Oral History Project Considers Impact of Bringing Modern Dance to China

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.