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Wilcox, Emily

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Dr. Emily Wilcox 魏美玲 is Margaret Hamilton Professor of Modern Languages & Literatures/Chinese Studies at William & Mary and a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow in Dance Studies. Wilcox is core faculty in the Program in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and affiliate faculty in the Program in Asian and Pacific Islander American Studies and the Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. Wilcox is also a Center Associate of the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan, where she was previously tenured Associate Professor of Modern Chinese Studies before joining William & Mary in January 2021.

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 12
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    PublicationOpen Access
    Women Dancing Otherwise: The Queer Feminism of Gu Jiani’s Right & Left
    (Oxford University Press, 2017-01-01) Wilcox, Emily E.; Wilcox, Emily
    In twenty-first-century urban Chinese contemporary dance, gender and female sexuality are often constructed in ways that reinforce patriarchal and heterosexual social norms. Although “queer dance” as a named category does not exist in China, it is possible to identify queer feminist perspectives in recent dance works. This essay offers a reading of representations of gender and female sexuality in two works of contemporary dance by Beijing-based female Chinese choreographers: Wang Mei’s 2002 Thunder and Rain and Gu Jiani’s 2014 Right & Left. Through choreographic analysis informed by ethnographic research in Beijing’s contemporary dance world, this essay argues that Thunder and Rain reinforces patriarchal and heterosexual social norms common in Chinese contemporary dance, while Right & Left disrupts such norms. Through its staging of unconventional female-female duets and its queering of nationally marked movement forms, Right & Left offers a queer feminist approach to the presentation of women on the Chinese stage.
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    PublicationOpen Access
    An Image that Resonates: Yang Liping and the Evolution of Contemporary Chinese Folk Dance
    (Institute of Ethnography SASA and Ensemble of Traditional Dances and Songs of Serbia "Kolo", 2024-01-01) Wilcox, Emily E.; Wilcox, Emily
    Yang Liping 杨丽萍 (b. 1958) is China’s most successful contemporary folk dance choreographer. Beyond being famous among dancers, she has achieved the status of a mainstream popular celebrity, balancing her reputation as a fine artist and cultural purist with success in the commercial arena. Drawing on nearly two decades of ethnographic and archival research in China, as well as analysis of Yang’s dance performances, interviews, and visual media representations, this article asks how Yang achieved this unprecedented success through contemporary folk dance choreography. The paper examines Yang’s rise to fame since the late 1970s through her transformation of an iconic Chinese folk image: the peacock dance. Peacock dance uses elements of a mythological story from Buddhist literature with a type of village dance performed in one particular ethnic group in China and adapts it into a multimedia national image that gets reproduced in film, visual art, and dance choreography. The paper shows how Yang has deftly adapted the peacock dance into her own signature brand through a series of multimedia platforms, while she maintains an emphasis on dance, a charismatic public persona, and a unique yet constantly adapting contemporary folk aesthetic as the core of her appeal. Serbian Abstract: Јанг Липинг 杨丽萍 (р. 1958) је најуспешнија кинеска кореографкиња савременог традиционалног плеса у Кини. Осим што је позната међу плесачима, она је постигла статус мејнстрим популарне и познате личности, балансирајући своју репутацију ликовне уметнице и културног чистунца са успехом у комерцијалној арени. Ослањајући се на скоро две деценије етнографских и архивских истраживања у Кини, као и на анализу Јангових плесних представа, интервјуа и визуелних медијских репрезентација, овај чланак поставља питање: како је Јанг постигла овај невиђени успех кроз савремену кореографију традициналног плеса? Рад истражује Јангов успон до славе од касних 1970-их кроз њену трансформацију култне кинеске народне иконе: плес пауна. Паунов плес користи елементе митолошке приче из будистичке књижевности са врстом сеоског плеса који се изводи у једној одређеној етничкој групи у Кини и прилагођава га у мултимедијалну националну слику која се репродукује у филму, визуелној уметности и плесној кореографији. У раду је приказано како је Јанг вешто прилагодила плес пауна у свој препознатљив бренд кроз низ мултимедијалних платформи, док она задржава нагласак на плесу, харизматичној публици и јединственој, али стално адаптирајућој савременој фолк естетици као сржи своје јединственсти.
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    PublicationOpen Access
    Introduction to "Revolutionary Bodies: Chinese Dance and the Socialist Legacy"
    (University of California Press, 2018-10-01) Wilcox, Emily E.; Wilcox, Emily
    Revolutionary Bodies is the first English-language primary source–based history of concert dance in the People’s Republic of China. Combining over a decade of ethnographic and archival research, Emily Wilcox analyzes major dance works by Chinese choreographers staged over an eighty-year period from 1935 to 2015. Using previously unexamined film footage, photographic documentation, performance programs, and other historical and contemporary sources, Wilcox challenges the commonly accepted view that Soviet-inspired revolutionary ballets are the primary legacy of the socialist era in China’s dance field. The digital edition of this title includes nineteen embedded videos of selected dance works discussed by the author.
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    PublicationOpen Access
    Rulan Chao Pian 卞赵如兰 (1922–2013)
    (University of Hawai'i Press, 2015-10-01) Wilcox, Emily E.; Wilcox, Emily
    Rulan Chao Pian, who taught Chinese and music at Harvard University from 1947 to 1992, was a pioneer in the fields of Chinese Song dynasty musical history and ethnomusicological studies of Peking opera and Sinophone popular performance.
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    PublicationOpen Access
    When Folk Dance Was Radical: Cold War Yangge, World Youth Festivals, and Overseas Chinese Leftist Culture in the 1950s and 1960s
    (Centre d'étude français sur la Chine contemporaine, 2020-01-01) Wilcox, Emily E.; Wilcox, Emily
    This article challenges three common assumptions about Chinese socialist-era dance culture: first, that Mao-era dance rarely circulated internationally and was disconnected from international dance trends; second, that the yangge movement lost momentum in the early years of the People’s Republic of China (PRC); and, third, that the political significance of socialist dance lies in content rather than form. This essay looks at the transformation of wartime yangge into PRC folk dance during the 1950s and 1960s and traces the international circulation of these new dance styles in two contexts: the World Festivals of Youth and Students in Eastern Europe, and the schools, unions, and clan associations of overseas Chinese communities in Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, and San Francisco. By tracing the emergence and circulation of yangge and PRC folk dance, I propose the existence of “Cold War yangge” – a transnational phenomenon in which Chinese folk dance became a site of leftist political activism.
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    PublicationOpen Access
    Performance and Performativity in Modern China
    (Routledge, 2023-01-01) Wilcox, Emily E.; Wilcox, Emily
    Excerpt from publication: "Whether in China or elsewhere, performance is a subject fraught with prejudice. Professional performers in China have historically been stigmatized for their itinerant lifestyles, which are seen to disrupt and endanger the stability of community relations with their mobility and the fluid nature of their social networks..."
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    PublicationOpen Access
    Han-Tang Zhongguo Gudianwu and the Problem of Chineseness in Contemporary Chinese Dance: Sixty Years of Controversy
    (University of Hawaii Press, 2012-04-01) Wilcox, Emily E.; Wilcox, Emily
    In 1979, after twenty-one years of political reeducation, Chinese classical dance professor Sun Ying (孙颖, 1929—2009) returned to the Beijing Dance Academy to instigate reform in the field of Zhongguo gudianwu, the official national dance form of the People's Republic of China. In creating the Han-Tang style of Zhongguo gudianwu, Sun challenged accepted notions of Chineseness within the field, especially the idea that Chinese indigenous theater, or xiqu, should serve as the primary foundation for a distinctively Chinese national body aesthetic. While Sun's alternative vision of Chineseness produced extensive controversy, this controversy is not antithetical to the historical aims and assumptions of Zhongguo gudianwu. Since the founding of the field in the early 1950s, practitioners of Zhongguo gudianwu have treated Chineseness as a subject for creative invention, interpretation, and debate; therefore, Sun's work is not a post-Mao phenomenon but rather an extension of the art and politics of the Mao period.
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    PublicationOpen Access
    Quando os lugares importam: provincializando o "global"
    (2024-05-01) Wilcox, Emily E.; Wilcox, Emily
    Na primeira edição do livro “Rethinking dance history: a reader” (Repensando a história da dança: uma leitura), Alexandra Carter discutiu a necessidade de novas histórias na história da dança. Em particular, ela destacou a importância de ir além das narrativas lineares com pontos finais claros no tempo presente. “Nossas histórias podem acomodar atividades que não parecem contribuir de nenhuma maneira óbvia para o 'desenvolvimento' da forma de arte, mas, em seu tempo, foram uma parte vital dela”. (Carter, 2004, p. 13) Como historiadores da dança, a crítica de Carter nos ajuda a reconhecer que escrever sobre a história da dança é importante, mesmo quando não valida os gostos e ideias artísticas de hoje. Isso sugere que as investigações podem ser ainda mais urgentes, uma vez que pode nos ajudar a superar os preconceitos de nosso próprio tempo.
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    PublicationOpen Access
    Meaning in Movement: Adaptation and the Xiqu Body in Intercultural Chinese Theatre
    (MIT Press, 2014-04-01) Wilcox, Emily E.; Wilcox, Emily
    Zhuli xiaojie (adapted from Strindberg's Miss Julie) and Xin bi tian gao (from Ibsen's Hedda Gabler) are two works in a recent series of intercultural xiqu productions by playwrights William Huizhu Sun and Faye Chunfang Fei. In these works, the xiqu body serves as a medium for theatrical expression, where music, costume, movement, and props come together in a super-expressive acting technique that foregrounds qing (情), or sentiment. In these adaptations, the xiqu body compensates for what is necessarily cut from the text in the transformation from spoken drama to xiqu performance.
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    PublicationOpen Access
    Dance and the Nation: Performance, Ritual, and Politics in Sri Lanka
    (2012-01-01) Wilcox, Emily E.; Wilcox, Emily