Specialist Lecture on Chinese History and Culture (7)
‘Lotus Aloft:’ Dunhuang Dance Narratives
Historically a frontier metropolis, Dunhuang was a strategic site along the Silk Road in northwestern China, a crossroads of trade, and a locus for religious, cultural, and intellectual influences since the Han dynasty (206 B.C.E.–220 C.E.). The 492 caves at the Mogao cliff near the modern town of Dunhuang have served as temples, sites for performative events, and an archive that consisted of medieval Chinese paintings and Buddhist sutras. Today, the Dunhuang Mogao Caves is among one of the most well-known UNESCO heritage sites along the ancient Silk Road. This lecture presentation introduces the creation of the Dunhuang mural dance genre as a sociocultural phenomenon that emerges through interactions and negotiations among multiple actors and institutions to envision and enact a Chinese vision as well as China’s imaginations of “journeying abroad” from and to the country. This phenomenon is involved in the re-creation of historical memory and identity of China in contemporary moments of contestation and transformation. The lecture examines the semiotics in the present-day imagination of the Silk Road – specifically, staged performances of the Dunhuang dance as an embodied re-interpretation and re-creating of the arts from the Dunhuang.
