We are excited that the debut of Notes from Asia Library comes at a time of great activity for us in terms of initiatives on which we are partnering with the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies.
“Chinese Dance: National Movements in a Revolutionary Age, 1945-1965” is on view in the Hatcher Library Gallery until May 15. This exhibit introduces modern Chinese dance history through issues of ethnicity, nation, gender, and class, telling the stories of individual dancers and choreographers and exploring the relationships among dance, popular media, and global exchange. The materials on view include photographs, performance programs, archival materials, books, and videos, all of which are part of the Asia Library’s Chinese dance history research collection, the largest of its kind in North America.
On Thursday, April 6, at 7 PM in the gallery, the exhibit’s curators, Emily Wilcox, Asian Languages and Cultures, and Liangyu Fu, Asia Library, will introduce the collaborative process behind its creation. Their talk is part of the U-M Bicentennial event Feast of Ideas. Also in the gallery, on April 7 and 8, there will be a conference, “Dancing East Asia: Critical Choreographies and their Corporeal Politics,” featuring invited scholars from Asia, Europe, and North America who will present new research on dance in the East Asian region, including mainland China, Japan, North and South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.
We hope you can join us for one or more of these activities. If you can’t, or even if you can, rest assured that part of our Chinese dance collection can also be seen online. Pioneers of Chinese Dance is a collection of digital photographs intended to make the 20th century history of Chinese dance accessible to researchers from all over.