Our Hands Dance Them and Our Feet Tap Them

Our Hands Dance Them and Our Feet Tap Them: How Chinese Dance, Like Chinese Poetry, Reflects the Traditional Chinese Worldview Carly O’Connell The Art of Chinese Poetry Professor Tang May 2015 O’Connell 1 “The affections （情）are stirred and take on form (形) in words. If words are inadequate, we speak them out in sighs. If sighing is inadequate, we sing them. If singing them is inadequate, unconsciously our hands dance them and our feet tap them” (Owen 41). This quote from the Major Preface of the Book of Poetry, also attributed to the lost Record of Music, hints at the close connection between poetry and dance. “Singing” one’s feelings here refers to poetry, which was often chanted or put to music. Talking, poeticizing, sighing, and dancing are presented as a progression of means to express emotions. Yet when poetry is linked to other art forms in scholarship and popular thought, it is usually to painting, calligraphy, or music. Although dance is not traditionally grouped with poetry and the other high arts in China, it still shares many of their principles and reflects the same Chinese worldview. From ancient times until the present, in ritual dance, theater dance, and modern dance performance, Chinese dance has reflected concepts from the Book of Changes, Daoism, and other mainstays of Chinese thought. Only recently has Chinese dance theory begun to incorporate the terminology used to describe poetry, but it is not surprising that these two art forms share characteristics, given their common purpose of expressing mind and feeling. To discuss Chinese dance academically, in the abstract, it is important to note that a literary body on Chinese dance theory comparable to that on poetry theory is only a recent development, for several reasons. Firstly, dance was associated with the lower class, unlike poetry, which was a pastime of the literati official class. Dance was considered “merely a form of entertainment, an endeavor not worthy to be ranked with calligraphy, poetry, or painting as an appropriate subject for the highest grade of scholarship” (Strauss 6). In the four-layer hierarchy of traditional Chinese society, literati poets sat at the top, while entertainers made up the bottom stratum along with merchants and artisans. Although dancers would perform for the households O’Connell 2 of the elite, they were often traded among the nobility in ancient times like commodities (Wang 19). The second reason for dance’s lack of its own academic theory was because historically, dance was not always conceived of as its own distinct art form in China. For example, the term music in ancient China usually referred to both song and its accompanying dance (Wang 1). When dance was incorporated into ritual, it was not necessarily seen as related to that same type of regulated movement that accompanied the popular songs of the day (Straus 6). Lastly, what literature did exist on dance in early China focused on practice rather than theory (GUAN iii). The Chinese have long considered experience a greater teacher than words, and thus new dancers were expected to learn from masters, not from books. Therefore, writings focused on skills and training rather than the nature of the dance. Yet just because dance was not associated with the high arts in the minds of the Chinese people does not mean it was not shaped by the same Chinese worldview which influenced the aesthetics of poetry. This paper will primarily explore scholarship on ritual and theater dance in order to make generalizations about historical Chinese dance, although there were other types of dance such as court dance and folk dance in ancient China. Afterwards, I will transition to discussing modern Chinese dance theory by analyzing a specific dance and a piece of innovative dance scholarship. Chinese dance, throughout its history, displayed the Chinese characteristics of imitating nature, valuing experience over language, tolerating ambiguity, and originating in emotion. Nature in Chinese culture serves as a model for human behavior, and dance is no exception. According to legend, the trigrams of the Book of Changes were invented when Fu Xi studied the patterns of nature. Likewise, both Laozi and Confucius advised looking to nature as a role model for living one’s life. Turning to nature as a teacher is thus a major characteristic of Chinese philosophy. In this same vein, Chinese dance, too, drew inspiration from nature. Many O’Connell 3 Chinese dances were devised by “imitating the behavior of birds and animals” (Wang 2). Often their names reveal their source of inspiration as is the case for the lion dance, dragon dance, peacock dance, halcyon dance, mynah dance, thrush dance, and many more. Certain dance movements were also named for the animal actions they resemble, such as “Pair of Flying Sparrows” and “Step of the Scorpion” (Wang 2). Thus dance, like writing, found its origins in natural images in ancient China. Related to this reliance on nature in Chinese thinking is a mistrust of human language. In addition to the names of dances and moves, information about ancient Chinese dances can be found in the instructional records of certain dances. Dance notation of a Ming Dynasty ritual dance shows detailed illustrations, while written directions are brief (Strauss 5). As Laozi said, “To use words but rarely is to be natural.” Confucius demonstrated both this distrust for language and his reverence for nature in the quote “What does Heaven say? Yet the four seasons revolve and a hundred things grow. What does Heaven say?” Chinese philosophy views words as one step further removed from reality than images are. Poetry reflects this mistrust of language by using concise language, abundant imagery, and implicit meaning. Dance notation likewise reflects this mistrust of language by favoring images over words. However, even studying the illustrations is not enough to truly learn the dance. Chinese ritual dance, which here may be generalized to Chinese dance as a whole, adheres to the tradition of learning by doing, following in the footsteps of a master, rather than following instructions of a written guide. Like the Dao, dance must be experienced, not explained in words. The dance notation itself is often highly ambiguous, depicting only a picture of feet, leaving the position of head, arms, and hands up to interpretation. And yet, while leaving out concrete details such as position of various body parts, many descriptions included the emotion that should be conveyed O’Connell 4 through the dance move (Strauss 8). This shows that emotion is an intrinsic part of the dance and that like poetry, dance is meant to express emotion. Yet emotion is not easily explained in words or pictures, and is thus part of the reason why ritual dance and other dance must be learnt and experienced in person rather than through a page in a book. China was not the only ancient civilization to incorporate dance into ritual. Thus, dance is another field in which it may be useful to follow the popular practice of Nisbett and others of comparing ancient China to ancient Greece. Greek scholar Dr. Aphrodite Alexandrakis has done a comparative study of the philosophy of ritual dance, drawing from the works of Plato and his Chinese near-contemporary, Xunzi. Xunzi was a Chinese philosopher who lived in the fourth century B.C.E. He believed ritual dance was emotional in nature and thus focused on the (emotional) content expressed by dance. This contrasts with Plato’s approach, which was to reject emotional impact and focus instead on form (Alexandrakis 267). For Plato, form was attractive because it was rational and consisted of abstract elements. Yet as Nisbett points out, “The concern with abstraction characteristic of ancient Greek philosophers has no counterpart in Chinese philosophy” (17). These different viewpoints gave rise to two different conceptions of beauty, formal/objective and sensual/subjective, which were valued by the Greeks and Chinese respectively (Alexandrakis 268). This Chinese focus on a subjective aesthetic experience is evident in Xunzi’s accounts of the dances he witnessed. He does not describe the objective reality of the bodily movements that the dances comprise but instead focuses on the subjective reaction they inspired in the personages of importance who watched them. For example, he dutifully transcribed Prince Zua of Wu’s response to the dance Great Elegance: “Admirable indeed! Zealous labors without any claim to moral power, which but Yu would have been capable of this cultivation!” (Alexandrakis 272). The intention behind such dances was also duly O’Connell 5 noted, as when he perceived the Militant dance as an expression of the ambitions of King Wu. Like poetry, ritual dance was seen as a means of expressing emotion and intent, and thus for the Chinese, unlike for the Greeks, studying the form alone was not as meaningful as studying the content. Aside from ritual, another major venue for dance in traditional China was xiqu, Chinese indigenous theater. According to Emily Wilcox, scholar of Chinese dance, the “exploration and expression of qing” has been a “defining feature” of Chinese xiqu since at least the Qing Dynasty. Whether dance is employed for ritual or entertainment purposes, emotion is always at the heart of it, just as it is at the heart of Chinese poetry. Also like poetry, theater dance relies on a shared knowledge between the artist and audience that allows for the communication of implicit meanings. The images of dance are the movements, encoded with abstract ideas such as “psychological character development, metaphorical relationships between objects, meanings, and people,” and more (Wilcox 54). The audience must understand the significance of these coded gestures as well as “the subtleties of role type, prop significance, and the qualities of xiqu music” in order to understand the meaning of the performance (55).

Load more