19th Century Writings on the Grand Tour

Two collections of writings, found in the glass cabinet on the left wall of our Wonder Cabinet, contain the descriptions of two travelers’ times abroad during the Grand Tour. The first item is a travel journal written by Henry Louis Baugher, son of Pennsylvania (now Gettysburg) College’s second president, Henry Lewis Baugher. The journal was generously donated to Gettysburg College’s Special Collections and College Archives by Gary Hawbaker, class of 1966. Beneath the travel journal you’ll find a collection of letters written by Louisa Augusta Webb about the tales of her and her sisters’ travels. This compilation of letters is held by Gettysburg College Special Collections. The two pieces, when analyzed together, reveal the journeys of travelers on the Grand Tour. [excerpt

Revolutionary Bodies

This book examines the history of concert dance in China from 1935 to 2015, with a focus on Chinese dance and its relationship to revolutionary performance culture in PRC history. The book argues that Chinese dance, not revolutionary ballet, was the primary legacy of Maoist dance research and innovation. Showing the relationship between dance and politics, it discusses dance developments during the War of Resistance Against Japan, the Chinese Civil War, the Korean War, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the post-Mao era, and the period of One Belt One Road. The book emphasizes transnational exchange and highlights the contributions of immigrant and ethnic minority women, such as Chinese Trinidadian dancer Dai Ailian, Korean dancer Choe Seung-hui, Uyghur dancer Qemberxanim, Bai dancer Yang Liping, and Uyghur dancer Gulmira Mamat. It discusses the history of dance schools and companies such as the Beijing Dance Academy, the China National Opera and Dance Drama Theater, the Central Nationalities Song and Dance Ensemble, and the Xinjiang Arts Institute. Dance film is an important subject of analysis. Aesthetic experimentation is another key theme. Dance styles examined include Chinese classical dance, Chinese national folk dance (including ethnic minority dance and Han folk dance), Chinese military dance, New Dance, New Yangge, national dance drama, Dunhuang dance, peacock dance, and ballet. The book argues that kinesthetic nationalism, ethnic and spatial inclusivity, and dynamic inheritance are lasting features of Chinese dance

Women Dancing Otherwise: The Queer Feminism of Gu Jiani’s Right & Left

In twenty-first-century urban Chinese contemporary dance, gender and female sexuality are often constructed in ways that reinforce patriarchal and heterosexual social norms. Although “queer dance” as a named category does not exist in China, it is possible to identify queer feminist perspectives in recent dance works. This essay offers a reading of representations of gender and female sexuality in two works of contemporary dance by Beijing-based female Chinese choreographers: Wang Mei’s 2002 Thunder and Rain and Gu Jiani’s 2014 Right & Left. Through choreographic analysis informed by ethnographic research in Beijing’s contemporary dance world, this essay argues that Thunder and Rain reinforces patriarchal and heterosexual social norms common in Chinese contemporary dance, while Right & Left disrupts such norms. Through its staging of unconventional female-female duets and its queering of nationally marked movement forms, Right & Left offers a queer feminist approach to the presentation of women on the Chinese stage.https://scholarworks.wm.edu/asbookchapters/1111/thumbnail.jp

Rulan Chao Pian 卞赵如兰 (1922–2013)

Rulan Chao Pian, who taught Chinese and music at Harvard University from 1947 to 1992, was a pioneer in the fields of Chinese Song dynasty musical history and ethnomusicological studies of Peking opera and Sinophone popular performance

Locating Chinese Dance: Bodies in Place, History, and Genre

This chapter begins with a discussion of water sleeve dance at the Beijing Dance Academy. It explains that Chinese dance is a modern twentieth-century concert genre that takes inspiration from existing performance practices, such as folk performance, xiqu, and ethnic minority performance. It introduces the main categories of Chinese dance, including Chinese classical dance and Chinese national folk dance, and it discusses the scope of contemporary and historical Chinese dance practice in China and the Sinophone world. It also discusses the history of Chinese dance and outlines key dance theories proposed by Dai Ailian and Choe Seung-hui. It argues that Chinese dance originated in the 1940s and 1950s in the context of socialist revolution and socialist nation-building. It proposes that kinesthetic nationalism, ethnic and spatial inclusiveness, and dynamic inheritance are defining features of the genre. It argues that these features of Chinese dance differentiate the genre from earlier experiments by Qing palace dancer Yu Rongling and Peking opera star Mei Lanfang. It also argues that Maoist culture and socialism encouraged artistic innovation and that Chinese dance has become less revolutionary during the post-Mao period.https://scholarworks.wm.edu/asbookchapters/1147/thumbnail.jp

Meaning in Movement: Adaptation and the Xiqu Body in Intercultural Chinese Theatre

Zhuli xiaojie (adapted from Strindberg\u27s Miss Julie) and Xin bi tian gao (from Ibsen\u27s Hedda Gabler) are two works in a recent series of intercultural xiqu productions by playwrights William Huizhu Sun and Faye Chunfang Fei. In these works, the xiqu body serves as a medium for theatrical expression, where music, costume, movement, and props come together in a super-expressive acting technique that foregrounds qing (情), or sentiment. In these adaptations, the xiqu body compensates for what is necessarily cut from the text in the transformation from spoken drama to xiqu performance

When Folk Dance Was Radical: Cold War Yangge, World Youth Festivals, and Overseas Chinese Leftist Culture in the 1950s and 1960s

This article challenges three common assumptions about Chinese socialist-era dance culture: first, that Mao-era dance rarely circulated internationally and was disconnected from international dance trends; second, that the yangge movement lost momentum in the early years of the People’s Republic of China (PRC); and, third, that the political significance of socialist dance lies in content rather than form. This essay looks at the transformation of wartime yangge into PRC folk dance during the 1950s and 1960s and traces the international circulation of these new dance styles in two contexts: the World Festivals of Youth and Students in Eastern Europe, and the schools, unions, and clan associations of overseas Chinese communities in Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, and San Francisco. By tracing the emergence and circulation of yangge and PRC folk dance, I propose the existence of “Cold War yangge” – a transnational phenomenon in which Chinese folk dance became a site of leftist political activism