UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Dancing with Nostalgia in Taiwanese Contemporary “Traditional” Dance A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Critical Dance Studies by Szu-Ching Chang August 2011 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Jacqueline Shea Murphy, Chairperson Dr. Marta Elena Savigliano Dr. Daphne Pi-Wei Lei Copyright by Szu-Ching Chang 2011 The Dissertation of Szu-Ching Chang is approved: __________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________ Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside Acknowledgements The research, writing and completion of this dissertation are impossible without many individuals' generosity in their support and assistance. First, I would like to offer my special thanks to my committee for their inspirations, critical feedbacks, and suggestions. My greatest gratitude goes to my advisor, Dr. Jacqueline Shea Murphy. Her tireless mentoring, patience and encouragement have supported and guided me through this difficult but exciting process. Dr. Murphy's critical insight helped to shape my perspective and theoretical framework on this dance research project. She also demonstrated to me on how to be a responsible and professional dance scholar. Next, I would like to express my sincere thanks to my dissertation committee member, Dr. Marta Elena Savigliano, who pushed my boundaries and expanded my exploration with inspiring discussions. I offer my deepest appreciation to my dissertation committee member, Dr. Daphne Pi-Wei Lei. Dr. Lei for her invaluable help on deepening my academic research. She always offered me warm guidance and generously devoted her energy and time to support me. I would also like to thank Dr. Susan Leigh Foster and Dr. Linda J. Tomko for their helpful comments in the dissertation's early stage. In addition, I also want to thank Dr. Christina Schwenkel, Dr. Anthea Kraut and Dr. Priya Srinivasan, whose seminars introduced me to new materials that instigated my thinking. This long-term project and dissertation had been supported by numerous scholarships and grants. My doctoral studies had been founded by the three-year governmental Fellowship from the Ministry of Education, Taiwan (R.O.C). The Maxwell H. Gluck Fellowship at UCR has not only offered me the opportunity to demonstrate iv dance in the South California but also financially support my study. I also appreciate the finical supports for my dissertation writing from the UCR Dissertation Year Fellowship and the UC Humanities Fellowship. My research had also been funded by the UCR Humanities Research Grant and the UCR Dean’s Dissertation Research Grant. I would not have this research completed without these supports. I want to express many thanks to the assistance from the two dance companies I research on: the Taipei Folk Dance Theater and the Legend Lin Dance Theater. I especially thank the two choreographers, Li-HuanTsai and Lee-Chen Lin, who provided me rich resource and information and shared their insights. I appreciate my interviewees who generously donated their time to share their valuable experiences with me. They are, Nien-Chou Chen, Wen-Tsui Wu, Wen-Ren Lee, Bi-Jue Tsai, Ming-Jing Wu, Hsiu-Hsia Wu, Chien-Wen Cheng, Ming-Wei Lee, Lan-Lan Mo, Chin-Hung Kao, Lin-Lin Yang, Lei-Qian Wang, Zhi-Jie Tan, and Zheng-Hua Jiang. I offer my sincere thanks to those who offer generous helps in the every encounter during my research. I want to express my special gratitude to my fellow colleagues and friends. Melissa Templeton, who tutored me on essay writing and helped me in the editing of my drafts, supported the completion of this dissertation. I would also like to extend my gratitude to my colleagues with whom I often share inspiring conversations with: Anusha Kedhar, Gabriela Mendoza-Garcia, Sangwoo Ha, Hannah Schwadron, Melissa Hudson Bell, Premalatha Thiagarajan, Hye-Won Hwang, Kristy Yu-Chieh Shih and many other beautiful people who gave me emotional supports. v Finally, I owed my deepest gratitude to my family for their support. My parents and my brother have been offering me their loving encouragements during my long years of study and research. I am especially grateful to my mother, my first dance teacher, for her support to allow me to dance freely, to express myself on writing dances, and then to enjoy dancing throughout all the pages of my life. vi ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Dancing with Nostalgia in Taiwanese Contemporary “Traditional” Dance by Szu-Ching Chang Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in Critical Dance Studies University of California, Riverside, August 2011 Dr. Jacqueline Shea Murphy, Chairperson This dissertation focuses on Taiwanese contemporary choreographies that incorporate “traditional” materials. I examine the works of two female-led dance companies in Taiwan: Pilgrimage, staged by Taipei Folk Dance Theater in 2004 and Jiao, performed by Legend Lin Dance Theater in 1995 and in 2006. My dissertation engages with interdisciplinary perspectives on the concept of nostalgia. Focusing especially on the dancing body, which is living and changing, I theorize a body-based understanding of engagements with nostalgia, and argue for the dancing body a site of nostalgic negotiation. This approach reevaluates the critical possibility of Asian dance practices and offers a critique to the binary ideology between the West and the East. In chapter one, I demonstrate how, historically, Taiwanese female choreographers engaged nostalgically with “traditional” Chinese Min-Zu dance in ways that somehow empowered them in post-war Taiwan. In chapter two, I discuss the development of Taiwanese subjectivity after the 1980s and suggest that another kind of nostalgia, focusing on local culture, was generated widely during this period. My discussions of the search for Taiwanese cultural symbols and the desire to redefine Taiwanese bodies vii provide historical and political background that situates the two dance companies analyzed later. In chapter three, I examine how Li-Hua Tsai, the choreographer of Pilgrimage, incorporates folk elements that highlight female spirituality in this dance. I suggest this dance piece negotiates different nationalism(s) in its attempt to fulfill the audiences’ and governmental desires for the staging of cultural representations of Taiwan. Tsai’s self- positioning in the local culture of Taiwan also achieves visibility in the international folk dance festivals. In chapter four, I explore how Lee-Chen Lin, the creator of Jiao, constructs a specific body aesthetic that demonstrates a body-based nostalgia, one that choreographs both her local resistance and her niche in the global market. By exploring how contemporary women choreographers in Taiwan continue to engage with their different longings, I bring Asian female choreographers back into dance discourses and recognize their complicated strategies of choreographing nostalgia(s) that bridge not only the past and the present, but also the local and the global. viii Table of Contents Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................ iv Abstract ............................................................................................................................. vii Introduction Choreographing Nostalgia ................................................................................................1 Chapter One Chinese Nationalism, Anti-Communism, and Restorative Nostalgia: Chinese Min-Zu Dance in 1950s-1960s Taiwan .........................................................................................27 Chapter Two Constructing of Taiwanese Subjectivity in the 1990s: The Revival of “Native” Culture and Ma-Zu religion ............................................................................................92 Chapter Three Longing for Authentic Taiwanese Dance: The Taipei Folk Dance Theater and Pilgrimage ......................................................................................................................164 Chapter IV Body-Based Nostalgia in the Local-Global Configuration: Legend Lin Dance Theater’s Jiao .................................................................................................................253 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................326 Bibliography ...................................................................................................................333 ix Introduction Choreographing Nostalgia This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. The concept of the historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogeneous, empty time. A critique of the concept of such a progression must be the basis of any criticism of the concept