Harnessing Vitality in Kunming: The Intellectual Lineage and Artistic Development in the Yi Compatriots Music and Dance Performance of 1946

Abstract:This article explores the aesthetic and ideological positioning behind the Yi Compatriots Music and Dance Performance, a performance that took place in Kunming in 1946. By considering the development of the performance, the performance program, the intellectual ideas of Liang Lun and Wen Yiduo (two key figures in the organization of the performance), and finally some of the ensuing textual accounts of the performance, this article situates the “Yi Compatriots Music and Dance Performance” within the overlapping and often paradoxical artistic and political discourses of the time. Analyzing how the performance engages with the Euro-American discourse of modernist primitivism, this paper demonstrates a complex ideological relationship between early 20th century Euro-American modern dance and late Republican ethnic minority dance forms in China. Ultimately, this paper suggests that the Yi Compatriots performance contributed to a new epistemological framework through which to understand the meaning of ethnic dance in modern China.