Rethinking the Circuits of Cold War Culture: International Dance Exchanges in Mao-Era China

Lasting from the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 to the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, the Mao era is often misunderstood as a time of “isolation” and “closing off from the world.” On the contrary, as I demonstrate in this study, Mao’s China was a place seething with new international connections and rapidly evolving visions of the world and China’s place in it. These connections, moreover, were not limited to the socialist world but stretched far beyond, engaging diverse artistic communities in countries across the political spectrum. In this talk, I examine China’s international dance exchanges and internationally themed choreographies inspired by these exchanges that took place in China during the 1950s and 1960s. From tours by Mexican modern dancers and British and Japanese ballet dancers in the 1950s to a Chinese dance drama about the US Civil Rights Movement inspired by visits of African American activists, these encounters challenge us to rethink current understandings of the circuits of cultural exchange during the Cold War, as well as China’s artists’ conceptions of and access to the wider world during this period.

Speaker:

Emily Wilcox is Margaret Hamilton Professor of Modern Languages & Literatures in Chinese Studies at William & Mary and a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow. She is the author of Revolutionary Bodies: Chinese Dance and the Socialist Legacy (University of California Press, 2018, winner of the 2019 de la Torre Bueno Prize® from the Dance Studies Association), published in Chinese in 2023 by Fudan University Press under the title 革命的身体：重新认识现当代中国舞蹈文化. Wilcox is the co-editor of Corporeal Politics: Dancing East Asia (University of Michigan Press, 2020), Inter-Asia in Motion: Dance as Method (Routledge, 2023); and Teaching Film from the People’s Republic of China (Modern Language Association, 2024). Wilcox is co-creator of the University of Michigan Chinese Dance Collection and co-editor of the book series “China Understandings Today” with the University of Michigan Press. In fall 2023, Wilcox was a member at the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. She is currently working on a new book project Performing Solidarities: Dancing the World in Mao’s China, from which she will speak today.

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