Fangfei Miao (University of Michigan)

This talk explores the paradoxical role that the US played in China’s dance modernization during the Reform Era through a paradigmatic case: for four years (1987-1991), teachers from the American Dance Festival, at the invitation of the Guangdong Dance School, taught dance techniques and composition and trained the first group of professional modern dancers in China, most of whom continued on to establish the country’s first modern dance company in 1992. Contesting the presumption that a smoothly-communicated physical and spiritual liberation defined the program, Professor Miao argues that recurrent reciprocal misunderstandings deeply marked the exchange, because of the American teachers’ and Chinese students’ profoundly different conceptions of kinesthesia, pedagogical approach, and freedom. These missteps generated new methods of dance modernization and significantly shifted the history of Chinese modern dance.