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China is definitely a dancing country.
About six thousands professional dancers live in Beijing
alone, mostly absorbed into government supported ballet
companies, or the so-called song and dance troupes featuring
various folk dances, attached to working units (danwei)
of government departments.
Switch on your television, and you will
easily find big productions of dance entertainment, albeit
in their more popular forms. Just go to any of Beijing's
big theaters -- with 1,000 to 3,000-seat capacities --
and you can easily find the Swan Lake ballet being performed
by three different companies, from China and from abroad,
in just a single month.
Zhang Yimou's Raise the Red Lantern was
adapted into a ballet in 2001, with the National Ballet
of China doing a big production. The show has toured all
over the world and is still occasionally staged in China's
big cities.
But for all these dance productions,
only very few shed light on contemporary dance. This art
form may not be as evident as China's other visual arts,
but it is certainly finding its own niche in the sphere
of world contemporary expression. Its story, too, unravels
a unique slice of the country's post socialist culture.
Unlike the visual arts that were officially
revived soon after the dusk of the Cultural Revolution
back in 1977; contemporary dance in China had to wait
another decade to reemerge. The artistic output of Chinese
artists -- paintings, installations -- sold like hot cakes
at international auctions and was pursued by many of the
world's galleries during the 1980s. However, contemporary
dance, like rock and roll music, remained suppressed.
But in 1987, Yang Meiqi, then the principal
of Guangdong Dance School, came back from a cultural visit
to the U.S and started a modern dance class in the school
she led.
Now considered as the mother of contemporary
dance in China, Yang Meiqi managed to get the official
permissions necessary to open the first classes in modern
dance partly because she did it in Guangzhou - a coastal
city, among the first few that tasted the Open Policy
launched by Deng Xiao Ping - China's post-Mao leader.
Since its inception, the School has attracted
a legion of Chinese dancers, and many of its graduates
are now the key artists of contemporary dance, at home
and abroad. Among them are Jin Xing, arguably the most
famous Chinese dance artist who runs her company from
Shanghai, and the younger Shen Wei, who founded his own
troupe in New York. Both now are thriving as international
artists.
"Back in 1987 we recruited professional
dancers -- be they from classical ballet or folk dance
backgrounds. So, it was not easy to teach a new vocabulary
of dancing to these already trained bodies," recalled
Yang Meiqi of Guangdong's first class.
She invited many international dance
tutors and teachers from the U.S. and other countries
to teach her students various Western techniques, mostly
imported from the tradition of American modern/contemporary
dance: Graham, Limon, Cunningham, in addition to whatever
they had already studied for years.
By then, China was already accustomed
to certain aesthetics: the beautiful body of ballerina,
and the great techniques of both ballet and Beijing Opera
acrobatics. Thus introducing a new way of bodily expression
as elusive as contemporary dance was truly a challenge.
There is also a familiar tradition of
storytelling in both dance genres: the linear narrative
of ballet repertoires or the tragedies of Beijing Opera.
Hence, a non-linear, often abstract story presented in
the form of contemporary choreography is deemed to be
unintelligible, not to mention overshadowed by official
suspicion of its potential for freedom of expression and
subversion.
"Contemporary dance is like a Chinese
unicorn," said Xiao Xiang Rong, a young choreographer,
referring to an animal character of old Chinese legend
that has a strange body and scarred skin. Joining the
first class of modern dance at the Beijing Dance Academy
back in 1994, Xiao teaches non-contemporary dance at the
Beijing Normal University whilst practicing the art he
loves in his spare time, mainly through his small Beijing-based
Kong Kong Dance Company.
Guangdong Modern Dance Company
The opening of the school created a way
for Yang Meiqi to start the first, professional contemporary
dance company in China: the Guangdong Modern Dance Company.
Housing several young, talented choreographers and a group
of well-trained dancers, the Company represented China
to the international world.
They were toured all over the world,
getting rave reviews, including in Indonesia when they
performed at the Third Arts Summit back in 2001, in Jakarta.
Meanwhile, at home, contemporary dance
is still a marginal, peripheral desire -- with Guangdong
remains the only contemporary dance group supported by
the local government, whilst others try their best to
make the best out of personal donation and individual
commitment. Most of contemporary dance artists in China
have another full-time jobs, whilst practicing their art
in their free time.
Things are bound to change, though. Last
year, the Beijing Modern Dance Company (BMDC), first founded
by Jin Xing who left the company in 1999 pointing at government
censorship as the main cause, was included in the state's
official visit to Latin America.
Now led by choreographer Willy Tsao,
a successful Hong Kong choreographer, who also played
a big role in supporting the arts on the Mainland since
the early years of the Guangdong Modern Dance Company,
BMDC was also the initiator of the only international
festival of contemporary dance in the country.
The new millennium is a hopeful time
for contemporary dance in China. Wen Hui, founder of Living
Dance Studio, the first independent contemporary dance
company in China, just opened a space in Beijing last
year where she welcomed everybody for dance or theater
workshops. This would have been unthinkable even just
a year before.
However, "the change is way too
slow. It's been 17 years (since the inception of Guangdong
Modern Dance School). But it's up to them now, the young
generation," said Yang Meiqi, gazing at fresh graduates
of the Beijing Modern Dance Academy that she trained in
Guangzhou for four years.
Most of them now work for established
choreographers (such as Jin Xing) or return to their danwei
in their hometowns. All of them have mastered great dance
techniques, not only from the West, but also those rooted
in Chinese tradition such as tai chi. Some of them show
a striking talent for choreography, and it is only a matter
of time for these youngsters to find a way of channeling
their creative energies, in China or beyond.
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