Q: Professor Miao, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

I am currently the first and the only dancer from the People’s Republic of China who has received a Ph.D. in critical dance studies in the U.S. I am committed to improving cross-cultural communications between the U.S. and China through scholarly and artistic practices of dance.

I am both a practitioner and dance scholar. I graduated from the Beijing Dance Academy (BDA), China’s premier dance conservatory, where I was first trained professionally in Chinese classical and folk dance, and later modern dance. This embracement of different dance cultures allows me to question deeply the meaning of identity and to discuss that in my artistic and scholarly works.

When I was pursuing my doctoral degree at UCLA, I continued my artistic research alongside my scholarly research. I believe I'll continue this artist/scholar trajectory, being who I am and always true to myself.

Q: How did you get into dance?

My mom sent me to dance classes because I didn’t eat much, and she assumed that I needed more exercise to be healthier. So that's how I started dancing.

I started dance training at the age of five in our provincial song and dance troupe affiliated school. It is different from the U.S., where most people are trained in private studios. Classical and folk dance served as the base of my initial training.

My dad used to be a professional erhu (二胡） player for over 20 years in the provincial song and dance troupe. So he had been in that artistic world for a long time and supported me to continue dancing at the BDA. The BDA equipped me with the knowledge, both physically and mentally, about dance and contributed to my qualification to pursue a Ph.D. in the U.S.

Q: Was there a moment you wanted to give it up and try to do something else?

Haha. I never thought of that. Dance represents where home is. I cannot go away from it. I am very happy that earning a Ph.D. expands the ways in which I connect to dance.

Q: Your dissertation “Dancing Cross-cultural Misunderstandings: The American Dance Festival in China’s Reform Era” explores a group of teachers from American Dance Festival (ADF) coming to Guangdong (Canton) to train modern dancers in the late 1980s. Can you elaborate on it?

I'm always interested in the 1980s. It's the first decade of China’s Reform Era after the Cultural Revolution. Under the policy of “Reform and Opening Up” (1978), China opened its door to the West and witnessed an influx of Western modern culture. I remember looking at the photographs of my parents at that time. They were dressed in a fashionable way with curly hair and sunglasses. My mom was wearing high heel shoes and jeans. Apparently that signals a contrast to their previous lives.

Guangdong Modern Dance Experimental Program is a milestone in the history of Chinese modern dance, ending up with the PRC’s first professional modern dance company--Guangdong Modern Dance Company(广东现代舞团)--in 1992.

This research is also personal. As I told you I was trained in Chinese classical and folk dance, and then switched to modern dance. I believe that students in the Guangdong program felt the same contrast of corporeal culture as I did, even in a stronger way. Also, this project helps me to stand for my position as an outside insider in both the US and China.

Old pictures showing teachers from American Dance Festival (ADF) training Chinese dancers. Courtesy: Fangfei Miao

Q: What did you find?

I discovered that the process of corporeal exchange was not smooth at all, but always frictional. American teachers and Chinese students constantly talked across each other. Both sides were using their own understandings of dance to frame each other’s dance culture.

For example, I choose a dance-centered, corporeality-driven inquiry lens of kinesthesia, which in general means how one experiences movements of the body. A person’s kinesthetic experiences in dancing are not spontaneous and random for the moment, but rather, culturally and historically constructed. I discovered that American modern dance highlighted a gravity-related kinesthetic value, in which the body articulates particular muscular senses to exhibit the effect of gravity and to generate given movement quality.

In contrast, Chinese classical and folk dance have developed a picture-oriented kinesthetic value that the body constantly dissolves into and transitions from codified gestures. When the American bodies and Chinese bodies moved together, the two kinesthetic values converged in the studio and demonstrated divergent orientations of space, articulations of speed, and control of muscular energy. Thus contrasting cultural histories of the body merged and collided as people tried to reconcile the incompatible kinesthetic experiences. Such incompatibility transformed into crossing-over conversations and filled the entire exchange process with recurrent mutual misunderstandings. Therefore, by showing how recurrent missteps deeply marked the exchange, I present a sensational physical experience of globalization that centers on perplexity and awkwardness.

Q: Why did they want to be modern dancers in the first place?

In the 1980s, Guangzhou (the capital of Guangdong Province) was such an exciting place as the forerunner of China’s cultural opening to the Western world. Most of the twenty Chinese students came from Northern China. Between the ages of 18 to 22, they believed that being a modern dancer in Guangzhou could bring a new life.

Under the guidance of ADF teachers, Chinese students created two new genres of Chinese modern dance that differed from the previous realism style. Some of the students later became internationally acclaimed artists—Shen Wei, Jin Xing, and Wang Mei.

Q: What do you think about K-pop and why it's so popular?

A lot of scholars are writing about K-pop, such as professor Suk-Young Kim from UCLA, and I admire her works.

I am very interested in the question of how Hip-hop, as an American “folk” culture, traveled to South Korea and experienced local transformation into K-pop, and then traveled back to the rest of the world. This echoes my research because I also study the travel of dance across national and ethnic borderlines. I am obsessed with the idea that dance is constantly shifting and unstable. It speaks a lot to globalization.

Q:  How do you define Chinese dance? And what is Chinese dance, if any?

I hesitate to use the term “Chinese dance” and instead always address dance in China with specific terms of Chinese classical dance, Chinese folk dance, and Chinese modern dance to account for the scholarly shift in China. The concept “Chinese dance” historicizes the dualistic frame of “self” as Chinese dance and “other” as ballet during PRC’s early socialist period and the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). However, since the 1980s, impacted by the influx of capitalist arts, Chinese dance scholarships have critically revealed the complexity of their cultural self, manifested in their deployment of more precise terms to represent certain genre and the institutional changes in the early 1980s that Chinese dance major split into Chinese classical dance major and Chinese folk dance major in leading dance institutions. People in the dance world of China gradually abandoned the ambivalent “Chinese dance” in the following years to avoid confusion.

The other issue is the multiple meanings of “Chinese” in English, which can mean the country of PRC, ethnicity, language, or shared culture. Does “Chinese dance” mean PRC’s dance or worldwide dance of the ethnic people who define themselves as Chinese? Is there a “Chinese dance”? Or, is there an “American dance”?

Q: Which dance do you think matches your personality?

Well, if I probe into it, dance does show a kind of personality. I think the performances that I constantly stage, or hybrid dance if I have to name it, best shows who I am. I always seek conversations between philosophies of traditional Chinese performing arts and postmodern/ avant-garde concepts in my work, incorporating modern dance, Chinese classical and folk dance, Tai Chi, vocal text, pedestrian movement, etc. The cross-cultural conversational performance exhibits my personality as someone who likes to walk on the edges.

-Interview and edit by Debing Su.

Q&A with Fangfei Miao