Differences between Chinese and Western Cultures in Modern Dance

On the Cultural Differences between China and the West in Modern Dance

Modern dance is a dance school that rose in the west in the early 20th century, as opposed to classical ballet. Modern dance in different regions has different characteristics. The following is what I searched for you about the cultural differences between China and the West in modern dance. Welcome to read, I hope you like it!

First, cultural differences.

Dance is a kind of world culture and art, and artists from all over the world are constantly striving to innovate for the development of local dance art, but a country's local culture is limited and the world is vast. So since the last century, many great artists have combined world culture with local culture. In the process of this combination, they didn't care about cultural differences. For example, in 1950s, American avant-garde dancer Morse Cunningham got an English version of China's The Book of Changes, which is a rare treasure. From this ancient philosophical work, he gained important enlightenment to the ever-changing dialectical thought of everything in the world. At the same time, he applied the principle of divination to his own dance creation, forming an "opportunity choreography". Mr. Cunningham seems to have never felt the shock of oriental culture, and no one in China or the world questioned the "Americanization" of the art they created. Obviously, cultural differences are like a pair of "carrying poles", which only exist in the feelings of oriental dancers. There are many reasons for this situation, but an important factor is the unbalanced development of modern eastern and western cultures, which leads to the unbalanced mentality of eastern dancers in cultural exchanges, or the western modern dance culture is overwhelmed by the overwhelming trend sweeping the world, losing its local position with dogmatic learning attitude, or suffering from the weakness of its own culture, and not enough cultural accumulation to surpass the influence of other cultures. However, in any case, we must face up to the fact that differences do exist, and our own modern dance culture is constantly established by solving these differences. To this end, our first problem is to clearly understand how the differences occur. It is an indisputable fact that the development of modern oriental dance is fully influenced by western dance culture. This influence first lies not in the strength of western dance culture, but in the internal needs of the development of oriental culture itself. As Lukacs, a contemporary western Marxist, said, "The reason why a nation accepts truly significant and profound external influences is because the former meets some internal requirements of the latter". So our focus should be on the acceptance of the latter rather than the influence of the former.

Due to historical reasons, it is also an indisputable fact that the modern development of oriental culture is in a relatively sluggish state. When a new era, a new life and a new experience, we need a new artistic language and its expression and dissemination. When the cultural development is weak and the accumulation is scarce, it is inevitable for modern oriental dancers to ride the west wind to advance eastward-to impact the closed state of local culture with foreign culture and express and reveal their new sensory experience with foreign body language symbols. Then, success is here and failure is here. In the research results of anthropologists, language is an important part of human culture and a way to convey the feelings and experiences of human life. Language symbols give us the experience, form and color of the world around us. Therefore, different languages lead to different ways of thinking. Dance language, a body language with the same language common features, is formed in a specific cultural soil and ecological environment, and expresses the living state of a specific nation with a specific national thinking mode. Therefore, when oriental dancers express their cultural and national life experience by drawing lessons from their own, the distance between two cultures, two environments, two ways of thinking and two experiences will inevitably be clearly highlighted. If we don't know enough about this distance and difference and don't change the language system in cultural reference, cultural differences and conflicts will be inevitable because of their incompatibility.

Second, nationality and internationality.

Nationality and internationality are two slogans that modern dancers talk about. Generally speaking, the former is an effort to seek "nationalization" of foreign culture, while the latter is the pursuit of "globalization" of national culture. There is no doubt that the correctness of these two methods is beyond reproach. The former wants to be recognized by China people, while the latter wants to be recognized by the world. But the recognition of the world seems to be more authoritative and persuasive, so I hope that the modern dancers in the East will be in line with the international standards. However, we just easily deviate from the original intention of modern artistic creation. Because it is the current value standard centered on western culture, oriental dancers are often in the selected position, especially in order to cater to the oriental art of his culture, it is hard to say how many oriental national cultures are independent.

In fact, body language, as the earliest language form of human beings, is a poetic expression of life. The essence of dance as an art form lies in its contribution to the development of life. Therefore, some great artistic creations were born out of artists' concern and timely thinking about how to solve the problems of national life. The great achievements of contemporary eastern and western modern dancers also come from this.

In 1970s, pina bausch, a German modern dancer, became the pioneer and core figure of the modern dance theater in the world. Her broken, depressed and violent dance drama either confuses the audience or makes the audience flock to it, but what people look forward to is not the superficial broken, depressed and violent form, but the state of German spirit after the war, the essence of interaction between men and women or people, and the profound reflection on modern German culture. The value of pina bausch's art lies in that it bears the broken and heavy spirit of the whole postwar German.

Therefore, can we say that the international orientation of art lies not only in the form that artists can pursue, but in the connotation of life and emotion in this form, especially in the reflection of the living state of the nation and the thinking and solution of its obvious problems? It is said that only nations belong to the world, and nations belonging to the world are often the best. The value of this view lies not in its emphasis on the national culture itself, but in the fact that it points out that the successful experience in solving the survival problems of specific ethnic groups in the national culture has universal human significance.

Therefore, in the cultural exchange between the East and the West, we should pay attention to the acceptance of the East rather than the influence of the West. When we cut the tentacles of art into the most sensitive nerve of the nation, our art will have an impact and shock. Only by relying on the philosophical and aesthetic cornerstones of national culture can our modern art have cultural breadth, aesthetic height and philosophical depth, and our artistic localization will become a reality. When we successfully solve the artistic way of our own national life and provide experience for other nationalities, the internationalization orientation of oriental national art has become an indisputable fact.

Expand:

Characteristics of modern dance:

To sum up, the characteristic of modern dance is that it has no characteristics. It urgently pursues individuality, modernity and originality. Generations of modernist dancers have been constantly trying to update their designs to show off their new discoveries in dance. Helen Tominis, an American modernist dancer, summed up the uniqueness of modern dance and said, "There is no universal law, and every artist is creating his own code."

In the specific practice of dance creation, its characteristics are roughly embodied as follows:

1. Dance can also be a "pure action" performance that does not express "self".

2, with the action, there is everything, and there is no requirement for the action to reflect anything;

3. Try to exclude the subjective role of dancers in the creation, so that the creation is not dominated by consciousness, but has maximum arbitrariness;

4. Dance is characterized by the loss of objectivity in content and vague meaning. What the viewer thinks is what he thinks;

5. Dance moves towards non-dance, and any action in people's lives is regarded as dance.

Aesthetic concept of modern dance;

The main point of modern dance is to oppose the formalism tendency of classical ballet, which is conformist, divorced from social life and simply pursuing skills. It advocates getting rid of the rigid movement procedure of classical ballet, freely expressing people's true feelings with dance movements that conform to the laws of natural movement, and emphasizes that dance art should reflect modern social life. It reflects the contradictions in modern western society and people's psychological characteristics, so it is called "modern dance".

The artistic pursuit of modern dance;

Modern dance emphasizes that dancers must combine body and soul, and advocates that body movements must develop into the natural language of soul. Regardless of any existing dance forms and recognized dance rules, without the restriction of formal beauty rules, we constantly get inspiration from nature and national culture and design any dance style at will. There is also a great breakthrough in plot design, which does not show characters, storylines, life scenes, abstract concepts, "self", inner impulses, instincts, subconscious, intuition, hallucinations and dreams.

Technical movements of modern dance;

Graham, the founder of the greatest technical theory of modern dance, established his own artistic theory and technical principles according to the basic principles of human movements. She put forward that the law of dance movements is composed of falling and rising, balance and imbalance. Her technical theory centers on breathing. She studied the physical changes between breathing and inhaling, and thought that dancers could use breathing to push their bodies to rotate, jump, fall and lift. Rudolf Laban, a Hungarian, established a relatively complete training system for modern dance schools. He created a training method, called the natural law, which summarized the composition of human movements into eight elements: "cutting, pressing, rushing, twisting, sliding, flashing, knocking and floating", and thought that all kinds of movements could be formed by correctly handling the relationship between the elements. In postmodern dance, free play has become the main form of dance movement training. Free-form physical training not only highlights the professor's personal style, but also includes various explorations of time, space and energy.

Musical characteristics of modern dance;

Modern dance opposes the "dictatorship" of music and advocates the creation of "free and independent dance". Among them, they are committed to cutting off the relationship between dance and music and establishing dance without music. In addition, they regard every part of the body as a musical instrument, and when the whole body moves, it is like a touching melody played by a symphony of the body. Therefore, in modern dance, whether there is music, what kind of music it is, and what kind of musical instrument it uses are not so important.

;