Revolutionary Bodies: Chinese Dance and the Socialist Legacy

Speaker: Emily Wilcox
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The University of Minnesota China Center invites you to join an online conversation about Chinese dance with Professor Emily Wilcox.

As the first English-language history of dance in the People’s Republic of China, Revolutionary Bodies examines previously unexamined dance films, a wide range of Chinese-language published and archival materials, and ethnographic field research to analyze the work of major Chinese choreographers from 1935 to 2015. With a focus on transnational connections in this history, Wilcox challenges the previously held view that Soviet ballet was the primary force shaping China’s socialist dance creation, instead showing the impact of a broader range of intercultural connections, from Trinidad and London to North Korea and Uzbekistan. Wilcox also shows the important role that ethnic minority and diaspora artists played in twentieth-century Chinese dance history and demonstrates continuities and changes from the early socialist period to new choreography that has emerged in the past two decades. A central argument of the book is that transnational socialist dance experiments laid the basis for the art form today known around the world as “Chinese Dance.”

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About the Speaker

Emily Wilcox

Emily Wilcox is Associate Professor of Chinese Studies, Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, and Chinese Studies Program Director at William & Mary. She is an international expert on Chinese dance and performance as well as Asian performance studies more broadly. Wilcox’s first book, Revolutionary Bodies: Chinese Dance and the Socialist Legacy (University of California Press, 2018), won the 2019 de la Torre Bueno Prize© from the Dance Studies Association. Wilcox is co-editor of Corporeal Politics: Dancing East Asia (University of Michigan Press, 2020) and co-creator of the University of Michigan Chinese Dance Collection. Before joining William & Mary, Wilcox was Associate Professor of Modern Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan.