Abstract:

In 2015, Huawei shocked the world with a striking advertisement. a ballerina’s foot, one perfectly poised in a satin shoe, the other bruised and bleeding beneath its bandages. For Huawei’s founder, this tortured foot symbolized both “pain and happiness” on the path to global success-a metaphor eagerly taken up by Chinese media to reflect the nation’s rise. But why does the battered female ballet body carry such power in the Chinese imagination

By unpacking this uneasy fusion of Western cultural aesthetics and Chinese ideals of femininity, I argue that the Chinese female ballet body emerges as a powerful but contested figure-one that both reveals and obscures the tensions between beauty, suffering, gendered oppression, and national pride.

Speaker’s Bio:

Ziying Cui is a scholar, choreographer, and dancer who currently works as a Visiting Lecturer at Duke Kunshan University. After graduating from the PhD in Dance program at Temple University, she became an Adjunct Professor and worked as an editor and writer for the thINKingDANCE journal based in Philadelphia. Her research focuses on the hybridity of Chinese dance and ballet in postsocialist China. She is also interested in the development of ballet in China/Chinese diaspora as well as transnational Chinese dance practices. Ziying earned her BA in Dance Theory and History at Beijing Dance Academy and MFA in Contemporary Dance at Case Western Reserve University in 2016. Her research has been published in Asian Theatre Journal and presented at several dance conferences, including the Association for Asian Performance and the Dance Studies Association. She also choreographed dances for dance concerts and festivals in Philadelphia.