China watchers have hopes for modern dance - problems created by government cultural policy

Dance Magazine, August, 1994 by Daryl Ries

BEIJING--Almost everyone in China will tell you that the country's political system must change. From business to the arts individuals are tugging at the seams of communism. Most people feel that the Chinese government has moved neither fast enough nor far enough in expropriating successful foreign ideas. And China's artists are still recovering from the Cultural Revolution, from 1967 to 1977, when almost an entire generation of artists was annihilated for political reasons.

Today an inflexible and far-reaching political system maintains dancers onstage long past their prime, while lack of funding inhibits cultural exchange programs, and a deficiency of contemporary choreography keeps China's premiere dance companies out of stride with their Western equivalents. Comparing their situation with that of professionals in science, technology, sports, and medicine, today's dancers are anxious to progress and to adapt Western training to meet their needs.

To some extent international comparison has urged change: socialist realism and romanticism are slowly being supplanted on Chinese stages; while modern dance techniques and experimental forms of expression are being introduced. Yet today's Chinese modern dancers are more aggressive than lyrical, less interested in telling stories than in punching out messages. Thwarted by censorship and the pervasiveness of politics, they find it hard to indulge in fantasy. Outside observers hope that through continued cultural exchange and the recent establishment of two modern dance companies, in Guangzhou and Beijing, creative freedom will get a foothold.

The impending absorption of Hong Kong by China has prompted contacts among arts educators, and the Hong Kong Academy for the Performing Arts School of Dance has become the model for tertiary dance education in China. Beijing Dance Academy has gone one step further than the Hong Kong Academy by establishing its own American-style modern dance company this year. Twenty students from the new modern dance major class perform new works produced by the school's choreography department. Students learns Graham and Limon techniques along with composition, choreography, and the history and aesthetics of modern dance. Music, English, philosophy, and the history of the Chinese Revolution complete the curriculum. The small teaching staff consists of graduates of the Beijing Academy and of the Hong Kong Academy's professional diploma course.

Now Beijing, which claims twenty large ballet, folk, military, and Chinese classical dance companies, can boast of a modern dance company as well. But the government's overall resistance to change, which recently manifested itself in an overt rejection of the Western concept of human rights, still exerts old pressures on this new addition to China's cultural sphere. Sowing the seeds of change moves step by step with political reform.