Staging Chinese Dancing Bodies: Beijing Dance Academy and Its Cross-Century Performances, Exchanges, and Practices

This dissertation examines a century of Chinese dancers' bodily citizenship from the 1920s to the 2020s with emphasis on accounts of dance instruction and artistic exchange at the Beijing Dance Academy through a review of historical dance photo and newspaper archives, data collection of lived experiences in artistic practice, and oral history interviews. Engaging with Dance and Performance theory and through an analysis of bodily movement practices, the research examines Chinese moving bodies in and across national borders through a process of shaping how these bodies are performed with new visibility in the People's Republic of China. As a social group, Chinese dancers residing in urban cities in China disrupted socio-spatial structures of gender through choreography, performance, and interactions during the last century. By utilizing Performance Studies as an approach, this dissertation elevates unheard historical narratives and body performance to re-stage the socialist performing body as a national performance in itself. Highlighted are the observations and voices of ordinary dancing bodies and groups in city spaces where their voices and stories are given value in the research process. How do Chinese dancers participate in national projects and embody bio-diversified movements as props to dwell in urban city spaces? What does it mean for Chinese dancers and their dancing bodies to perform the in-between spaces as a whole? Each chapter presents diverse perspectives that analyze the Chinese body as a process of performance that complicates the conventional notion of a moving body. As the first doctoral dissertation to re-stage Chinese dancing bodies at the Beijing Dance Academy through a first-person account and experience, this dissertation challenges the historical archives, bodily memories, and socialist ideologies and uplifts embodied movement research on scholarship and artistic motion in China. Shifting in and out of this performative process, the research not only aims to understand the Chinese body in a mobile form of moving through different times, spaces, and historical experiences but also serves as a translation of emerging Chinese historical dance accounts and exchanges that occurred between China and the US in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]