Corporeal Politics: Dancing East Asia

by Katherine Mezur (Editor), Emily Wilcox (Editor)

Overview

In Corporeal Politics, leading international scholars investigate the development of dance as a deeply meaningful and complex cultural practice across time, placing special focus on the intertwining of East Asia dance and politics and the role of dance as a medium of transcultural interaction and communication across borders. Countering common narratives of dance history that emphasize the US and Europe as centers of origin and innovation, the expansive creativity of dance artists in East Asia asserts its importance as a site of critical theorization and reflection on global artistic developments in the performing arts.

Through the lens of “corporeal politics”—the close attention to bodily acts in specific cultural contexts—each study in this book challenges existing dance and theater histories to re-investigate the performer's role in devising the politics and aesthetics of their performance, as well as the multidimensional impact of their lives and artistic works. Corporeal Politics addresses a wide range of performance styles and genres, including dances produced for the concert stage, as well as those presented in popular entertainments, private performance spaces, and street protests.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780472126941
Publisher:	University of Michigan Press
Publication date:	09/03/2020
Series:	Studies in Dance: Theories and Practices
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	372
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Katherine Mezur is Lecturer in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.
 
Emily Wilcox is Associate Professor of Modern Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
 

Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction: Toward a Critical East Asian Dance Studies (Emily Wilcox)

Part 1: Contested Genealogies

Chapter 1. Sexuality, Status, and the Female Dancer: Legacies of Imperial China (Beverly Bossler)
Chapter 2. Mei Lanfang and Modern Dance: Transcultural Innovation in Peking Opera, 1910s–1920s (Catherine Yeh)
Chapter 3. Te Conficted Monk: Choreographic Adaptations of Si Fan (Longing for the Mundane) in Japan’s and China’s New Dance Movements (Nan Ma)

Part 2: Decolonizing Migration

Chapter 4. Murayama Tomoyoshi and Dance of Modern Times: A Forerunner of the Japanese Avant-garde (Kazuko Kuniyoshi)
Chapter 5. Korean Dance Beyond Koreanness: Park Yeong-in in the German Modern Dance Scene (Okju Son)
Chapter 6. Diasporic Moves: Sinophone Epistemology in the Choreography of Dai Ailian (Emily Wilcox)
Chapter 7. Choreographing Neoliberal Marginalization: Dancing Migrant Bodies in the South Korean Musical Bballae (Laundry) (Ji Hyon (Kayla) Yuh)

Part 3: Militarization and Empire

Chapter 8. Masking Japanese Militarism as a Dream of Sino-Japanese Friendship: Miyako Odori Performances in the 1930s (Mariko Okada)
Chapter 9. Imagined Choreographies: Itō Michio’s Philippines Pageant and the Transpacifc Performance of Japanese Imperialism (Tara Rodman)
Chapter 10. Exorcism and Reclamation: Lin Lee-chen’s Jiao and the Corporeal History of the Taiwanese (Ya-ping Chen)

Part 4: Socialist Aesthetics

Chapter 11. Choe Seung-hui Between Classical and Folk: Aesthetics of National Form and Socialist Content in North Korea (Suzy Kim)
Chapter 12. Te Dilemma of Chinese Classical Dance: Traditional or Contemporary? (Dong Jiang)
Chapter 13. Negotiating Chinese Identity through a Double-Minority Voice and the Female Dancing Body: Yang Liping’s Spirit of the Peacock and Beyond (Ting-Ting Chang)

Part 5: Collective Technologies

Chapter 14. Cracking History’s Codes in Crocodile Time: The Sweat, Powder, and Glitter of Women Butoh Artists’ Collective Choreography (Katherine Mezur)
Chapter 15. Fans, Sashes, and Jesus: Evangelical Activism and Anti-LGBTQ Performance in South Korea (Soo Ryon Yoon)
Chapter 16. Choreographing Digital Performance in Twenty-First-Century Taiwan: Huang Yi & KUKA (Yatin Lin)

Coda: To Dance East Asia (Katherine Mezur)

Digital materials related to this title can be found on the Fulcrum platform via the following citable URL https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11521701 

What People are Saying About This

Rosemary Candelario

“Makes significant contributions to dance studies by adding in-depth studies of choreographers, dance forms, and dancers largely missing from the Anglophone literature. It makes significant contributions to Asian and area studies with its close attention to bodies and movement and the knowledge produced by both. Simply put, there is nothing else like this book available.”
—Rosemary Candelario, Texas Woman’s University

Editorial Reviews

"Essential."
—CHOICE

CHOICE

"Composed of sixteen chapters contained by an introduction and a coda, this anthology emerges from the growing field of East Asian dance research, a previously underrepresented area in Anglophone academia... Drawing both from critical area studies (East Asia) and critical dance studies, Corporeal Politics stresses the politics of East Asian dance." - Dance Chronicle

Dance Chronicle

Corporeal Politics makes significant contributions to dance studies by adding in-depth studies of choreographers, dance forms, and dancers largely missing from the Anglophone literature… [and] to Asian and area studies with its close attention to bodies and movement and the knowledge produced by both. Simply put, there is nothing else like this book available.”
—Rosemary Candelario, Texas Woman’s University
 

From the Publisher

"Corporeal Politics breaks new ground in East Asian Dance Studies through its dual contribution to Dance Studies and East Asian Studies. It should be read by anyone interested in dance history, the East Asian region, its rich transregional and transnational cultural histories, and the politics of dance in East Asia and throughout the world."
—International Quarterly for Asian Studies

International Quarterly for Asian Studies - Liang Luo

"Rather than only offering a linear perspective, the book paves a diverse path for readers to approach East Asian dance performances with a wide-angle lens. ...Overall, Corporeal Politics: Dancing East Asia propels many future conversations and concepts that intersect between East Asia and the West."
—Asian Theatre Journal

Asian Theatre Journal

"The essays in Corporeal Politics are doing important work by "challenging common patterns of thinking and understanding of dance practices in and from East Asia" (331). More importantly, but troubling the generally accepted historical narrative of critical dance studies it is opening new avenues and introducing new methodologies for future research into dance in and from East Asia."
—Inter-Asia Studies

Inter-Asia Studies - Adrianna DiRisio

"Corporeal Politics: Dancing East Asia adds great insight and stokes the growing interest in dance in this region. For those interested in dance and East Asian studies, this book is an especially welcome arrival. Captivating and theoretically useful, the chapters correct the lens through which East Asian dance artists and their choreographies have been viewed while bringing attention to current power dynamics and issues that artists today are facing." - Choreographic Practices

Choreographic Practices

"While all the analyzes gathered in it comprehend inner and trans-Asian logics and temporal structuring, this collective project makes a relevant contribution to deepening the field of East Asian dance research, which is to be understood as part of global dance research...In its cross-regional claim, which the book generously reproduces as a dialogue of different characters, periods and genres, it offers the reader parallels and insights into happily unexpected encounters." - rezens.tfm

rezens.tfm - Freda Fiala

"A deft and uncluttered collection of diverse regional views of East Asia through the deployment of scholarly writing that is clear, concise, and directive." —Dance Research Journal

Dance Research Journal - Angeline Young