughout their migrating journeys between East Asia and the United States.

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1 SanSan Kwan, Kinesthetic City: Dance and Movement in Chinese Urban Spaces (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 2. 2 Ibid., 10–12. 3 Yatin Lin, Sino-Corporalites: Contemporary Choreographies from Taipei, Hong Kong, and New York. (Taipei, Taiwan:Taipei National University of the Arts Press, 2015), xiii–xvi. 4 Manning, Modern Dance, Negro Dance, 58 (see Chap. 1 n. 58). 5 See Volker R. Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe: Shepard Stone between Philanthropy Academic, and Diplomacy (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001); Edward H. Berman, The Ideology of Philanthropy the Influence of the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller Foundations on American Foreign Policy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1983); Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta Books, 2000). 6 Chen, “身體的歷史,” 316–22 (see Chap. 1 n. 26). 7 Srinivasan, Sweating Saris, 113–4 (see Chap. 2 n. 83). 8 Yutian Wong, Choreographing Asian America (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2010), 13 & 19. 9 Arne Westad, Global Cold War, 3 (see Chap. 1, n. 6). 10 “來來來，來台大，去去去，去美國.” Hsiao, Return to Reality, 91 (see Chap. 1, n. 16). 11 Ibid., 87–91. 12 This event is also known as the Case of Lei Cheng. For the details of this political case, see Hua-yuan Hsueh, Lei Chen and Taiwan's Political Development in the 1950s: An Analysis from Transitional Justice [in Chinese] (Taipei, Taiwan: Chiang Kai- Shek Memorial Hall, 2019). 13 Wan-wen Chu, «台灣戰後經濟發展的源起: 後進發展的為何與如何» [Taiwan postwar economic growth: why and how] (Taipei, Taiwan: Academia Sinica, 2017), 252. 14 Hsiao, Return to Reality, 79. 15 Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans, rev. ed. (New York and Boston: Back Bay Book and Little Brown and Company, 1998), 30. 16 Ibid. 17 Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1993), 7. 18 Takaki, “Different Shore,” 40 19 Yutian Wong, “Artistic Utopias: Michio Ito and the Trope of the International,” in Worlding Dance, edited by Foster, Susan Leigh (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 154. 20 Angelo Ancheta, Race, Rights, and the Asian American Experience (New Brunswick, NJ : Rutgers University Press, 2006), 18.

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21 Srinivasan, Sweating Saris, 16 (see Chap. 2 n. 83) 22 Ibid., 474–5. 23 Ancheta, Race, Rights, and the Asian American Experience, 45. 24 Srinivasan, Sweating Saris, 22 & 38. 25 William Wei, The Asian American Movement (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1993), 2. 26 Ibid., 1. 27 Ancheta, Race, Rights, and the Asian American Experience, 45. 28 Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 6–7& 112–3. 29 Ibid., 4. 30 Shu-mei Shih, “Against Diaspora: The Sinophone as Places of Cultural Production,” in Global Chinese Literature: Critical Essays, edited by Jing Tsu and David Der-wei Wang (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2010), 30–31. 31 Angela K. Ahlgren, Drumming Asian America: Taiko, Performance, and Cultural Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 14. 32 Funeral Committee, editor, The Memorial Book of Mr. Huang Zhenwu (1970), 4. National Central Library, Taiwan. The People’s Republic of China terms it as The Nationalist Party of China Army Officer Academy since Republic of China is not recognized. Also, Whampoa may be spelled by Haungpu, since the former is the , the common language in Guangdong, and the later Mandurian. Here I choose the historical spelling. 33 Cited in Cynthia Logan, “Opening Up with Al Huang: The Tai Ji Master Shares His Thoughts,” Atlantis Rising 49 (January/February, 2005): 45 & 70. https://atlantisrisingmagazine.com/article/opening-up-with-al-huang/. 34 Goodman, “Al Huang: Brief Biographies: A Monthly Series About Dancers You Should Know,” Dance Magazine, 37 (October, 1965): 62. Music and Dance Library, Ohio State University. 35 Karen Mozingo, “Lotte Gosler’s Clowns,” in New German Dance Studies, edited by Susan Manning and Lucia Ruprecht (Urbana, Chicago & Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 110. 36 Program note of Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival. July 4-8, 1961. Jacob’s Pillow Archive. https://archives.jacobspillow.org/index.php/Detail/objects/4885 37 Al Chungliang Huang’s letter to Ted Shawn in June, 1962, Folder 273, Ted Shawn Collections, the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library, Performing Arts. 38 Ted Shawn, Kinetic Molpai (1935), restaged by Norman Walker in 1962. Jacob’s Pillow Dance Interactive. https://danceinteractive.jacobspillow.org/norman- walker/kinetic-molpai-1962/. 39 Al Chungliang Huang’s letter to Ted Shawn on April 18, 1962, Folder 273, Ted Shawn Collections, the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library, Performing Arts. 40 Huang, Al Chungliang, and Jerry Lynch, “Prologue by Chungliang Al Huang,” 248

in Thinking Body, Dancing Mind: Taosports for Extraordinary Performance in Athletics, Business, and Life (New York: Bantam Books, 2009), xxii. 41 Al Chungliang Huang’s letters to Ted Shawn on September 12, 1962, Folder 273, Ted Shawn Collections, the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library, Performing Arts. 42 Al Chungliang Huang’s letters to Ted Shawn on September 23, 1963, Folder 273, Ted Shawn Collections, the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library, Performing Arts. 43 Al Chungliang Huang’s letters to Ted Shawn on December 2, 1964, Folder 273, Ted Shawn Collections, the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library, Performing Arts. 44 Wei-ying Hsu, «落日之舞: 臺灣舞蹈藝術拓荒者的境遇與突破» [The Dance of Sunset: Taiwanese Dance Frontiers’ Situation and Breakthroughs], (Taipei, Taiwan: Linking Publishing, 2018), 118. 45 Al Chungliang Huang’s letter to Ted Shawn on April 28, 1963, Folder 273, Ted Shawn Collections, the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library, Performing Arts. 46 Lu, “Wrestling with the Angels,” 92 & 153 (see Chap. 1 n. 65). 47 He, “贈票問題” [The Issue of Ticket Giving], United Daily (Taiwan), May 17, 1967, Udndata. 48 “新舊觀念不能適應.” Ibid. 49 Ibid. 50 “目前的社會對舞蹈有種錯誤個觀念，他們認為舞蹈只能在夜總會表演而 已，並沒有把舞蹈當做一種藝術而呼試了它的存在.” “現代舞需要創造 不必向他人 抄襲” [Modern dance requiring creation, no copying needed], Central Daily (Taiwan), May 15, 1967, 中央日報全文影像資料庫. 51 Pierce, “Al and I Spend a Year in Taiwan: An Open Letter from Suzanne Pierce, Wife and Partner of Concert Dancer Al Huang,” Dance Magazine (November 1967):81. Jerome Robins Dance Devision, New York Public Library. 52 “全美國最優越的五名舞蹈家之一.” Liu, “在金元王國開拓了舞蹈夢境: 訪 我旅美名舞蹈教授黃忠良夫婦” [Opening Up Dance Dreams in the U.S.: Interviewing with Our Residing-in-America Well-Known Dance Professor Mr. and Mrs. Huang], China Times (Taiwan), October 7, 1966, 中國時報五十年報紙影像資料庫. 53 “現代舞需要創造 不必向他人抄襲,” Central Daily (Taiwan), May 15, 1967, 中央日報全文影像資料庫. 54 “中國文化為體、現代舞蹈形式: 黃忠良夫婦表演現代舞” [Embodying Chinese Cultures, Formatting Modern Dance: Mr. and Mrs. Huang Presenting Modern Dance], China Times (Taiwan), May 13, 1967, 中央日報全文影像資料庫. The English titles are according to Three Faces of Chinese Dance, directed by Lyndon Tsai (Taipei, Taiwan: China Arts Films,1968), Film, Performing Arts Research Collection, New York Public Library; Lu, “Wrestling with the Angels,” 200. 55 Interview with author on August 4, 2018 in Keelung, Taiwan. 249

56 “黃忠良夫婦記者會介紹現代舞” [The Huangs’ Press Conference Introducing Modern Dance,] Taiwan Television, May 14, 1967. Taiwan Television Official Website. https://www.ttv.com.tw/news/tdcm/viewnews.asp?news=0105994. 57 Ernestine Stodelle, The Dance Technique of Doris Humphrey and Its Creative Potential (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Book, 1978), 9 & 14-15. 58 “中國文化為體.” “中國文化為體、現代舞蹈形式,” Central Daily (Taiwan), May 15, 1967, 中央日報全文影像資料庫. 59 “以中國為主題的現代舞，而不是西洋的現代舞.” Ibid. 60 “…以蟬的脫壳形容人生的掙扎.” Ibid. 61 My analysis in based on the excerpt in the film Three Faces of Chinese Dance. 62 “…國內在未來兩年內，必有創新的作品出現.” “玲瓏剔透、行雲流水: 黃 忠良的現代舞風靡了國內觀眾，在舞蹈藉機起了漣漪” [Crystal and fluent, Al Huang’s modern dance infatuating the domestic audiences, riddling in the dance field], Central Daily (Taiwan), May 21, 1967, 中央日報全文影像資料庫. 63 Xie Huirong, interview by the author, August 4, 2018. Keelung, Taiwan. 64 Cited in Michael Robertson, “What T’ai Chi is Doing for Dance,” New York Times, late edition (East Coast), September 21, 1980. ProQuest. 65 Pierce, “Al and I Spend a Year in Taiwan,” 47. 66 Huang, Embrace Tiger, Return to Mountain: The Essence of T’ai Chi (Moab, Utah: Real People Press, 1973), 20. 67 Libby Worth and Helen Poynor, Anna Halprin (New York: Routledge, 2004), 38. 68 See, for example, Shih, “Against Diaspora”; Kuan-Hsing Chen, Asia as Method: Towards Deimperialization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 69 Huang, Embrace Tiger, 12. 70 “Bennington College Propaganda Film,” produced by United States Information Service. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2haArkqGIw 71 Al Chungliang Huang, Embrace Tiger, Return to Mountain: The Essence of Tai Ji (Moab, Utah, Real People Press, 1973). 72 Wong’s speech script. Speech in Taipei, Taiwan, on February 17, 1968. Yen Lu Wong Website. http:// http://yenluwong.com/. Last accessed: February 25, 2019. 73 Ibid. 74 “來了六百多個人，而且擠得不了，趴在牆上來看，因為沒有地方、不能 再坐人了.” Ibid. 75 “文化局主辦現代舞之夜: 王仁璐獲觀眾注意” [Bureau of Culture holding modern dance night: Yen Lu Wong attracting the audiences’ attention] Central Daily (Taiwan), February 18, 1968, 中央日報全文影像資料庫. ; Cheng, interview by the author in New Taipei City, Taiwan, on August 4, 2018. 76 “現代舞是自由的表現，不受傳統技法的約束，而賦于動作新的意義.” Ibid. 77 All the information about the English titles of dance works and English translation/names of dancers are according to the program note of “An Evening of Dance: 250

Choreography of Yen Lu Wong.” To note, Hsüeh-T’ung Ch’en, also known as H. T. Chen, later established Chen Dance Center in Chinatown, New York. The digital images of the program note are available on the Yen Lu Wong website, http://yenluwong.com. 78 The images are available on Yen Lu Wong’s website, http://yenluwong.com, last accessed on March 7, 2019. 79 Erhu is a Chinese two-string instrument. Cheng-tung Li was a lecturer at College of Chinese Culture, teaching erhu, and later founded the Chinese Erhu Association. The Taiwanese folk song was in Houlo language, which was oppressed by the Mandurian Movement in postwar Taiwan. 80 “文化局主辦現代舞之夜,” China Times (Taiwan), June 5, 1968, 中國時報五 十年報紙影像資料庫. 81 “…以純粹中國的動作「雲手」揉入表現.” “採用的音樂是中國於唐朝時 傳入日本的雅樂.” “王仁璐現代舞表演: 白娘子及輪迴表現創造深度” [Yen Lu Wong dance concert: What Snake and Lotus showcase her depth of creation], China Times (Taiwan), June 6, 1968, 中國時報五十年報紙影像資料庫. 82 “中國人的思想感情.” Huang, Shen. “王仁璐的現代舞” [Yen Lu Wong’s modern dance] China Times (Taiwan), June 6, 1968, 中國時報五十年報紙影像資料庫. 83 “…民間的民謠，使音樂與舞蹈的融會來表現中國的傳統美.” “王仁璐現 代舞發表會 十年功 中國味 民謠風: 五日演出七項創作” [Yen Ru Wong Modern Dance Concert: Ten-Year Work, Chinese Flavor, Folk Style, Presenting Seven Works on 5] China Times (Taiwan), June 3, 1968, 中國時報五十年報紙影像資料庫. 84 Program Note of Dance Recital of Miss Yen Lu Wong. 1968. The digital images of the program is available on Yen Lu Wong’s website: yenluwong.com. 85 “王仁璐舞蹈表演會” [Yen Lu Wong’s dance concert], Taiwan Television, June 5, 1968, Taiwan Television Official, https://www.ttv.com.tw/news/tdcm/viewnews.asp?news=0097153. 86 These photos are on Yen Lu Wong’s website, http://yenluwong.com, last accessed on March 7, 2019. 87 Gu Xianliang, “王仁璐與她的白娘子” [Yen Lu Wong and her White Snake], Youth Library (June 5, 1968), Yen Lu Wong’s Website, http://yenluwong.com/chinese/medias/09.html 88 “她並不走那東施效顰的路子...而是全盤創新.” Ibid. 89 “不受傳統或八股的限制而運用動作, 探索試驗動作的可能性, 賦予動作新 的意識.” Yen Lu Wong, “現代舞之夜王仁璐演講稿” [Yen Lu Wong’s presentation script for The Night of Modern Dance,” presented at Cardinal Tien Cultural Foundation, Taipei, Taiwan, on February 17, 1968, accessed on Yen Lu Wong’s personal website, http://yenluwong.com/chinese/medias/02.html. 90 “那是我第一次與沒有舞蹈訓練的人合作，却發現我們這種所謂的「專業 訓練」很容易「誤導」人，而且有一定的限制.” Quoted in Li, “「傳統」與「現 代」: 訪問舞蹈家王仁璐” [Traditions and the modern: interview with Yen Lu Wong], Hsintu 14 (September, 1979), 49. 251

91 “…一剛開始找到一個傳統的途徑，會覺得它什麼都好.” Ibid. 92 “愛國青年藝術家.” Wong, «舞者轉身: 舞動的記憶與創生», Yen Lu Wong’s Talk on December 5, 2017. Taipei, Taiwan. DVD. Taipei National University of the Arts Library. 93 Ibid. 94 Quoted in Pai, “Yen Lu Wong: A New Force in The Wings,” Neworld 3, no. 3 (1977):45. 95 Wong, «舞者轉身: 舞動的記憶與創生». 96 My analysis of Cicada Images, Moulting is based on the four video excerpts in The Choreography of Yen Lu Wong, VCD, Taipei National University of the Arts Library. The following record of Wong’s lines is based on my listening to this video with the unclear audio. It may not be accurate to exactly what Wong says and sings in this work. 97 Chris Pasles, “Performance Art Review: Wong’s TNR Company at Japan American Theatre,” Los Angeles Times, May 9, 1987, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-05-09-ca-4880-story.html, last accessed on November 22, 2019. 98 Hillier, “Rituals for the ‘80s: The Unusual Performances of Choreographer Yen Lu Wong,” Los Angeles Times, January 12 ,1986, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la- xpm-1986-01-12-tm-27030-story.html, last accessed on November 22, 2019. 99 Pasles, “Performance Art Review.” 100 Although Huang described Lin as his student, the dancer Huang Huiron recalled that Lin set aside instead of actively participating in the workshop. 101 Wong, «舞者轉身: 舞動的記憶與創生». 102 “你要知道你是一個男的，舞蹈是非常困難，對不對?” Ibid. 103 Jiang, “訪林懷民” [Interviewing Lin Hwai-min.] in «雲門舞話» (Taipei: Yuan-Liou Publishing, 1976), 163. 104 Ibid., 164-165. 105 Quoted in Lu, “Wrestling with the Angels,” 160. 106 Three Faces of Chinese Dance. 107 See n. 55. 108 “「夢蝶」給我的整箇印象是由一串美麗的美國現代舞詞藻堆砌而成； 但每一箇動作倒是斬釘截鐵，就這樣他贏得觀眾的掌聲.” Wu, “用動作寫小說: 林懷 民的四級跳” [Writing Novels With Movement: Lin Hwai-min’s Big Leap].” «雲門舞話 » (Taipei: Yuan-Liou Publishing, 1976), 62. 109 “只是佩服他善於利用道具—用一件袍子做到具而又處理得那麼好.” Ibid. In his interview with Jiang Sheng, Lin described this robe as “a Chinese large-sized robe” (中國的大袍子). See Jiang, “訪林懷民,” 165. 110 I have discussed about how Graham’s movement vocabularies shaped Lin’s choreography in terms of expression of characters’ mantle state in Chapter 3. 111 In the premier concert, the Chinese title of Lin’s The Tale of White Serpent was from the name of the male scholar Xu Xian (許仙). In 1981, the title of the story replaced the Chinese title of Lin’s version. See Cloud Gate Dance Theatre, 1975 Autumn 252

Concert Program Notes, Cloud Gate Foundation Archives. http://archive.cloudgate.org.tw/ 112 Ya-ping Chen, “尋找中國當代舞蹈劇場：白蛇傳” [Seeking Chinese Contemporary Dance Theater: The Tale of White Serpent], in «雲門.傳奇», edited by Chang Daguang (New Taipei City, Taiwan: Jingo, 2003), 16. 113 My analysis of The Tale of The White Serpent is based on a shortened VHS version danced by Cheng Shuji, Wu Su-chun, Ye Jutai, and Gou Chicong. This VHS is the attachment of Wu Su-chun’s MFA project report. Wu, Su-chun. January 1994. A Study of the Production of Wu Su-Chun. Taipei National University of the Arts Library. 114 Paul Yu, “從動物在中國的地位談雲門舞集的現代舞劇«許仙»” [Discussing Cloud Gate Dance Theatre’s New Dance-Drama The Tale of The White Serpent From Perspective About the Animal Symbols in Chinese Culture], in «雲門舞話 » (Taipei: Yuan-Liou Publishing, 1976). 115 Wu, “用動作寫小說,” 67. 116 “中國人作曲、中國人編舞、中國人跳舞給中國人看.” See Shi, “‘中國現 代樂府’結合‘雲門舞集’” [Chinese modern Yuefu with Cloud Gate Dance Theatre], in « 中國現代樂府之三: 雲門舞集首次公演» [Program note of Cloud Gate Dance Theater Debut Concert], September 29, 1973, in Taiwan. Open Museum. Taiwan Music Institute. https://tmi.openmuseum.tw/muse/digi_object/cd67195eed48ff9e798ac8a9c595e67a 117 Lu “Decolonized Imagination,” 15 (see Chap. 3, n. 124). 118 Ibid. 119 Ibid., 14. 120 Wong, “美國加州來信” [A Letter from California, U.S.], Dance 91 (1980): 55-56.

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Conclusion

In the Name of Taiwan

On March 9, 2018, I flew from Ohio to Virginia to watch Lin Hwai-min’s

Formosa (2017) at the Center for the Arts at George Mason University.1 In the theater hall, some familiar Mandarin voices mixed with Taiwanese accents caught my attention. I noticed many Taiwanese Americans gathered there. Elders, parents, and kids wandered around, holding their tickets. I could tell this concert would probably be their first, or at least one of their first, experiences watching concert dance, from their slightly uncomfortable reactions to the space. Nevertheless, we, Taiwanese in the United States, gathered in the theater in Virginia. We might have quite different experiences watching concert dance, but we gathered for Cloud Gate’s tour of Formosa to the United States.

Lin’s last choreography before his retirement as artistic director of Cloud Gate

Dance Theatre of Taiwan, Formosa is like a miniature version of Taiwanese history. It is titled with Taiwan’s former name in English and the Chinese title is «關於島嶼», meaning “about the island.” On stage, with a full-backdrop projection showing

Taiwanese poems in Chinese characters, audibly accompanied by Taiwanese art critic

Chiang Hsun’s voice, various scenes evoke the images of Taiwan, from rice fields to urban spaces, from an agricultural society to the chaotic contemporary. The Cloud Gate dancers appear onstage, carefully rotating their arms and other body parts while finely 254 keeping their balance. They hold hands in a circle, stamp the floor, and swing their arms and torsos, in a presentation of a well-recognized dance of the Taiwanese Indigenous group Ami. With Tanwanese Indigenous (Cuo) singer Sangpuy Katatepan Mavaliyw’s improvised voice, this juxtaposition of movement phrases portrays multiculturalism resulting from Taiwan’s consecutive colonization. The dancers bounce around onstage desks and chairs, which are arranged like a school classroom. Their rush presents a chaotic image composed of various movements: yoga head stands, martial arts, minzu wudao, torso contractions, leaps, duet lifting, and more. At one point, two male dancers fight at center stage by holding each other’s shoulders, aggressively pushing each other until they are both rolling on the floor. The other dancers circle around, looking at them.

In the last section, dancers run full-out all over the stage, creating a tumultuous yet energetic image. This piece is about Taiwan, hinted by the Chinese and English work titles and all the poems describing Taiwanese scenes, but with its tumultuousness it is also about its people’s freedom of choice.

Lin’s Formosa exemplifies how a Taiwanese choreographer expresses his imagination about the nation through dancing bodies. Lin started to choreograph

Formosa in 2014, initiated by the inspiration of the first two sentences of the book

Taiwan Tongshi («臺灣通史», meaning history of Taiwan): “The whirling ocean. The beautiful island.”2 He illustrates Taiwanese history, from the ancient to the contemporary, by showing various bodily movements that Taiwanese residents of various ethnic groups, including Han, Hakka, Amis and Cuo, generations, and/or lifestyles, embody, hybridize, and use. Through these images with which Taiwanese audiences, including me, identify,

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Formosa summons the feeling of a community that connects Taiwanese audiences. In this way, it delivers a kind of nationalism that used to be banned by the Kuomintang. The

Kuomintang banned it because it challenged the Kuomintang’s Chinese nationalism, a nationalism focusing on culturally Chinese orthodox and homogenizing the people under their rule to fit into their Chinese nationalist discourses (as I discussed in Chapters 2 and

3). In this sense, Formosa instead delivers an inclusive Taiwanese nationalism, freed from the constraints of censorship that Lin experienced in the 1970s.

Furthermore, Cloud Gate’s Formosa touring to the United States attracted

Taiwanese and Taiwanese Americans to gather in the theater in Virginia through an artistic form that is promoted neither as Chinese nor as Taiwanese. Cloud Gate was able to do so because of its brand and international renown as a Taiwanese contemporary dance company. As I analyzed in Chapters 3 and 4, Lin adopted Graham technique and

Ausdrucktanz in the 1970s and 1980s. Even though Lin merged taichi daoyin in Cloud

Gate’s training since the 1990s—and this mergence is seen in Formosa as well—Western traces in his choreographies are still clear. These traces include movement vocabulary and choreographic methods as seen in Formosa, in which the dancers execute various movements at the same time to create chaos. At the same time, Lin developed his own movement language that Taiwanese dance historian Yatin Lin terms as the Cloud Gate body that “embod[ies] the multiple waves of influences from within Taiwan and abroad.”3 The Cloud Gate body takes the steady flow in taichi daoyin as the basis, hybridizing various movements forms to create a flexible dancing body. In this sense, Lin and Cloud Gate presented a work that Taiwanese audiences identify with by telling a

256 creolization history, a postcolonial history that absorbs international, imperial, and colonial influences and develops its own language. This creolization becomes the core discourse of Taiwan.

On both local and international levels, Taiwanese dancing bodies demonstrate their mobility in a hard time. Postwar Taiwanese dancers and choreographers faced both the strict social control from the Kuomintang government and also the postwar dominance of American cultural exports. However, they found a way to express their nationalist discourses through negotiating between the powers on different scales. In this sense, American modern dance empowered the Taiwanese, not in a way that Americans freed Taiwan, but in a way that the Taiwanese chose American dance modernity as one available means to construct their own freedom.

Freedom Reflected from Transnational Perspectives

This dissertation has told a story of frictions based on the fluid meaning of freedom during the Cold War era. Frictions, in Anna Tsing’s usage, refer to process conflicts resulting from negotiations between individuals and agencies of sponsored and host countries, and from local audiences’ interpretations based on their socio-political contexts. Freedom, as the main theme of the Cold War free alliance, became a rhetoric available to many individuals and organizations to use for different ends. These different interpretations around this rhetoric of freedom paralleled to and/or challenged each other, forming the whole stage of U.S. cultural diplomacy with domestic debates within the

United States, and within Taiwan. American, Taiwanese, and transnational choreographers advocated for social change through their dancing bodies, and relied on

257 the rhetoric of freedom in the Global Cold War context. In this sense, these frictions were represented physically as well as verbally.

In Taiwan, the Cold War rhetoric of freedom played a significant role in this game between the Kuomintang and its people. The Kuomintang legitimatized its strict social control over Taiwan and its relationship with the United States through its membership of the free alliance. Taiwanese people fought for freedom of speech and advocated for loosening social controls with the same rhetoric. In this sense, American modern dance and its official support from the U.S. government gave the Taiwanese people opportunities to conduct social change through various channels, including publications and choreographies, under the Cold War rhetoric of freedom. The Taiwanese intellectuals and artists advocating for artistic freedom loosened the Kuomintang’s control over speech and Taiwanese choreographers were able to stage their thinking on social issues on stage. Lin’s Legacy, which I discussed in Chapter 3 and 4, presented

Taiwanese migration. The Kuomintang used to view such Taiwanese narratives as pro- independence and anti-Kuomintang and censored them. In addition, Lin choreographed

Portrait of the Families (1997) to explore people’s memories about the February 28 massacre in 1947 and the following White Terror. T’sai Jui-Yueh’s follower, Ondine

Hsiao (蕭渥廷), choreographed Adventure of City Girls (1995) to highlight the issue of young prostitutes. Hsiao also choreographed several anti-nuclear and pro-victim-of-

White-Terror activist performances for social movements and protests. Freedom, a rhetoric that actors defined in different ways for different ends, became the main character on the stage of U.S.-Taiwan cultural diplomacy.

258

Internationally, frictions among interpretations of freedom composed the stage of

U.S. Cold War dance diplomacy. Taiwanese public media interpreted the state sponsorship of cultural diplomacy initiated with U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower’s special funds as taking cultural practices as of freedom against the spread of the

Soviet Union-led communist campaign. American modern dance companies competed for the sponsorship of the Cultural Presentations Program to gain fame and financial support to be financially and artistically free. The local government and media in the host country, in the case of this dissertation, Taiwan, interpreted American modern dance companies’ state-sponsored tours as a symbol of friendship from the leader of the free world and of Taiwan’s membership in the alliance. In this sense, exemplified in a culminating sense by Formosa, this Taiwanese absorbed this interpretation of American dance modernity and further created a work that connects Taiwanese audiences.

Areas of further inquiry for this transnational study include American citizens’ participations in and contributions to, through other roles, the Taiwanese dance modernization during and after the U.S. postwar dance diplomacy. Besides the short visits of Carmen De Lavallade-Alvin Ailey’s, José Limón’s, Paul Taylor’s, Martha

Graham’s, and Alwin Nikolais’s dance companies, some other American citizens also participated in these diplomatic events and/or contributed to later development of

Taiwanese dance. Aliza Bethlahmy, now a lawyer based in Oregon, United States, and her brother David, danced for Yen Lu Wong’s 1968 concert in Taipei.4 As American citizens, they stayed in Taipei in their childhood and participated in Wong’s choreographic process. Based on their long stay in postwar Taiwan, their observations

259 and memories would supplement the Taiwanese perspectives about Wong’s experimentation to fuse Chinese subjects and American choreographic logics and movement vocabulary. Lin Hwai-min later invited Ross Parkes, Graham’s dancer and vice artistic director who visited Taiwan with her company’s 1974 tour, to teach Graham technique and restage Graham’s works at National Institute of the Art (now Taipei

National University of the Arts, TNUA). Parkes not only established a dance training system based on Graham’s training and technique but also modified Lin Hwai-Min’s choreographies. For example, Taiwanese dancers Yang Mei-Rong recollected that Parkes changed the rhythm of a triple hop phrase in Lin’s Legacy to make it more rhythmic during the students’ rehearsal.5 Although Taiwanese dancer Henry Yu (also known as Yu

Hao-Yen), a former dancer of Graham’s company, had started to teach Graham technique at Chinese Cultural University in 1982, Parkes’ twenty years of teaching at TNUA definitely rooted Graham technique in Taiwan dance history.

Transnational migrations, no matter short or long, facilitate interactions, circulations, and shifts of ideas through embodiments. These do not only happen verbally but also within the body. The Taiwanese dancers received American modern dance as representations of freedom under the Cold War rhetoric and experienced freedom through practicing modern dance of their own. Since then, the modern, for the Taiwanese, has taken the name of freedom: free to explore, free to express, and free to advocate.

1 Lin Hwai-min, Formosa (see Chapter 3, n. 83). 2 Yang, Yuanting, “林懷民舞出臺灣 «關於島嶼»編織土地情” [Lin Hwai-min

260

choreographs about Taiwan, weaving his feeling about the land with Formosa], (Taiwan), September 17, 2017. https://talk.ltn.com.tw/article/paper/1135950; “婆娑 之洋, 美麗之島.” Lian, Hen, «臺灣通史» (Taipei, Taiwan: Taiwan Tongshi She, 1920), Taiwan eBook of National Central Library, Taiwan. 3 Lin, “Choreographing a Flexible Taiwan” (see Chap. 3, n. 104). 4 “An Evening of Dance,” the program notes (see Chap. 4, n. 77). 5 Yang Mei-Rong, interview by the author in Taipei, Taiwan, on November 20, 2018.

261

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Chun. VHS. Taipei National University of the Arts Library, 1994. Premiered in

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Archives and Repositories

National Archives at College Park, Maryland, United States

National Central Library, Taipei, Taiwan National Diet Library, Tokyo, Japan

National Performing Arts Library, Taipei, Taiwan

National Library of Thailand, Bangkok, Thailand

The Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts

The Music Division, Library of Congress, Washington D.C., United States

The David W. Mullins Library at the University of Arkansas

278