"By that time, Duncan had commenced her experiment on "Greek dance" (later known as early modern dance), often performing in the semi-private salons of her patrons, a close circle of wealthy noble American Grecophile expatriates. Though yet to make a name for her dance, Duncan had already become a controversial figure in the Parisian upper-class society, as she danced in ancient Greek-style tunic that highlighted "her lightly-clad, bare-limbed female body." Sometime around 1902, Yu Rongling took a major role, as a certain "goddess" from Greek mythology, in one of Duncan's Greek dramatic dances performed either publicly or semi-publicly in Paris. A teenaged girl from the Manchu court of the Qing Empire-characteristically depicted by the Western press as backward, conservative, and xenophobic-danced gracefully as a Greek goddess, barefoot and thinly-clad, in front of a Parisian upper-class audience. This dancing cosmopolitan figure, characterized by temporal, racial, and geo-cultural hybridity, could be norm-defying for the audience at the turn of the century who had just witnessed the end of the Victorian era. Note that about a mere year earlier, when Duncan first performed in Parisian salons, her solo body and simple tunic shocked her unprepared elite audiences "accustomed to very different styles of dance and performance" (such as Anna Pavlova's classical ballet and Loèie Fuller's skirt dance), let alone the broader audiences at high art theaters"--
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.
