Putting Minzu into perspective: Dance and its relation to the concept of ‘Nation’

The term ‘minzu’ was raised and discussed on several occasions in relation to its meaning in the Chinese language and how it could or could not be translated into English to sufficiently convey the complexity of its connotations. Chinese scholar Jiang Dong presented a paper tracing the term’s usage among the dance practitioners and academics in China since the 1950s. This article is a response to Jiang’s paper from a Taiwanese perspective. It looks at the Minzu Wudao Movement in post-1949 Taiwan historically, tracing its ideological heritage to the nation salvation movements in the early twentieth-century China and contextualizing its body-reformation concept within the nationalist indoctrination policy of the Kuomintang government. In addition to examining the representation of ‘minzu’ (nation) in the Minzu Wudao Movement, the article also discusses the shifting content of minzu qinggan (national sentiment) in the 1970s and the disappearance of the term ‘minzu’ in social media and cultural discourses in today’s Taiwan. It is still widely used in China, however, and a number of choreographers in the ArtsCross/Danscross project, as noted in the Introduction, were specialists in minzu dance and worked from a minzu dance vocabulary.