Rethinking the Circuits of Cold War Dance: Mestizo Modernisms in 1957 China
Emily Wilcox (Chinese Studies, College of William & Mary)
Contributing to the transnational turn in Asian dance studies, this talk reconsiders conventional understandings of Cold War dance history and histories of dance in the socialist world by looking at the first visit of dancers from Latin America to the People’s Republic of China. In 1957, two groups of dancers from Mexico toured China: the first included two dancers, Josefina Lavalle and Óscar Puente; the second included thirty-eight dancers led by Guillermina Bravo and Elena Noriega. Many aspects of this first encounter between Chinese and Mexican dancers on Chinese soil are surprising and thought-provoking.
Perhaps most unexpected, however, is that the Mexican dancers who visited China were not ballet dancers, nor were they members of Amalia Hernández’s famed Ballet Folklórico, the two styles most often associated with dance in the socialist world during this time. Rather, they were modern dancers mentored by choreographers from the United States.
In this talk, Wilcox excavates Chinese-language records to provide the first detailed scholarly account of these two tours. Engaging with the secondary scholarship on Mexican dance history, Wilcox examines the tours through the lens of Jose Luis Reynoso’s concept of “embodied mestizo modernisms,” considering the role of linguistic translation and transnational leftist dance networks in mediating Mexican dance to Chinese audiences.
About the speaker:
Emily Wilcox is Margaret Hamilton Professor of Chinese Studies at William & Mary and a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow in Dance Studies. She is the author, co-editor, or translator of six books: Revolutionary Bodies: Chinese Dance and the Socialist Legacy (winner of the 2019 DSA de la Torre Bueno Award) and its Chinese translation; Corporeal Politics: Dancing East Asia; Inter-Asia in Motion: Dance as Method; Teaching Film from the People’s Republic of China; and Creating With Roots: Contemporary Chinese National Folk Dance Choreography.
She is co-creator of the University of Michigan Chinese Dance Collection and director of the oral history project Planting Seeds: ADF and Modern Dance in China.