Beyond resistance: aesthetics and politics of Chinese independent choreography

Beyond Resistance: Aesthetics and Politics of Chinese Independent Choreography reconceptualizes independent choreography within China’s postsocialist political and cultural context. Challenging the dominant trope that tethers artistic independence with political resistance to the state, this dissertation argues that such a framework, shaped by liberalist assumptions, obscures the complex institutional, economic, and affective conditions under which contemporary Chinese dance is produced. Instead of treating independence as a fixed oppositional stance, this study approaches it as a contingent relational and processual practice that unfolds through ongoing negotiation across institutional and extra-institutional spaces.Drawing on historical analysis, infrastructural analysis, close choreographic readings, and ethnographic fieldwork, the dissertation examines how aesthetic conventions, funding mechanisms, labor structures, and social relations shape independent choreographic practice. Chapter One destabilizes prevailing assumptions about Chinese concert dance by demonstrating that realism, often read as a monolithic vehicle of state ideology, has been plural, adaptive, and historically contingent. Chapter Two analyzes the political economy of independent choreography through major national funding platforms, showing how state-supported infrastructures simultaneously cultivate aesthetic norms and intensify precarity, producing what I term a “celebrated precariat.” The final two chapters turn to choreographers’ situated practices, examining how artists navigate institutional ambiguity, relational labor, and postsocialist contradictions. Through case studies of Lv Zimin, Gu Jiani, and Yang Zhen, the dissertation theorizes social relational practices of “guarded improvisation” and aesthetic strategies that mobilize and reconfigure ambiguity, affect, and artistic and social capital to render precarity sensorially legible without resolving it into overt opposition. By foregrounding labor, affect, and institutional negotiation as integral to choreography, this dissertation expands choreographic analysis beyond performance and contributes to Chinese dance studies by offering a more nuanced account of independence as simultaneously choreographed and contingent, agentive while constrained. In doing so, it reframes the politics of contemporary Chinese choreography beyond the binary of resistance and compliance, revealing independence as a dynamic practice shaped by the very conditions of postsocialist cultural life.