Dancing in the Squares

I am Yifan Wang, a graduate student at Duke University. This is the online field note of my current research on the public dance (Guangchangwu, literally translated as "square-dance") in China. The project aims to understand the popularity of this gender-specific dance by reading through its very spatial and sonic role in everyday life. I am posting photos, videos, online sources, thoughts, reading notes on this site. Everything is kept as original as possible except all names related to my fieldwork are pseudo for security's sake. Please feel free to "ask" me (by clicking the button on top of the page) or email me at yw128[at]duke[dot]edu with however random questions, curiosities, ideas, suggestions, etc., or simply "submit" your post to share your findings on the dance! 我是杜克大学的在读研究生王一凡。我正在研究中国的广场舞，这里是我的田野笔记。我希望能通过广场舞在城市中扮演的空间和声音角色理解它今天的流行。 我将在这里更新研究中的影像资料、相关链接、思考、阅读笔记等。除去出于保密考虑而对受访者使用假名外，我将尽力保持信息的原样呈现。如果有任何疑问、好奇、想法、建议等，请尽情通过最顺手的方式联系我（点击页面顶端的“提问”或是发邮件至yw128[at]duke[dot]edu）；或是直接“发帖”，分享你关于广场舞的新发现！

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I miss my grannies.

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Sorting out the images and videos taken during the past three months and happy to find this one recorded in May. It looks at the boundary line that separates site C, the one that ballroom dancers and guangchangwu ones share the music and space. (Later people told me there was a long history of the two groups fighting over the domain and currently settled the boundary precisely in the middle of the square.) I hope this video can give some sense of the dynamics of this site by the two distinct groups of dancers and the various other factors (spectators and other kinds of dancers, for example) that may be ignored elsewhere. 

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Last day being "in the field." Said goodbye and thanks to people I had the honor to share a tiny part of their stories. Watching them dancing on this last Fan Dancing Thursday my feeling was hard to tell. The only thing I was sure about was... their life goes on with or without me, which is good.

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Perspective vision and prospective vision [...] [i]naugurate (in the sixteenth century?) the transformation of the urban fact into the concept of a city. [...] Linking the city to the concept never makes them identical, but it plays on their progressive symbiosis: to plan a city is both to think the very plurality of the real and to make that way of thinking the plural effective; it is to know how to articulate it and be able to do it.

Michel de Certeau: The Practice of Everyday life, 93-4

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Have things changed since technical procedures have organized an "all-seeing power"? The totalizing eye imagined by the painters of earlier times lives on in our achievements. The same scopic drive haunts users of architectural productions by materializing today the utopia that yesterday was only painted . The 1,370 foot high tower that serves as a prow for Manhattan continues to construct the fiction that creates readers, makes the complexity of the city readable, and immobilizes its opaque mobility in a transparent text.

Michel de Certeau: The Practice of Everyday life, 92

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I knew there must be something in the arrangement of the group but never figured it out. Nevertheless, I have been recording the position of the eight leading dancers (among whom six normally dance in the front row on a daily basis). I visited leading dancer Chen today and finally, what she told me corresponded perfectly with my suspicion.

She mentioned that a year and a half ago she was selected as a leading dancer, which was only half a year after her joining the group. New leading dancers were in need at that point of time because the tension between dancers of work unit A and those of non-A rose and the organizers decided to pacify the participants by regulating where to stand. I'm not able to draw the situation at that time but mapping the current group can be clear enough to see the point.

So basically there are roughly four rows of dancers, each consisting of ten to twenty people, plus six leading dancers in the front most. In order to guarantee the right of participants of Unit A--since the space is Unit A’s property--the font two rows were divided into two parts, though no visible signs were to mark the separation. As a result, only a few regular dancers of non-A are allowed to stand in the front two rows to the west while most dancers of Unit A can fit into the rest on the east side so as to have better view of the leading dancers. As the space was effectively, albeit implicitly, divided into two parts, extra non-A leading dancers were to be posited on the west side specifically for non-A dancers to see.

The sketch below is to show very roughly the distribution of dancers on site A, of which “~” is to indicate dancers of work unit A while  “-” is for non-A dancers. 

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-   -   ~    ~    ~    ~

----- ~ ~~~~~~ ~~~~~ ----- ~~~~ ~~~~~~ ~~~  ~ ----~ ~---- -~~- --~-~-~~ --~- --~---~-~ ---~---~ --          --      -    -  ~

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According to my notes, the two non-A leading dancers never changed their positions while changes among the rest four leaders of Unit A are not uncommon.

Another interesting thing is, Chen told me that a male dancer who worked in Unit A insists on standing on the west side of the group, for he thinks the division "is ridiculous." 

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Been reading works of feminist geographers' in these days, such as McDowell's Gender, Identity and Place and Dolores Hayden's The Power of Place. Moreover, I'm also trying as best as I can to read through Prof. Jameson's cognitive mapping, The Imagine of the City by Kevin Lynch, David Harvey's chapters in his various books, and a number of works by the Situationalists (from Deboard to Lefebvre and Certeau). The two syllabi I came across on the other day by Cindi Katz on Gender and Environment/ Sexuality and Space and The Social Construction of Space and Time help me a lot in framing new readings. 

Reading at the end of the fieldwork (only a week left) keeps reminding me of what prof. Leo Ching told me quite a while ago that "theories are nothing if they don't help you to think." They definitely do. things I observed and questions hovering over my head through the months are still messy, but I think I finally find the direction where an understanding of the hidden order of things can be made possible. Perhaps through and beyond the summer project, it finally leads me here that I guess feminist geography is one of the areas I really want to continue to work on.

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Visited the home of an occasional dancer who I enjoyed talking with on site. She once shared with me her experience as a painting lover and her effort to get a degree in interior designing as a full-time accountant and a mother. Above are ones she did in late 1970s when she was a teenager. On the left is an imitation of a poster while on right is that of Marx and Engels.

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The first field notebook of mine! Through May 25 - July 25

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"Aging and being beautiful are two entirely different matters. Life is like going through the seasons and it's only a change of sceneries. You can't just appreciate the spring while disparage the winter."

Said Leading dancer Yang yesterday between two dances when another granny was flipping through the photo album on her phone and moaned.

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Talked with the security guard again tonight. He's been nice to me (-suggesting several time to bring me a chair to sit when watching the dance-) since our last long talk some two weeks before. He said the security gates of the nearby housing estate, which requires a magnetic key to open, was not installed until this April. The same gates are erected simultaneously at the three estates owned by working unit A, where most of its employees live.

I am interested in the gate because to my knowledge the gates make the three yards the first ones in town to be segregated. By "segregated" I mean people who are not tenants of the three estates are largely limited from accessing them. The story of the gates coincide with my interest of the privatization of domesticity of people in such large working unit. Although I doubt how effective the separation is, but more importantly, the doors visually there. In fact, the security guard said he didn't take the installation so much of security concern as of a "project" of the property management, which is lucrative in the process of the construction. 

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Xi'an city held a public hearing on "noise pollution"

related reports:

http://news.hsw.cn/system/2014/07/21/051977818.shtml

http://news.hsw.cn/system/2014/07/21/051977802.shtml

http://www.chinanews.com/fz/2014/07-23/6418625.shtml

Overheard grannies discussing the hearing tonight when we were to leave site A. So basically the problem of guangchangwu was highlighted in reports of the hearing which was supposed to deal with many other kinds of noise. Still, I am not at all interested in the issue of the exact decibel. To be sure, I do not mean people living near a dancing site are not bothered; in fact, the reason why I became interested in the dance is that I was so much annoyed by the loud music played when I was in Guangzhou two years ago.

Nevertheless, what I am worried about over this stately issue of noise pollution is that it simplifies the problem (of gender, for example) which is only revealed by the noise. The legitimation of privacy dignifies whatever concepts that it seeks to establish and hence delineates the problematic boundary it arbitrarily embraces, while too many issues are left unexamined or even unquestioned. By defining noise by the ever so scientific decibel level, the whole history and event of why the music is there, who is dancing, why they need/have to dance, and what does it mean for them, and for those who don't, to dance there in those particular places become secondary, if of any level of importance at all.

I don't know how and where the legislating process would go and here's only for the record.

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Thrilled to learn a book titled Insurgent Public Space: Guerrilla urbanism and the remaking of contemporary cities last night when I was about to sleep. Caroline Chen's chapter 2 (Dancing in the streets of Beijing: Improvised uses within the urban system) totally had me. Wrote to her already and wish I could have a chance to talk with her!

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As against this privileging of sovereign power, I wanted to show the value of an analysis which followed a different course. Between every point of a social body, between a man and a woman, between the members of a family, between a master and his pupil, between everyone who knows and everyone who does not, there exist relations of power which are not purely and simply a projection of the sovereign's great power over the individual; they are rather the concrete, changing soil in which the sovereign's power is grounded, the conditions which make it possible for it to function.

Michel Foucault: Power/Knowledge, 187

I'm so, so excited to read this interview in which Foucault made explicit his notion of the relations of power. I've been trying to understand the however subtle contradictions over the organization of the dance groups through the fieldwork: say, the initiator has told me quite a few times that she's not a people person and she refuses to be institutionalized all her life; meanwhile, the way she organizes and supervises Group A appears to have much in common with what she shuns. Foucault's talk on the first volume of The History of Sexuality, indeed this entire collection of interviews on power and knowledge, helps a lot in thinking through the multiple tiny sites on which the power structure emerges and how the practice of that structure is integrated and articulated in individual participants' own life experience.

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The leading dancer invited me to their Taiji session on Tuesday morning. It is sweltering today --79F~108F-- and was nearly 90F when I went out at 8 am. They played a variety of Taiji, from the barehand style to those with fans or a sword.

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Taiji with double fans (shuangshan)

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I went back to Tani Barlow's account on funü and nüxing again:

Internal Party debates over what to call the subject women in revolutionary praxis actually continued for decades. An alternative, massified, politicized subject known in CCP diction as funü eventually superseded both the Confucian protocols of funü and the eroticized subject nüxing. In Maoist rhetoric, funü referred to a national subject that stood for the collectivity of all politically normative or decent women. Under the Maoist state’s centralizing discourses, funü got resituated, first within the guojia (state) and then, secondarily, through the magic of revolutionary social praxis and ideological metonymy, in the modern jiating (family). In other words, Maoism reversed the older convention of woman within and man outside. It imagined a national woman, funü, intertwined directly in state processes over the period of social revolution and socialist modernization who, because of her achievements as a state subject, would modernize family practices.

(Tani Barlow: The question of women in Chinese feminism, 38, my emphasis)

I mean.. It seems fair to understand this very notion of funü as a generational one. Then, is it possible that dama are precisely the funü that are getting old?