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REVOLUTIONARY BODIES: CHINESE DANCE AND THE SOCIALIST LEGACY. By Emily Wilcox. Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2018. 322 pp. Paper, $32.83.
Revolutionary Bodies: Chinese Dance and the Socialist Legacy is the first monograph by Emily Wilcox. In this book, Wilcox examines the history of Chinese dance development in the People's Republic of China (PRC) from its emergence in the 1940s. This groundbreaking research highlights the practices of Chinese concert dance and provides enormous historical sources for the reader. Before the publication of Revolutionary Bodies, Chinese dance studies (in English) were shaped by socialist propaganda and Asian performance studies which focused on Chinese revolutionary ballet and the performance practices other than dance. in this text, wilcox, who conducted intensive fieldwork at the Beijing Dance Academy (Beijing Wudao Xueyuan ?????l?), shifts from her previous anthropological project to primarily historical research of Chinese dance. In this innovative scholarship, Wilcox places the development of Chinese dance at the intersection of modern Chinese history and individual dance artists' narratives. She argues that Chinese dance should be seen as a complex cultural phenomenon rather than a monolithic political production. While this research is not able to cover all the details of 70-years' Chinese dance evolution, Wilcox's book crystallizes the prolonged, massive, and diverse PRC dance history into a comprehensive assessment and provides an example for scholars who research on this topic.
In the introduction, Wilcox raises three core principles that define Chinese dance as a genre: kinesthetic nationalism, ethnic and spatial inclusiveness, and dynamic inheritance (p. 6). The concept of "kinesthetic nationalism" is expanded from the Chinese language ideas of "national form" (minzu xingshi l????), a discursive concept that relates to aesthetic form and nationality. The idea of "ethnic and spatial inclusiveness" explains the multiplicity of Chinese dance forms which developed from the diverse ethnic communities and geographic regions across China. The third principle, "dynamic inheritance," is the balancing of maintaining and innovating traditional performance forms. These three principles are important concepts underpinning Wilcox's arguments and analysis of Chinese dance throughout the book.
In chapter 1, Wilcox examines...