Huang Zitong: The Significance of Ethnicity in Modern Dance
After watching Relationship, a performance held at the UK London on September 5th, we invited dance artist Zitong Huang for an interview about her outstanding works.
Image: Live performance at the Michaelis Theatre, Roehampton University on 5th Sep 2022. Pengcheng Zhang
“In such a fast-changing era, various cultures [from] around the world are being fused into a brand new form of contemporary culture, and it has become apparent that what’s important is the basis itself…And by basis, I mean the culture foundations, from which people get inspired” says Huang.
Image: Live performance at the Michaelis Theatre, Roehampton University. Ge Chen
As a traditional Korean-folk dancer, who has devoted herself to a new form of contemporary dance, Huang insists that her Asian identity has enabled her to distinguish herself from other contemporary dancers.
In Huang’s new choreography and performance piece, Guan Gea, meaning “Relationship”, dance techniques from both the eastern and western worlds have been adopted and integrated into a mixture of complex movements and emotion. To be specific, as Huang illustrates, techniques such as the Horton, Cunningham and Limon contribute to the overall texture of the movements; the features from Korean folk dance, such as the “unique breath of Korean”, imbue the dance with spiritual meaning and help Huang to convey emotion more directly to the audience. The performance is thus full of the melancholy of Korean ethnicity.”
Image: Live performance at the Michaelis Theatre, Roehampton University. Pengcheng Zhang
Not only limited to Korean folk dance, which mirrors Huang’s own ethnicity, Huang also explores the further possibilities of combining the different cultures of different countries. Having practiced and performed for more than 20 years, Huang has mastered 10 kinds of folk dance covering different regions of Asia.
Huang belives that no culture is superior to any other, and various different ethnicities have inspired her. In the 2022 Singapore Asian International Dance Competition, Huang’s Indonesian Dance Shadow of Arimbi won awards for both choreography and performance.
Image: Costume of Shadow of Arimbi. Hongqiuye Wei
Image: Rehearsals for Shadow of Arimbi. Hongqiuye Wei
Huang adds: “In Indonesian mythology, Arimbi resembles the goddess and the queen with the characteristics of a snake” Huang said. During the performance, Huang imagined herself as a 2-D shadow at first, with only subtle movements of the body, but sophisticated adjustments on hands and feet. As the performance progressed, more intense movements become dominant, where the 2-D shadow becomes stereoscopic, and finally the shadow becomes the goddess of the snake.
“It is only when people understand and love culture itself that they can appreciate the beauty of a piece of art. It is only when a dancer focuses on the story and emotion of a certain ethnicity, can they perform something meaningful to the audience” Huang explained.
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