In this stark statement, Marx announces game over for the commons. After four hundred years of land enclosures and privatization, the European working class had lost not only physical access to common lands, but also the “very memory” of the commons as a basic right and co-existential truth. He thus draws a distinction between the commons as a physical site and the sensibility associated with its collective use—call it commons-sense. To lose the physical commons is to incite struggle—as occurred across centuries of peasant revolt in Europe. But to lose commons-sense, Marx implies, is to eclipse from the imagination the very possibility of a collective way of organizing our lives.

This essay seeks to limn the vulnerabilities of partnering in competitive ballroom dancing. It argues that for racialized and gendered subjects who fall beyond dancesport’s normative range of aesthetic legibility, lead and follow becomes an especially fraught—yet potentially reparative—mode of relation. It brings sustained ethnographic focus to the Asian American amateur dancesport community in New York City, which not only represents a growing presence in a predominantly white industry, but unsettles its racially charged conventions of skill, prestige, beauty, and belonging. From this position, it maps a field of vulnerable relations: between Asian American amateurs and the dancesport industry, in which they remain largely marginal and illegible figures, but also between Asian American male leads and female follows. Building on partner dance scholarship that complicates assumptions about lead and follow as a one-way flow of power, it treats the embodied mechanics of dancesport partnering as a dialogic practice of mutual vulnerability, in which both dancers effectively lead and follow each other. It also attends to the aesthetic, pedagogical, and social rules that put pressure on competitive couples—demanding resilience, even detachment, at the expense of that mutual vulnerability. In parsing what is contradictory, even compromising, about Asian American dancesport practice, this essay theorizes lead and follow as a mode of relation that involves opening ourselves up, and remaining open, to risk—but also, to the possibility of exquisite moments that can only be co-created.

This article explores the multifaceted interpretations of “Chinese dance” — “中国舞蹈” (zhōngguó wǔdǎo, Dance in China) and “中国舞” (zhōngguówǔ, China’s dance)— across historical periods and cultural contexts in Chinese dance criticism in mainland China. To understand and interpret the “Chineseness” embodied in what is referred to as “Chinese dance,” it is essential to recognize that the concept and characteristics of “Chinese dance” are not fixed, but rather dynamic and closely connected to history, aesthetics, and cultural contexts. The multiplicity and complexity of “Chinese dance” possess a generative quality, continually evolving among Chinese people, both collectively and individually, and their relationship with dance. This article aims to address the concepts of Chinese dance— “中国舞蹈” (“zhōngguó wǔdǎo”) and “中国舞” (zhōngguówǔ)—in Chinese-language dance studies. Both — “中国舞蹈” (“zhōngguó wǔdǎo”) and “中国舞” (zhōngguówǔ) are translated as “Chinese dance” in English, yet they hold distinct meanings in Chinese. This problem of the loss of meaning and generalization of culture in a cross-cultural context has not been addressed yet. This article shows how the plurality of “Chinese dance” as both “zhōngguó wǔdǎo” and “zhōngguówǔ” mobilizes the embodied coexistence of “traditional China,” “modern and contemporary China,” “red China,” and “global China” in contemporary “open China.” This nuanced coexistence highlights the complexities of Chinese identity within both global and national landscapes, offering audiences a dynamic and multidimensional experience.

This paper considers the source material of the construction of frontier dance in the Chinese Civil War. It argues that the choreography of frontier dance derives from a combination and reorganisation of many competing elements, including local, western and ethnographic traditions. Source material allied to a particular approach to choreography defines the outlook, nature and boundaries of frontier dance. The narrative of the adaption of frontier dance demonstrated the dynamic of Chineseness and the construction of a hierarchical multiethnic nationhood. The duet arrangement in Western ballroom dances corresponds with a Han imagining of a romanticised frontier synonymous with free love, exerting an important physical influence on the choreography of frontier dance. Existing and traditional ethnographies, redolent of a sexualized imagining of a frontier, have become important sources in the encoding of frontier dance. The creative choreography of frontier dance complicates our understanding of the mobility and transformation of dance in modern China.

Every year, beginning on Memorial Day, a group of 35 to 851 activists walk from Sásabe, Mexico to Tucson, Arizona, USA over eight days, through the arid, rugged terrain of the Sonoran Desert. They walk through soaring desert temperatures, along dirt roads and highways, enduring hot spots, blisters, and leg cramps, as shade gradually disappears with little to block the rising sun. At night, walkers sleep in tents or on tarps. Participants carry small white crosses emblazoned with the names and ages at death of migrants who perished while trying to complete a perilous journey undetected. Some are labeled “Deconocido/a” (Unknown) to memorialize someone whose remains have not yet been identified. Periodically, over the course of each day’s journey, participants conduct a role call in honor of the dead, with each walker reciting the name of the person they commemorate as the group responds with the word “¡Presente!” to “indicate that the life and death of the migrant whose name was read is recognized and witnessed” (Mankel 2021: 104). Participants undertake this journey to highlight the scale of death in the desert and its individual ramifications.2

After seeing the ballet Nocturne (1909) in 1952, Ai Qing (1910-1996), one of the pioneers of Chinese modern poetry, wrote a poem praising the celebrated Soviet ballerina Galina Ulanova for her performance in Les Sylphides (1909).1 His depiction of Ulanova as “cloud,” “wind,” “moonlight,” and “goddess” visualizes the ethereal and exalted feminine ballet body, reflecting Chinese intellectuals’ early admiration for the art of ballet in the nascent People’s Republic of China (PRC). During China’s Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), however, representations of femininity onstage shifted. Female soldier characters who are short-haired, dressed in navy military uniforms, and armed with rifles dominated the dance stage of China in revolutionary ballet. Since the 1980s, the delicate, fairy-like ballerina clad in a tutu has returned to the Chinese stage as the mainstream ballet ideal, aligning with the state’s economic reforms and its strategy of political globalization in postsocialist China.2 With the increasing cultural exchange between Chinese and European/American dancers and choreographers, dance practitioners in China see ballet as a universal, homogenous language. Classical ballet training is often framed as a “scientific and practical course” that conveys a “common, unified, monistic” aesthetic (Meng 2004, 2).

Nawa Kōhei’s gallery shows mounted under the title Vessel (2016-19) used techniques of bodily distortion to explore what Nawa called “the idea of ‘liquefying’ and ‘dissolving’” the human body as “represented by the distinctive ‘headless’ pose”—or what the Surrealist Georges Bataille christened in 1936 “the acéphale” (Nawa et al. Arario; Jalet et al. 2019; Woo-hyun 2019). Christine Chiu’s review of the gallery exhibition described how:

From 1912 to 1949, the Republic of China (ROC) underwent a profound period of transformation and revitalization. Following the collapse of the Qing Dynasty in 1912, the ROC era was characterized by significant social changes, including the emergence of new social classes, the expansion of modern education, and widespread political mobilization (Fairbank and Goldman 2006). Among these changes, the status of Chinese women saw remarkable progress. Because Chinese women were no longer confined to being merely the product and property of their families (Fairbank and Goldman 2006), they began to experience newfound freedoms. This included greater participation in the workforce, increased access to education, and enhanced autonomy in choosing their life partners. As traditional norms were challenged and new opportunities for social and economic participation emerged, these shifts marked a pivotal moment in the modernization of Chinese society. As Diana Lary highlights, this era represented a crucial shift towards gender equality and the broader renaissance of China within its society (Lary 2007). A key moment in this transformation was the May Fourth Movement of 1919, which called for the rejection of traditional Confucian values in favor of modernization, alongside political, social, and cultural reforms, including the advancement of women’s rights. A prominent platform for these ideals was New Youth (新青年), a journal founded by Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao, which championed Marxism, science, democracy, and women’s emancipation. Influential female political figures, such as Soong Ching-ling, the wife of Sun Yat-sen, utilized their power to advocate for gender equality and women’s education. These cultural and political shifts gave rise to the figure of the “New Woman” (新女性), symbolizing empowerment, independence, and modernity.

This article provides a close analysis of Dance on Hands (《掌上舞》, Zhangshang wu), performed by the Chinese popular gewu tuan (song and dance troupe) Meihua shaonü gewu tuan (梅花少女歌舞团, Plum Blossom Girls’ Song and Dance Troupe). In this article, I analyze twelve photographs of Dance on Hands alongside literary descriptions of the Han Dynasty empress Zhao Feiyan’s dance of the same name. Drawing on newspaper reports from the 1930s and 1940s, as well as intersecting secondary sources on literature, theater, and physical culture of the period, I situate Dance on Hands within China’s colonial modern context. I argue that the performance negotiates a dynamic interplay between tradition and modernity, as well as Chinese and Western femininity, while also traversing racialized, classed, and gendered boundaries between the popular and the avant-garde.