A queer feminist anthropologist exploring the realities of culture, gender, and sexuality in contemporary Asia
Reviews of books, live theatre and dance shows.
Inspired by her grandmother’s deathbed confession of being sold to a brothel, Lijia Zhang injects her cutting social criticism into her first novel, Lotus. The book delves deep into the sex industry in contemporary Shenzhen, following a young migrant woman, Lotus, who is eager to escape her life as a prostitute. A strong believer in [...]
Beijing Dance / LTDX premiered Earth / Quake, a contemporary dance work by well-known traditional Chinese choreographer Yang Wei at the People’s Liberation Army Theater last week to a noticeably mixed and highly enthusiastic crowd of foreigners and locals alike. This is the first time Yang has done a modern dance piece, announced good-humoured Artistic Director [...]
Tao Dance Theatre left their Beijing audience dumbfounded last Thursday evening with a performance of weight x 3 and 2 at the NCPA. Tao Dance Theatre quickly became internationally famous, but it took a little time before they gained recognition in China. So it is a big deal for Tao to be performing in China. Plus this [...]
On the second night of San Francisco Ballet’s second visit to Beijing, the American ballet company treated their Chinese audience to a varied programme in four parts. Tomasson’s own Caprice opened the event, followed by Christopher Wheeldon’s Rush and Hans van Manen’s Variations for Two Couples, finally closing the evening with George Balanchine’s Theme and Variations. [...]
San Francisco Ballet returned to the stage of Beijing’s NCPA this October, during the company’s second visit to China, with Helgi Tomasson’s Giselle. Dancing Giselle was Tan Yuan Yuan, a Shanghainese ballerina who has now been performing with San Francisco Ballet for 20 years. Her return to the Chinese stage brought enthusiastic Beijingers out in hordes on [...]
Life in Progress A lone dancer skuttles onto stage dragging an arm, resting momentarily where a bare tree stands centre stage. Guillem moves like a whirring gizmo, compact and full of electricity, as though she could burst any moment. Her livewire limbs rarely come to rest for long. One quiet moment finds her face down, spread-eagle [...]
Divine Comedy Trilogy: Inferno, Cantica, Paradiso A ring of brightly lit bodies hangs suspended above the stage of the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA). A lone dancer writhes and wriggles his way across the circle in which he is encased, launching off one body, spinning in mid-air and landing securely with a soft [...]
The beauty of it will enthrall young and old, but the subtleties of this story appeal best to adults.
A distilled movement reveals itself: these are citizens throwing petrol bombs toward a distant enemy.
Hofesh Shechter Company's In Good Company It’s not often that dancers are given free reign to create new works of their own, and even rarer that they get all the support necessary to make fully-realised, successful pieces. That’s why In Good Company, the project enabling dancers of the Hofesh Shechter Company to present their own [...]
Zhēn de Gender 