Identity and Diversity

Celebrating Dance in Taiwan

Wang Yunyu, Stephanie Burridge

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000084399
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Reflecting the breadth and diversity of dance in the Asia–Pacific region, this volume provides an in-depth and comprehensive study of Taiwan's dance history. Taiwan is home to several indigenous tribes with unique rituals and folk dance traditions, with an array of eclectic influences including martial arts and Peking Opera from China, and dance forms such as contemporary, neo-classical, post-modern, jazz, ballroom, and hip-hop from the West. Dance in Taiwan, led by pioneers such as choreographers Liu Feng-shueh and Lin Hwai-min, continues to have a strong presence in both performance and educational arenas. In 1973, Lin Hwai-min created Cloud Gate Dance Theatre, the country's internationally acclaimed modern dance company, and simultaneously produced a generation of dancers not only trained in modern dance and ballet, but also in Chinese aesthetics and history, tai-chi and meditation.

Including the voices of dance professionals, scholars and critics, this collection of articles highlights the emerging trends and challenges faced by dance in Taiwan. It examines the history, creative development, education, training, and above all, the hybrid practices that give Taiwanese dance a unique identity, making it central to the renaissance of Asian contemporary dance. In describing how the intersections of dance cultures are marked by exchanges, research and pedagogy, it shows the way choreographers, performers, associated artists and companies of the region choose to imaginatively invent, blend, fuse, select and morph the multiple influences, revitalising and preserving cultural heritage while oscillating between tradition and change.

1
‘Holding Hands to Dance’: Movement as Cultural Metaphor in the Dances of Indigenous People in Taiwan^*

Chao Chi-fang

* This chapter has been expanded and amended from the same-titled chapter in the Journal for the Anthropological Study of Human Movement, 16 (1 & 2), pp. 1–9.

As narratives on Taiwanese dance(s) become popularly constructed, a dimension which has come to be rather exceptional or even controversial is that of indigenous people’s dances. Their dances are either ignored or unrecognized. This exception of narratives is closely related to the ethnic politics and the cultural and artistic otherness which have been rooted in the Taiwanese history. One of the key issues is the (mis)classification of indigenous people’s more syncretic form of dancing, that is, dancing and singing together, and the much less complicated variance of movement compared with other Chinese or Western presentational forms. Reflecting upon this situation, I shall try to go beyond the general classificatory approach and interpret the most essential movement as a cultural metaphor in order to review the development of indigenous dances in Taiwan.

This chapter analyzes relationships between the signifying dimension and form of indigenous people’s dances in Taiwan. The focus is on one of the most important formal characteristics, the ‘root metaphor’, of holding hands, and to examine its reproduction in various dances.¹ I discuss both the visible dynamics and the invisible components of the dances that make manifest aspects of social, religious and political symbolism.²

1 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

2 Brenda Farnell, ‘Where Mind Is a Verb: Spatial Orientation and Deixis in Plains Indian Sign Talk and Assiniboine (Nakota) Culture’, in Human Action Signs in Cultural Context: The Visible and the Invisible in Movement and Dance, Metuchen NJ, and London: Scarecrow Press, 1995, pp. 82–111.

My study responds to ideas found in the anthropological study of human movement advanced by Drid Williams³ and Brenda Farnell.⁴ The study is, however, mainly contextualized within the ethnographic framework of contemporary Taiwan, where the ethnic relationship between indigenous minority people and majority Chinese people (who migrated into Taiwan in different periods) has played an active role in the transformation of perception, interpretation, and creation of the dances.

3 Drid Williams, ‘“Semasiology”: A Semantic Anthropological View of Human Movements and Actions’, in D. Parkin (ed.), Semantic Anthropology, London and New York: Academic Press, 1982, pp. 161–81.

4 Brenda Farnell, ‘Ethno-graphics and Moving Body’, Man 29 (n.s.), 1994, 4: 926–74.

Although the action of holding hands can be broadly seen among different indigenous people, the specific indigenous group whose dance will be discussed in this chapter is the Amis, the largest of its kind in Taiwan. The Amis people reside mainly in the eastern part of Taiwan, from the middle to the south along the Hualien-Taitung Rift Valley, the Eastern Coast and the mountains in between. The dances of the Amis are the richest among all the indigenous people of Taiwan, although there are ample variances in patterns and styles within subgroups. Without concentrating on any single community, I will present a number of general features of Amis dances. I realize this departs from a standard anthropological convention of close-gained analysis of one community, but it is a meaningful strategy here in terms of exploring common denominators when viewing bodily movements in general as ‘signifiers’.⁵

5 Williams, ‘Semasiology’, pp. 161–81.

Choosing indigenous dances as the main focus involves historical and political factors that reach beyond academic interests to include the social conditions in which the dances of indigenous people occur. Originally, prior to the seventeenth century, the indigenous people of Taiwan had not developed written forms of language. The expression and transmission of group memory and core values thus depended largely on oral histories and embodied practices of many kinds. From the sixteenth to the end of the twentieth century, after encountering and being colonized by Europeans, Japanese and Han Chinese, myths, songs and dances became the characteristic representations of indigenous culture.

Map showing the location and names of indigenous people in Taiwan Source: Prepared by the author Map not to scale

The genre of expressive culture plays a vital role in several post-colonial and decolonizing practices of resistance. Study of dance thus provides a means to illustrate the interaction between indigenous groups and the dominant, greater part of society: between ‘culture’ understood as a valued entity to be preserved and ‘culture’ as a living, contemporary practice of resistance. With this historical and political structure, I will argue that the corporeal and cultural knowledge contained in the movements of indigenous dancing creates new dance forms of cultural production that range from ritual events to stage performances.

To facilitate analysis of the dances, I will follow Williams’ semasiological approach to the anthropology of human movement that articulates the notion of an ‘action sign’, that is, ‘signifying acts done with movement’.⁶ Utilizing the concept of the action sign to analyze dances emphasizes the creative dimension of the dancers as social agents:

When body movements are viewed as action signs … they become one kind of semiotic practice among others, all of which provide persons with a variety of cultural resources for the creation of meaning. Dances and rituals are replete with these kinds of metaphorical gestures and, as we shall see, frequently extend to include whole body action signs and metaphorical usages of the ritual or other performance spaces.⁷

6 Ibid.

7 Brenda Farnell, ‘Metaphors We Move By’, Visual Anthropology, 8 (2–4), 1996, p. 323.

Concentrating on the metaphorical action sign of ‘holding hands’ in Taiwanese indigenous people’s dances, I will present evidence from three different resource categories in which body movement becomes a signifier: (a) Chinese historical writings, (b) the indigenous ritualistic dances, and (c) contemporary theatrical creation. I hope to unravel some interesting relationship between cultural and corporeal knowledge through analyses of ‘writings’ on dance, not only in the textual form but also in performances.

From ‘Savage’ to ‘Indigenous’

In this section, I will present a diachronic overview of Chinese historical writings on the dances of the indigenous people of Taiwan, which demonstrates an early Chinese perspective of indigenous cultures. The writing is blurred with romantic exoticism, as seen in the rhetorical descriptions of customs and dances. In focusing on the historical and related writings, however, my aim is not a reconstruction of the past. Instead, it uncovers representations of the relationship between the powerful writer and those others being written about—others whose main form of communication is not writing. Such writing does not always reflect their reality as much as it does of the writer:

Dong-Fan, the different [place]! … It is near. The people who live there are timeless, and there is no rank. They are naked and [they use] rope tying [meaning ‘ancient’]. How different! They live by the ocean but do not fish, [family] inhabit together but have no incest. Men’s and women’s statuses are reversed, and the living dwells with the dead… They do not have calendars or words, but lack nothing.⁸

8 Chen Di, ‘Dong-Fan Jih’ [Record of Dong-Fan, author’s translation], in H. J. Sheng (ed.), Ming Hai Zeng Yan (Words of Advice from the Southern Sea), Taiwan Wen Shien Tsong Kan Wu Shih Liu (No. 56, the Anthology of Taiwan Archive), Taipei: Taiwan Ying HangJinJih Yan Chyo Shih (the Research Office of Economic, Bank of Taiwan), 1959 [1603], pp. 24–27.

In this famous Chinese historical account of Taiwan, dated 1603, the island of Taiwan and the inhabitants were called Dong-Fan, ‘the Eastern Savage’. Dong, ‘the Eastern’, referred to the island’s location. Fan, ‘the savage’, came from the Chinese convention of verbal categorization, distinguishing between the ‘we’ (or ‘us’) group and ‘others’. Those who did not share the same language and customs as the Han people who lived on the central mainland were ‘Fan’.

During the seventeenth century, European colonizers conquered Taiwan. Portuguese sailor first bestowed the name Formosa on the island in the sixteenth century. The Dutch and Spanish dominated southern and northern Taiwan, respectively, during the mid-seventeenth century. During this time, two forms of European colonialism existed in contrast in Taiwan: the Catholic Spanish, who emphasized the religious missionaries, and the Protestant Dutch, who treated southern Taiwan as the newly gained economic resource, not only for trade with China but as a source of tax income for their newly formed colony. It was during the Dutch-dominated period that waves of labourers from southern China were brought into Taiwan to plant fields in the southwestern plains. These historical immigrations changed the demographic and cultural composition of Taiwan. Gradually, the Chinese assimilated the indigenous people of the plains.

European writings on the indigenous Taiwanese came partly from the Christian missionaries who had strong motivations towards converting them. Their writings also carried an explicit tone that labelled the unconverted indigenous people ‘primitive’ or ‘savage’. Later, explorers also joined in, depicting an array of dance scenes of indigenous people. Although these amounted to few writings, some of them did notice the hand movement of indigenous dances:

After it was dark, a bunch of fire was lit in the front yard of the house … until the flame raised. This seemed to symbolize some sort of totemic spirit. Hence the young men and women cleared a space. They crossed hands to form a crescent shape. They danced while singing in grievous tone. Their voice accelerated in accompaniment with steps. Until the speed of their steps burst into wildness, the flame was like a flying spirit, penetrating the red-cloud-like dust … At the end, the sound stopped and was replaced with shouting of the natives, which was echoed in the valley.⁹

9 John Thomson, ‘Notes ofjourney in Southern Formosa’ (author’s retranslation from the Chinese text), in Liu Ke-Hsiang (trans.), Heng Yueh Formosa: Wai Guo Ren Zai Taiwan De Tan Hsien Yu Lu Hsing 1860–1880 (Crossing Formosa: Exploration and Travel of Foreigners in Taiwan 1860–1880), Taipei: Zhih Li Wan Bao (The Zhih Li Night Times), 1989 [1873], pp. 56–57.

There was still a contrast between European religious universalism and Chinese romantic exoticism, as seen in the above-cited Record of Dong-Fan. The romantic tone in Chinese writings, which depicted the indigenous people as a different and culturally contrasting community, became their predominant characteristic. In one of the eighteenth century historical accounts, the historian described the ‘savage’ as having ‘better essence but wild culture’.¹⁰ The inherent romanticism in Chinese historical accounts of many other people across different epochs was manifested in the depiction of indigenous Taiwanese.

10 Zhong-Hsuan Zhou, Zhu Luo Shieng Zhih II (History of Zhu Luo County II), Taipei: Cheng-Wen Chu-Ban Sheh (Cheng-Wen Publisher), 1983 [1717], p. 481.

Following the strong assimilation of Chinese immigrants, during the colonizing period by Japan from 1896–1945, the indigenous people were subjected to a scientific classification. Continuing in their usage of the terminology Fan, ‘...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Identity, Hybridity, Diversity: A Brief View of Dance in Taiwan
• 1. ‘Holding Hands to Dance’: Movement as Cultural Metaphor in the Dances of Indigenous People in Taiwan
• 2. A Study of Banquet Music and Dance at the Táng Court (618–907 ce)
• 3. Colonial Modernity and Female Dancing Bodies in Early Taiwanese Modern Dance
• 4. Looking into Labanotation in Taiwan
• 5. Dance Education in Taiwan
• 6. Taiwan’s Female Choreographers: A Generation in Transition
• 7. Bridging the Gap through Dance: Taiwan and Indonesia
• 8. The Spectacular Dance: 2009 World Games in Taiwan
• 9. Roots and Routes of Cloud Gate Dance Theatre’s Nine Songs (1993)
• 10. An Introduction to Dance Technology
• 11. ReOrienting Taiwan’s Modern Dance: The New Generation of Taiwanese Choreographers
• Artist Voices and Biographies
• Index