Title: Cold War Legacies: American Illiteracy of the Postcolonial Aesthetics of Spectacle in Chinese Dance Dramas

Journal: Dance Research Journal

 

Abstract: In January 2016, New York Times dance critic Brian Seibert, panned the Chinese dance drama Dragon Boat Racing, as well as the entire genre of the Chinese dance drama. I argue he misunderstood the aesthetic of spectacle, which the choreographers strategically deployed as an assertion of modernity and an attempt to defy the post-colonial world order’s indexing of Chinese culture to the temporal past. Seibert’s cultural illiteracy is part of broader problems with American dance criticism, including the continuation of Cold War logics of aesthetic hierarchy. The use of spectacle in Chinese dance dramas meets the wrath of American aesthetic gatekeepers because it invokes unexamined prejudices against communism and double violates Orientalist expectations of East Asian aesthetics as quiet, still, and spiritual, and that dances of Others should be authentic unaltered “raw” materials. This is a neo-colonial move that relegates Chinese dance dramas to lower rungs of global aesthetic caste.

 

Bio: Alissa Elegant is a PhD candidate in dance studies at Ohio State University who researches dances of China and the Chinese diaspora focusing on circulation, reception and qiye (enterprise) dance. She earned an MFA in Choreography from Temple University and spent a year studying at Minzu University of China on a Fulbright. She broadens ideas of livelihood in dance in her dissertation, which examines the practice and performance of amateur and professional dance in workplaces of the People's Republic of China's railway industry. Her work has been recognized by the Dance Studies Association’s Selma Jeanne Cohen Award.