The Political Kiaesthetics of Contemporary Dance:—

The Political Kinesthetics of Contemporary Dance: Taiwan in Transnational Perspective By Chia-Yi Seetoo A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Performance Studies in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Miryam Sas, Chair Professor Catherine Cole Professor Sophie Volpp Professor Andrew F. Jones Spring 2013 Copyright 2013 Chia-Yi Seetoo All Rights Reserved Abstract The Political Kinesthetics of Contemporary Dance: Taiwan in Transnational Perspective By Chia-Yi Seetoo University of California, Berkeley Doctor of Philosophy in Performance Studies Professor Miryam Sas, Chair This dissertation considers dance practices emerging out of post-1980s conditions in Taiwan to theorize how contemporary dance negotiates temporality as a political kinesthetic performance. The dissertation attends to the ways dance kinesthetically responds to and mediates the flows of time, cultural identity, and social and political forces in its transnational movement. Dances negotiate disjunctures in the temporality of modernization as locally experienced and their global geotemporal mapping. The movement of performers and works pushes this simultaneous negotiation to the surface, as the aesthetics of the performances registers the complexity of the forces they are grappling with and their strategies of response. By calling these strategies “political kinesthetic” performance, I wish to highlight how politics, aesthetics, and kinesthetics converge in dance, and to show how political and affective economies operate with and through fully sensate, efforted, laboring bodies. I begin my discussion with the Cursive series performed by the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan, whose intersection of dance and cursive-style Chinese calligraphy initiates consideration of the temporal implication of “contemporary” as “contemporaneity” that underlies the simultaneous negotiation of local and transnational concerns. Extending from the Cursive series, I depart momentarily from the milieu of Taiwan to engage with two contemporaneous transnational Chinese choreographers whose works blend dance and Chinese calligraphy differently as a way to problematize further the performance of “Chineseness” and the economy of forces and power at work in the transnational. The dissertation then takes up another prime case of temporal reconfiguration, examining the Legend Lin Dance Theatre of Taiwan and its artistic director Lin Lee-Chen’s early works whose kinesthetic shifting and continuity form a prism through which dance mediates, complicates, and alters Taiwan’s developmentalist ethos, in a way that complicates readings of (self-)Orientalisms. Finally, the dissertation engages with the Yellow Butterfly Flying to the South Butoh Troupe led by Japanese butoh dancer Hata-Kanoko, who lived and worked in Taiwan for nearly a decade and whose works draw attention to the legacy of Japanese colonial modernity in Taiwan and East Asia. The troupe’s leftist and self-marginalizing politics in the legacy of Japanese postwar avant-garde performance produce alternative inter- Asian engagements. Enacting different ways of negotiating temporalities of modernity across space, these performances are counterpoints to one another on various levels. They also articulate ways of 1 thinking, performing, and “moving” Taiwan transnationally: transnational Chineseness, self- conscious formations of “Asian” culture in opposition to an idea of the “West,” and inter-Asian relationships. Parsing out the complexity within the colossal designation of “transnationalism,” this project also proposes a concept of “contemporary dance” that moves beyond simple periodization or labeling of dance genres and styles and instead unpacks the temporal negotiations of moving bodies implicated in transnational relationships from differing and sometimes contradictory perspectives. Although seeking to transcend the periodization paradigm, my historicized case studies addressing the post-1980s conditions of Taiwan and globalized Chinese culture also index shifts from the end of the Cold War to globalization that affect cultural forms and their conditions of production and circulation. 2 To my parents and those who generously lent their guidance and support to this research. i The Political Kinesthetics of Contemporary Dance: Taiwan in Transnational Perspective Contents Introduction Chapter 1 Suturing Times: Contemporary Dance and Contemporaneity Chapter 2 The Materiality of the Immaterial: Training and Transnational Kinesthesia Chapter 3 Fluid Sinographies: De-/Reterritorializing Chineseness through Dancing, Painting, and Calligraphy Pause. Kinesthetics of Dance and Kinetics of Modernity Chapter 4 Kinesthetic Velocities: Mediating Development in Early 1980s Taiwan Chapter 5 Economy of Mobility: Persisting huan (緩) in the Force Field of Aesthetics and Politics Chapter 6 Exchanges (jiaohuan 交換) Actual and Phantasmagoric: Biopolitical Protest and the Seeding of Alternative Inter-Asian Transnationalism Coda. Shifting Rhythms Bibliography ii Introduction “Contemporary Dance” In 2001, Cloud Gate Dance Theatre (Yun men wu ji 雲門舞集), the largest professional modern dance company in Taiwan, created Cursive (Xingcao 行草), a dance piece inspired by cursive-style Chinese calligraphy (xingcao). This piece marked the beginning of a sustained aesthetic exploration, with three subsequent installments over the next decade: Cursive II (Xingcao er 行草貳, 2003),1 Wild Cursive (Kuangcao 狂草, 2005), and Water Stains on the Wall (Wu lou hen 屋漏痕, 2010). Cursive, Cloud Gate’s first attempt to explore the intersection between Chinese calligraphy and modern dance, contains sections that juxtapose dancing and images of ancient Chinese calligraphy scrolls projected on stage. Modern mechanical and digital technology brings into the present ancient writing in fluid ink traces, while the dancing absorbs, interprets, and interacts with the kinesthetic capacity retained in the writings. The imbrication of modern technology, dancing bodies, and ancient writings brings forth questions of aesthetics, medium, and temporality. Cloud Gate artistic director Lin Hwai-Min’s 林懷民 remarks about the aesthetic effects and generative process of this piece expose how complex these terms really are, as in the following excerpt from dance critic Tsou Chih-Mu’s 鄒之牧 interview with Lin about the clean-cut (“neat”) quality brought forth by the way Cursive includes technology: [Tsou:] How did you come up with the sense of “technology” and “neat”-ness this time? [Lin:] […] In recent years when my pieces toured abroad, people called them “contemporary dance”; as for this piece, it should not simply become a “folk dance”! I want the piece to have clarity, to have things like the slides that give a high-tech feel, with lines that are very clean cut, in order to create a counterpoint to the soft bodies and soft lines of the dancers in front of them, to create a tension. Everything is hard-edged. For example: every frame that appears as a result of the projection, the squares, the rectangles, the hard lines.[…] It might seem easy, but [the stage designer] Lin Keh-hua has to synthesize them all. Finally, there is the question of balance: how do things combine? What Chinese characters [from the scrolls] to show in the background, and what dances to make in the foreground? How to create parallels, correspondences, and contrasts between them? These are all very interesting challenges!2 Tsou faithfully retained in her transcription the question and answer session conducted in Chinese with English phrases. I try to express this “bilingual” quality by placing the English phrases used in the conversation in italics: neat, contemporary dance, folk dance, clarity, slides, high-tech, clean cut, counterpoint, tension, hard-edged, balance, and combine. These terms range from aesthetic qualities to materials, categories, and methodologies. What is certain is that aesthetics is not neutral, as the splitting of language discloses the varying frames of references Tsou and Lin draw on, which can be unsettled again if we begin to wonder what exactly determines the language being chosen to carry forth concepts at the moment of their enunciation—habit, the conscious, or the subconscious? I would note that the manifest linguistic 1 Cursive II is later renamed as Pine Smoke (Songyan 松煙). 2 Chih-Mu Tsou, Cursive: The Birth of a Dance (行草─一齣舞蹈的誕生) (Taipei: Ecus Publishing House, 2001), 42. Translation mine. Italics refer to the words spoken in English. iii split does not operate as a simplistic reflection of Chinese and English aesthetic references; rather, it gestures to a complex historical proliferation of international versus local frameworks, not in the form of stark contrasts but of permeable impurities. This passage, at its base, signals how Cursive could really be seen as a performance of the negotiations between differently perceived and evolving aesthetic traditions and concepts, negotiations having intimately to do with the embeddedness of the piece in transnationalized performing arts conditions and contexts. Aesthetic, medium, and temporality are caught within a complicated network of influences and concerns that demand consideration beyond the confines of national borders and that have profound implications within the transnational relations that Taiwan and its performing arts productions are embedded in and constantly rearticulating. This dissertation shows how this embeddedness

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