Editor's Note

• Published in: Dance research journal 2022-04, Vol.54 (1), p.1-4
• Main Author: George-Graves, Nadine
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Chinese languages; Cultural instruction; History; Imagery; Mindfulness; Modern dance; Pedagogy; White people; Workshops
• ISSN: 0149-7677; 1940-509X
• DOI: 10.1017/S0149767722000146

[...]she cites Hanna making the same argument as the presenter in my training program, an argument that many of us still hear (or worse, believe). After a thorough accounting of these mechanisms, Drury returns to Hanna's selective origins story to make several arguments, including the importance of corporeal abject “death” as well as fulfilling “life” as a philosophical concept in holistic movement practice; the acts of justification for the exclusion of non-white people in somatic lineages; the positioning of facile binaries between “West” and “East” (and erasure of the Global South, indigenous cultures of colonized territories, and the African continent); and the connections between somatics and social death, afro-pessimism, Black accelerationism, and Afrofuturism. In “Mis-step as Global Encounter: The American Dance Festival in Reform Era China,” Fangfei Miao carefully charges us to go beyond a facile interpretation of encounters between US-based modern dance instructors and Chinese dancers in the four-year US-China dance exchange project Guangdong Modern Dance Experimental Program that occurred as part of China's Reform Era cultural policies from 1987 to 1991. Disconnects around teaching “technique” using kinesthetic imagery and sensations of, for example, “weight” illustrate assumptions about how bodies move that are actually more of a result of training than perhaps assumed and not as easy to translate to bodies trained in another dance culture.