Migrant Choreographies: Dancing across China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Europe

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

Why dance now? Given the centrality of immigration in our contemporary global crisis of forced and illegal migration, this panel focuses on instances of dance structures in migration in East Asian contexts of shifting and uncertain national identities. Asian dance artists and dance practices have always moved across time, space, borders, empires, and nation states, transmitting and transforming their art across civilizations and bringing "national," "foreign," "subversive," and "dissident" into question. The significance of the migration of dance is not necessarily evoked through particular movement of bodies as the result of cultural migration but rather in the disintegration and reorganization of new structures of the dance as an aesthetic system. The discipline of dance as an aesthetic system offers unique tools and theories to analyze issues concerning migration. Each paper analyzes how specific dance forms, whether traditional, popular, or contemporary, offer direct connections to migration's issues of fragmented identities, post-migration isolation, and hybrid nationalities. These dance-centered studies require our attention to shift to physical and sensuous modes of analysis, where dance systems disintegrate and reorganize through their aesthetic structures. These presentations demonstrate the dynamism of dance cultures that fly in the face of rigid and bound notions of nation, state, and culture. The presentations include Korean/German interactions, Chinese/Japanese interventions, Chinese/Euro-American exchanges, and Japanese/European re-inventions, which examine the inner and outer politics of the dance and dancers, where choreography and technique, in their processes of "localization," reveal the power of dance systems.

Area of Study

• Interarea-Border Crossing

Session Organizer

• Katherine Mezur, Keio University

Chair

• Emily Wilcox, University of Michigan

Individual Presentations

• Korean Dance beyond Koreanness: Park Yeong-in and Lim Jee-ae in the German Dance Scene - Okju Son, Chung-Ang University

• Faith vs. Desire: Si fan in the Chinese and Japanese “New Dance” Movements, 1920s-1940s - Nan Ma, Dickinson College

• Dancing Pictures: “Mei Lanfang’s ‘The Goddess Spreads Flowers’ and the Inherent Ambiguity of Modernism - Catherine Vance Yeh, Boston University

• Glitter, Powder, and Sweat: Furukawa Anzu's Butoh Tanz Theater, from Tokyo to Berlin to Helsinki - Katherine Mezur, Keio University

Discussant

• Katherine Mezur, Keio University