Bringing modern dance to China

“Why do they fall down?”

This was the question that Yang Meiqi, a Chinese dance educator, asked about the students in a modern dance class she watched in Durham, N.C., in 1986.

The person she asked was Charles Reinhart, the longtime director of the American Dance Festival, the event she was attending. His answer: “Why not?”

After a few days, Yang had another question: Could Reinhart help her start a modern dance training program in China? He could.

With funding from the Asian Cultural Council, the Rockefeller Foundation and the United States State Department, Reinhart sent American teachers to the Guangdong Dance Academy, where Yang was the principal. After four years, this program gave birth to the Guangdong Modern Dance Company, often called (not quite accurately) the first modern dance troupe in China. From this experiment much would bloom, including figures like the choreographer Shen Wei.

Reinhart, 94, has told this story many times. But not long ago, he added a coda. A little later in that summer of 1986, while Yang and Reinhart were watching a performance of the avant-garde duo Eiko and Koma, she leaned over to him and began to ask “Why do they…?” Then she stopped and answered her own question: “Why not?” The educator was already learning.

Reinhart recounted this extra anecdote during an interview for “Planting Seeds: ADF and Modern Dance in China,” an oral-history project that the festival put online in November. In video interviews in Chinese and English with bilingual captions, 16 people associated with Yang’s undertaking flesh out its history and continuing impact. Even relatively familiar parts of the story, like the origin moment, acquire fresh detail and depth.

Emily Wilcox, a professor of Chinese studies at the College of William & Mary who conducted the interviews, was careful to dispel the idea that there was no modern dance in China before the American Dance Festival intervened. In the 1930s, Wu Xiaobang studied German modern dance in Japan and brought it back to China, founding the Sky Horse Dance Art Studio. In the 1950s, Guo Mingda studied modern dance in the United States — the expressive, idiosyncratic movement languages created by the likes of Martha Graham, José Limón and Alwin Nikolais — before trying to introduce it back home.

Mai Nakanishi (front) and Lorelei Chang, the twin sisters also known as Zhang Yi and Zhang Li, who were in the program in Guangdong. Credit…American Dance Festival Archives

“But ultimately, modern dance was too connected to American capitalist bourgeois culture,” Wilcox said. Apart from Chinese forms, only ballet, supported by the Soviet Union, was favored. Especially after the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, modern dance was essentially forbidden.

This began to change in the 1980s, during the “reform and opening up” period. As early as 1980, American representatives of modern dance, including Reinhart, began to visit. In 1986, Chiang Ching, a dancer and actress who had settled in the United States, returned to China to help judge a competition. One of her fellow judges was a former classmate: Yang. Chiang arranged permission for Yang and three choreographers to attend the American Dance Festival’s International Choreographers Workshop in Durham on scholarship.

On that 1986 trip, Yang also visited New York City, sampled its dance offerings and was impressed most of all by the Graham school. Among the surprising details that she reveals in her “Planting Seeds” interview is that her interpreters happened to be the composer Tan Dun and the artist Ai Weiwei. She says that it made her cry to learn how “backward” China was and that she saw modern dance as a way to “achieve freedom.”

The idea, as both Reinhart and Yang saw it, was never to import American modern dance, but to use it “like yeast” to make a Chinese version. Some Americans wondered if such a thing was possible: a dance about individual expression taking root in a collectivist society. Yang herself characterizes what she made happen as “something unimaginable.”

“Planting Seeds” makes clear that the achievement took extraordinary determination. Yang had to cut through layers and layers of bureaucracy, getting approval from provincial councils and propaganda departments, navigating quickly shifting politics. She trailed Ralph Samuelson, then associate director of the Asian Cultural Council, around China until he agreed to fund her project. Ou Jianping, a leading Chinese scholar of modern dance, says in his interview that Yang told him she would die if she couldn’t have her company.

Yang tried to recruit the best-trained dancers. Many came from military-affiliated troupes somewhat like marching bands, and some had to audition in secret. To join the Guangdong Modern Dance Experimental Program they had to give up stable careers and higher salaries. The American teachers came for three-month visits and gave classes six days a week. The students stayed up late creating their own work.

After three years, the students graduated. Then, following a one-year internship period, the Guangdong Modern Dance Company was officially formed. In 1991, it made its American debut at the Durham festival, which kept sending teachers throughout the 1990s. Touring internationally, the company performed works by its own dancers or by Willy Tsao, a Hong Kong choreographer who served at various times as artistic director and subsidized dancer salaries with his family’s fortune. Chinese policy forced Yang to retire at 55 in 2000, but the company endured and does to this day.

Outside of China, the most famous founding member of the company is Shen Wei. Trained in both Chinese opera and Western painting, he joined the training program two years into its three-year gestation. Yang made an exception, Shen said in an interview, because his paintings impressed her as modern. He was attracted, he said, because the sudden influx of pop music had robbed Chinese opera of its audience. Immediately, he began choreographing his own works. His 1999 piece “Folding” would become the company’s first international hit.

But before that, in 1995, Shen came to New York on a scholarship with the Nikolais/Louis Dance Lab. Reinhart, learning that Shen was in the United States, commissioned him to make a work for the festival. This quickly led to more choreographic commissions, critical acclaim and the founding of Shen’s own company in New York, in 2001. A MacArthur fellowship in 2007 and his role choreographing the opening ceremonies for the Beijing Olympics in 2008 cemented his position as the biggest international success story of Yang’s experiment.

Shen Wei, left, at the Guangdong Dance Academy in 1989. Credit…Yang Meiqi

In China, though, Jin Xing is better known. In her “Planting Seeds” interview, she says that the Guangdong program opened her mind, changing her from a puppet to a thinking person. As part of the program, the American Dance Festival brought Chinese students to the United States on one-year fellowships. Jin was the third of these and the last, because she refused to go back. “I wanted to go to the U.S.,” she says. “Modern dance was the means.”

When she did return, she made a splash, becoming in 1995 the first person in China to undergo gender confirmation surgery openly. She began giving modern-dance workshops for performers and choreographers. In 1996, she helped found the Beijing Modern Dance Company, and three years later, she started Jin Xing Dance Theater, China’s first private dance troupe.

To fund the company and an international dance festival in Shanghai, Jin mortgaged her house, then capitalized on her outspokenness by becoming one of China’s top talk-show hosts. More recently, she has been selling products on TikTok. In this way, her company also endures.

Beyond Jin and Shen, Wilcox credited the Guangdong project with creating a network of people who are central to modern dance in China. “So many people trace their lineage to it,” she said.

One member of the first graduating class, Wang Mei, developed a modern-dance program at the Beijing Dance Academy, China’s foremost dance school. A later member of the Guangdong troupe, Hou Ying, was an important early dancer in Shen’s company. Returning to China in 2008, she founded a company along with another American Dance Festival program in Henan province.

Yang, after her forced retirement, started another program in Guangzhou. She helped train the dancer Duan Ni, who founded TAO Dance Theater with the choreographer Tao Ye, a former member of Jin’s company, in 2008. TAO quickly became an international success, second only to Shen.

What Yang started is still going strong. The Guangdong company, Shen said, is “still the best in China for modern dance.” For his most recent projects in China, he has hired members of the troupe.

Compared to Chinese dance and ballet, modern dance in China is, in Wilcox’s words, “still niche.” But that may be changing. In 2019 and 2020, Shen served as a judge on “Dance Smash,” a number-one-rated TV dance competition. “It was like ‘So You Think You Can Dance?’ but with professional dancers,” he said. “And the modern dancers became celebrities with millions of followers, like pop stars. They sell tickets and can fill opera houses.”

“Planting Seeds” is intended to bolster such developments. Jodee Nimerichter, the American Dance Festival’s current director, said that one goal of the oral-history project was to help nurture modern dance in China by making people aware of what has already happened.

Another goal, Nimerichter said, was to record the memories of those involved while they are still able to relate them. Yang is 79. Sarah Stackhouse, the first American teacher sent to Guangzhou, did her interview in July, 2022. She died at 87 in January 2024.

Reinhart, the oldest participant, said that both the original project and the new one gave him great happiness. “It’s a little flame of hope,” he said. “It gives us a sense of connection across cultures, and boy do we need those now.”