Revolutionary Bodies: Chinese Dance and the Socialist Legacy by Emily Wilcox is the first English-language academic monograph on the national and socialist dances of the People's Republic of China (PRC). Tracing the history of dance development in Mainland China over eighty years from 1935 to 2015, with a focus on the years from the 1940s to the 1960s, Wilcox elaborates on the birth and development of Chinese concert dance in relation to the upheavals of socialism. The book challenges a monolithic reading of socialist dance as purely revolutionary ballet and presents instead that Chinese dance is comprised of a set of new and dynamic concert genres composed of subcategories of Chinese classical dance and Chinese national folk dance. This combination of subcategories remains representative of China's national and mainstream concert dance. Through over a decade of ethnographic and archival research, Wilcox collects an impressive amount of previously unexamined primary data to construct a history of Chinese dance. While her research grounds English readers in significant dance history of the PRC, it also provides scholars in China with an alternative approach to historicizing dances of their country.

Revolutionary Bodies demonstrates Wilcox's methodological rigor in constructing the history of Chinese dance through unexamined resources. For over a decade, Wilcox conducted intensive ethnographic work in different places of Mainland China. In Beijing, she received training in Chinese dance as a visiting graduate student at the Beijing Dance Academy, China's premier professional dance conservatory. Immersing herself in daily dance classes, Wilcox learned Chinese classical dance and folk dance from the most prestigious dance teachers in China, who were the leading practitioners and researchers of Chinese dance in the PRC. This learning experience from different teachers on their fields of expertise equipped Wilcox with a broad vision and in-depth understanding of the diversity of Chinese dance. To collect oral histories, Wilcox travelled across China and interviewed over 150 influential Chinese dancers and choreographers. The places that she visited included Chongqing, Fujian, Guangdong, Inner Mongolia, Liaoning, Shaanxi, Shandong, and Sichuan. Besides ethnographic work, Wilcox conducted intensive archival research. She combed through film footage, photographic documentation, performance programs, essays, and journal articles that were previously unexamined for their involvement in Chinese dance history. She also discovered important publications from the 1940s, before the establishment of the PRC. By incorporating these significant resources in her book, Wilcox presents previously unnoticed material affecting historical twists of Chinese dance and illustrates in detail the genre's complicated history, one interwoven with political change.

A socialist concert performance form created in the 1940s, Chinese dance, according to Wilcox, emerged with three core commitments in mind—“kinesthetic nationalism,” “ethnic and spatial inclusiveness,” and “dynamic inheritance” (6). Kinesthetic nationalism refers to the belief that aesthetic form, rather than content or performer, distinguishes Chinese dance. Ethnic and spatial inclusiveness is the notion that Chinese dance embraces styles and artists from all ethnic communities and geographic regions across China. Dynamic inheritance is a cultural theory that Chinese dance artists, through researching existing forms and generating original interpretations of these forms, keep innovating Chinese dance to maintain its relevance to the contemporary world, based on the belief that tradition inherently changes. Wilcox argues that these three commitments have defined Chinese dance and given “the genre revolutionary potential at different times” (6). They not only govern the creation of Chinese dance in the “seventeen years” (shiqinian: 1949–1966) before the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), but also manifest as principles in producing concert Chinese classical and folk dance in PRC during the New Era (1978–). Her first three chapters respectively elaborate the birth (1940s), development (1950s), and golden age (late 1950s–early 1960s) of Chinese dance. The fourth chapter contextualizes the rise of revolutionary ballet through analyzing the often-tense relationship between ballet and Chinese dance. The fifth and sixth chapters, focusing respectively on dance drama in the early 1980s and works in the twenty-first century, illustrate how the three commitments permeate dance creation in the New Era and render the dancing bodies in this era consistently red and socialist.

In Revolutionary Bodies, Wilcox challenges common misconceptions of the United States about socialist dance in the PRC. Firstly, Wilcox argues that ballet maintained a subordinate position relative to Chinese dance before the Cultural Revolution, which challenges the misperception that ballet played a dominant role throughout the PRC's dance history. Through detailed examination of historical texts, Wilcox demonstrates that in China's early socialist era, ballet served as the cultural “Other,” and Chinese dance represented the cultural “Self” (122). Instead of borrowing vocabulary from ballet, Chinese dance artists chose to reconstruct their own dance forms to represent the new nation. According to Wilcox, Chinese dance, not ballet, was the actual legitimized national dance in the PRC during the early socialist decades. Secondly, through analyzing the presentation of Chinese dance on the international stage in the 1950s and early 1960s, Wilcox corrects American assumptions that China was a culturally isolated country during the early years of the Cold War. She lists over sixty countries that Chinese delegations had visited—and that showcased Chinese dance—from 1949 to 1967. These visits included countries in the socialist camp, such as the Soviet Union and East Germany, in addition to capitalist countries, such as the United Kingdom, Canada, and West Germany. The absence of the United States in this list, as Wilcox states, explains the persistent misperception of many Americans that China was excluded from global communications in this period (83–84). In addition, Wilcox introduces other foreign presentations of Chinese dance, such as its continual participation in the World Festival of Youth and Students (WFYS), a leading international venue for staging socialist art at the time. Wilcox believes that through WFYS, China contributed to constructing international dance trends and advertised new national and cultural images of the PRC on an international platform.

Wilcox interprets the word “Chinese” in the phrase “Chinese dance” as primarily related to the nation of the PRC and summarizes the strategies to create this national dance—research and remolding. She argues that Chinese dance artists conducted their research through multiple resources such as existing performing arts and ancient relics and texts, in order to collect potentially useful movement materials. They then remolded these movement materials to choreograph new dance works that embodied national ideologies of the PRC, such as the portrayal of women protesting feudalism, the shaping of lower-class characters of farmers and workers, and the telling of revolutionary tales. Wilcox defines the PRC as primarily socialist, such that the innovation of dance as a representation of Chinese nationalism served to legitimize socialist thoughts on gender, class, and revolution.

Although Revolutionary Bodies offers significant contributions, I would not be surprised to discover that dance scholars in China could find some arguments in the book problematic. For example, they could disagree with Wilcox's definition of Chinese dance. Dance scholars in China understand the word “Chinese” in “Chinese dance” as broader than referring to the nation of the PRC, as it signifies for them the persistence of traditional culture in the contemporary moment. Chinese scholars believe in a historically broader concept of Chinese dance, in which the socialist concert dance that Wilcox studies is just one step in its long history. Chinese dance scholars argue that even though socialism has been playing an important role in shaping the development of dance in China, traditional aesthetics embodied in Chinese concert dance existed long before the 1940s. The movement materials that Chinese artists in the 1940s used to create concert dance contained significant cultural and historical meaning handed down centuries ago. The cultural essence that these resources bore was inherited in concert dance and still exists today. This explains why Chinese dance scholars introduced Revolutionary Bodies as research on “modern and contemporary Chinese dance” (zhongguo xiandangdai wudao) in the event poster when Wilcox initiated her book launch in Beijing. In addition, dance scholars in China question whether Chinese dance after the Cultural Revolution, known as the New Era (1978–), is still socialist and revolutionary. They agree with Wilcox that Chinese dance works in the “seventeen years” (1949–1966) and the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) era are fundamentally socialist and Red, but disagree that works produced in the New Era remain socialist. For them, two changes differentiate the New Era's Chinese dance from socialism. For one, choreography after 1978 shifted from politically driven work to humanity-focused work. Chinese dance artists started to spontaneously explore the meaning of life and culture instead of continuing to create dance works as political propaganda. Next, the political system in the PRC underwent a transformation toward “socialism with Chinese characteristics” (zhongguo tese shehuizhuyi), a government policy that combined socialism and capitalism for the developing needs of the nation. Chinese dance scholars believe that the most influential policy in the New Era for Chinese dance was not socialism, but capitalism. Marketization, commercialization, and capitalist arts such as modern dance and popular culture greatly impacted on the development of Chinese dance after 1978. Overall, Revolutionary Bodies: Chinese Dance and the Socialist Legacy provides a significant introduction of Chinese dance to English readers. It opens up conversations on how to theorize Chinese dance in the United States and the PRC and establishes an important foundation for ongoing research in the future.