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UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title The Dialectics of Virtuosity: Dance in the People's Republic of China, 1949-2009 Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5ms5j3tb Author Wilcox, Emily Elissa Publication Date 2011 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California The Dialectics of Virtuosity: Dance in the People’s Republic of China, 1949-2009 by Emily Elissa Wilcox A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Joint Doctor of Philosophy with the University of California, San Francisco in Medical Anthropology of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Xin Liu, Chair Professor Vincanne Adams Professor Alexei Yurchak Professor Michael Nylan Professor Shannon Jackson Spring 2011 Abstract The Dialectics of Virtuosity: Dance in the People’s Republic of China, 1949-2009 by Emily Elissa Wilcox Joint Doctor of Philosophy with the University of California, San Francisco in Medical Anthropology University of California, Berkeley Professor Xin Liu, Chair Under state socialism in the People’s Republic of China, dancers’ bodies became important sites for the ongoing negotiation of two paradoxes at the heart of the socialist project, both in China and globally. The first is the valorization of physical labor as a path to positive social reform and personal enlightenment. The second is a dialectical approach to epistemology, in which world-knowing is connected to world-making. In both cases, dancers in China found themselves, their bodies, and their work at the center of conflicting ideals, often in which the state upheld, through its policies and standards, what seemed to be conflicting points of view and directions of action. Since they occupy the unusual position of being cultural workers who labor with their bodies, dancers were successively the heroes and the victims in an ever unresolved national debate over the value of mental versus physical labor. In the case of socialist realist epistemology, dancers were called upon to use their bodies and their experiences to generate realistic depictions of a world that was, according to official ideology, always in a process of being formed. In their embodied expressions of regional, cultural, and national identities in the making of new “Chinese” dance forms, dancers contributed to the affective and aesthetic strength of state-supported worldviews, even while recognizing that these views were often “real” and “true” only because they were politically correct. The understanding of “Chinese traditional culture” applied by dance practitioners in the making of Chinese dance forms in the People’s Republic of China applies a dialectical epistemology drawn from Chinese socialist realism, Chinese postcolonial nationalism, and indigenous Chinese aesthetic theory. In this dialectical epistemology, Chinese traditional culture is understood as something that can be investigated, inherited, and remade through dance practice envisioned as a form of cultural research. 1 Courses in Gudianwu at the Beijing Dance Academy, Beijing. 2008-09. i To my parents, my teachers, and the dancers who opened their lives to me for this research. ii Table of Contents Preface Acknowledgements CHAPTER ONE “Molian” (磨练), “To Temper Oneself”: Virtuosity and the Socialist Subject CHAPTER TWO Eating Art After Mao: Paradoxes of Survival and Spirit in the Reform Era CHAPTER THREE Beyond Privatization: Dance Troupes During Reform CHAPTER FOUR Arts of Truth: The Epistemological Paradox of Chinese Dance CHAPTER FIVE Embodying the Minority: Politics of Aesthetics in Chinese Ethnic Dance CHAPTER SIX The Flavor of Chineseness: “Gudianwu” (古典舞) and the Making of a National Dance Form Bibliography Appendix - Notes On Fieldwork iii Dance students practicing in a courtyard in Wanyuan, Sichuan. 1970s. Photo courtesy of Wang Chaoying. iv Preface Under state socialism in the People’s Republic of China, dancers’ bodies became important sites for the ongoing negotiation of two paradoxes at the heart of the socialist project, both in China and globally. The first is the valorization of physical labor as a path to positive social reform and personal enlightenment. The second is a dialectical approach to epistemology, in which world-knowing is connected to world-making. In both cases, dancers in China found themselves, their bodies, and their work at the center of conflicting ideals, often in which the state upheld, through its policies and standards, what seemed to be conflicting points of view and directions of action. Since they occupy the unusual position of being cultural workers who labor with their bodies, dancers were successively the heroes and the victims in an ever unresolved national debate over the value of mental versus physical labor. In the case of socialist realist epistemology, dancers were called upon to use their bodies and their experiences to generate realistic depictions of a world that was, according to official ideology, always in a process of being formed. In their embodied expressions of regional, cultural, and national identities in the making of new “Chinese” dance forms, dancers contributed to the affective and aesthetic strength of state-supported worldviews, even while recognizing that these views were often “real” and “true” only because they were politically correct. The work of dance was recognized as essential to socialist nation building in China because it offered spaces for the realization of the paradoxes of Chinese socialism. In their cultivation of virtuoso bodies, dancers became physical embodiments of the unification of physical labor with ideological and moral goodness seen as instrumental in socialist China to the formation of healthy individuals and healthy societies. Likewise, by formulating a creative process that seeks cultural inheritance through the reconstitution of culture, dancers engaged in modes of knowing and representing both the present and the past that helped to remake Chinese culture according to a new vision of the future, which was promoted by the new socialist state. Although it shares many features with other socialist projects, Chinese socialism also has its own historical and cultural particularities. For example, Chinese Confucian and Taoist traditions of aesthetic and moral self-cultivation contributed to the adoption of a particularly aesthetic approach in socialist China to the Marxist notion that physical labor leads to personal enlightenment and social reform. Moreover, due to China’s post-colonial relationship to the West, including the nationalistic resistance to Western cultural imperialism professed by many early twentieth-century Chinese revolutionaries, the assertion of Chinese cultural identity took on particular importance in the building of the Chinese socialist state. In offering an aesthetic approach to the ideal socialist subject formed through physical labor, while also providing dialectical epistemology through forms of expression thought to be essentially “Chinese,” dance work in the PRC became an exemplary site of Chinese socialist political praxis. Socialist ideology calls for a vision of life in which the concrete and the virtual are constantly foregrounded and connected. Since it enacts the constant and dynamic merging of the concrete and the virtual, the dancer’s body is a useful site for examining socialist creative practice. The “concrete” here refers to the material reality of things as physical objects and their relationships to one another in time, space, and bodily experience. Though limited, the concrete is inherently malleable in the socialist vision of the world, and it is the order of being in which one exerts influence on the world through embodied practice. The “virtual” here refers to that v which exists in a realm of creativity and immanence, as the potential, the possible, or the in- formation. The virtual occupies a space of experience that is often preliminary to or outside of the physical, but that is nevertheless real. In the dancer’s body the concrete and the virtual come together in a single creative activity. The dancer’s body is a space of dialectical exchange and virtuosity in which the virtual is made concrete and the concrete virtual. The dancer’s body thus offers human form to the socialist vision of a utopian, revolutionary social project grounded in dynamic notions of social life, political praxis, and labor as work on the self, the material world, and society. In this dissertation, I examine the lives and works of dancers in the People’s Republic of China during a sixty-year period marked by unprecedented activity, creation, contestation, and reform in the field of dance. During this period, important changes have taken place in the social value, nature, and experience of dance work that reflect fundamental transformations in the nature of Chinese society and Chinese socialism. At the start of this period, during the decade immediately following the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, China established a nationwide system of dance training, creation, and research that became the largest and most extensive of its kind in the world. Completely new dance genres were developed, along with new repertoires and new ways of engaging the body for artistic and cultural expression. At the end of this period, in the early twenty-first century, China began the process of privatizing dance work. What was previously a state-managed and state-funded dance industry became