Overview

When Words are Inadequate is a transnational history of modern dance written from and beyond the perspective of China. Author Nan Ma extends the horizon of China studies by rewriting the cultural history of modern China from a bodily movement-based perspective through the lens of dance modernism. The book examines the careers and choreographies of four Chinese modern dance pioneers-Yu Rongling, Wu Xiaobang, Dai Ailian, and Guo Mingda-and their connections to canonical Western counterparts, including Isadora Duncan, Mary Wigman, Rudolf von Laban, and Alwin Nikolais. Tracing these Chinese pioneers' varied experiences in Paris, Tokyo, Trinidad, London, New York, and China's metropolises and borderlands, the book shows how their contributions adapted and reimagined the legacies of early Euro-American modern dance. In doing so, When Words are Inadequate reinserts China into the multi-centered, transnational network of artistic exchange that fostered the global rise of modern dance, further complicating the binary conceptions of center and periphery and East and West. By exploring the relationships between performance and representation, choreography and politics, and nation-building and global modernism, it situates modern dance within an intermedial circuit of literary and artistic forms, demonstrating how modern dance provided a kinesthetic alternative and complement to other sibling arts in participating in China's successive revolutions, reforms, wars, and political movements.

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9780197575314

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Reviews

This superb and long-awaited book authoritatively locates the development of early Chinese modern dance in global dance history. The well-selected case studies focus on four of the most important figures in modern dance in twentieth-century China. Nan Ma's insightful analysis and vivid storytelling brings these individuals and their border-crossing artistic worlds to life and theorizes new models for understanding transnational interaction and circulation in modernist cultures. * Emily Wilcox, author of Revolutionary Bodies: Chinese Dance and the Socialist Legacy * This fascinating book rewrites the cultural history of modern dance and modern China. It brings to life the captivating transnational and transcultural careers of Chinese modern dance pioneers and their connections to canonical Western counterparts. Ma writes with grace and ease, and deeply engages with a wide range of interdisciplinary scholarship in refreshingly rigorous, theoretically reflexive ways. A must read for anyone interested in modern dance and modern Chinese culture. * Liang Luo, author of The Avant-Garde and the Popular in Modern China * Nan Ma's When Words are Inadequate offers a groundbreaking view of global dance modernism in the 20th century by focusing on key dance artists and ensembles based in China as nodes and routes of international artistic exchanges between China and the West. Ma's study seeks to re-write two histories, one about the global dissemination of modern dance within Chinese and Asian contexts, and another about the cultural history of modern China as seen through dancing bodies. Offering a transnational, transcultural, and intermedial account of dance modernism, When Words are Inadequate is a pivotal and original contribution to dance studies. * Rebekah J. Kowal, author of Dancing the World Smaller: Staging Globalism in Mid-Century America *

Author Information

Nan Ma is Associate Professor of East Asian Studies at Dickinson College. She conducts research on modern Chinese literature, film, visual culture, and dance and performance studies and has published articles on Chinese modern dance, ballet and film in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture (MCLC), China Perspectives, and the Journal of Beijing Dance Academy.

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