When Words Are Inadequate

This superb and long-awaited book authoritatively locates the development of early Chinese modern dance in global dance history. The well-selected case studies focus on four of the most important figures in modern dance in twentieth-century China. Nan Ma's insightful analysis and vivid storytelling brings these individuals and their border-crossing artistic worlds to life and theorizes new models for understanding transnational interaction and circulation in modernist cultures. * Emily Wilcox, author of Revolutionary Bodies: Chinese Dance and the Socialist Legacy * This fascinating book rewrites the cultural history of modern dance and modern China. It brings to life the captivating transnational and transcultural careers of Chinese modern dance pioneers and their connections to canonical Western counterparts. Ma writes with grace and ease, and deeply engages with a wide range of interdisciplinary scholarship in refreshingly rigorous, theoretically reflexive ways. A must read for anyone interested in modern dance and modern Chinese culture. * Liang Luo, author of The Avant-Garde and the Popular in Modern China * Nan Ma's When Words are Inadequate offers a groundbreaking view of global dance modernism in the 20th century by focusing on key dance artists and ensembles based in China as nodes and routes of international artistic exchanges between China and the West. Ma's study seeks to re-write two histories, one about the global dissemination of modern dance within Chinese and Asian contexts, and another about the cultural history of modern China as seen through dancing bodies. Offering a transnational, transcultural, and intermedial account of dance modernism, When Words are Inadequate is a pivotal and original contribution to dance studies. * Rebekah J. Kowal, author of Dancing the World Smaller: Staging Globalism in Mid-Century America *