The Modernisation Of Ancient Dance And The Import Of Western Dance To The East

The composition of "the history of dance" has always been accenting "the independent dance as a form of performing art". When it comes to the historical facts of "dance" in the period of late Qing and early Republic of China, however, such a standing may find trouble in locating itself or even any trace of "dance". Actually, it is quite evident in loads of concurrent descriptions of dances that many of the "dances" presented in the period of late Qing and early Republic of China were close to the presently defined "dances" (an art form taking rhythmic actions as main displaying tools that expresses human lives, thoughts and feelings) in neither denotation nor connotation, despited their shared appearing form as physical movements of limbs. It is safe to view dance as an import from the West, which was "never heard of in China before". Since it was "never heard of", it not only served as a fresh spectacle but also asked for a long and sinuous process of domestication through selection and transformation.This paper is centred on the "dance" in two concurrent publications, namely Shun Pao, a recognised "encyclopaedia" for Chinese modern history studies as the newspaper that lasted the longest and influenced the most widely in modern China, and Dianshizhai Pictorial, the longest-lasting, the widest-exposure and the most influential pictorial in late Qing period, aiming to reveal the transformation process from the traditional to the modern view on "dance" in China by combing the historical materials in the printed press as the major media in modern China.The first chapter investigates the ritual music as an orthodox of Chinese culture and explores the progression that it symbolised the state and politics by a physical "metaphor" and subtly represented the change of social mores across different times, thus became a concretised object. The second chapter focuses on the music and dance in a rendezvous places of lovers’to unlock the reason why people in the period of late Qing and early Republic of China abominated the folk dance and related idolatrous processions. The third chapter discusses the gradual establishment of the modern recognition of "dance" that has become used to people today as well as its replacement of the traditional "dance", based on an analysis of the import of Western "dance" intoChina and the acceptance of such a "dance from the West" by a country evolving from "royal government" to "nation-state".