Chinese dance history on show in Chicago, tells different collection story

The eldest Chinese dancer Wilcox interviewed for the archive is Sheng Jie. Wilcox said that although Sheng was over 90 of age, she could still recall vividly her dancing performances during World War II, which would often be disrupted by Japanese bombings.

Shu Qiao, who played the role of the female heroine in famous dance drama Dagger Society in 1959, impressed Wilcox most.

Shu is also one of the first prominent female choreographers of the Chinese classical and contemporary dance drama.

"I really enjoyed meeting Shu Qiao in person, I went to her apartment in Shanghai couple (of) years ago. I was just so shocked because she was already in her eighties, she just looked like a young person. She smoked all the time. She lived alone. She cracked jokes. She has a great personality," Wilcox told Xinhua.

"We had a really fun time talking all the afternoon in her apartment," she said.

On her part, Fu has amassed more than 1,000 items for the UM Chinese dance collection.

One of the interesting parts of the collection, Fu said, is that many things evidenced cultural exchanges between China and the rest of world in the 1950s and the 1960s, times that many people regard as a seclusive period for China.

"As a native Chinese, I didn't even know there were so many international exchanges in the field of performing arts (during that period) until I started collecting the performance programs," Fu told Xinhua. "They challenged a stereotypical view on that time period."

The performance program display at the current UM show unveils that between 1949 and 1965, state-sponsored Chinese dance delegations visited 53 countries, ranging from Hungary, Poland and Syria to Ghana, Colombia and Brazil. And vintage postcards in the 1950s and 1960s show trips of dance troupes from such countries as Yugoslavia and Britain to China.

Xiaobing Tang, a UM professor of modern Chinese studies, deemed the UM Chinese dance collection as invaluable resources for those who are interested in Chinese culture or dance and performance arts, for academic purposes or not.

Whatsoever, it is now the dream of both Wilcox and Fu to make the collection a world-class one.

Xinhua