Performers › Dramatists and Directors
Jia Zuoguang
Manchu dancer and choreographer who worked for decades in Inner Mongolia and, with Herding Horses and the Ordos Dance, set the vocabulary of Mongolian stage dance.
Mural of the cultural record “Mongolian and Northern Peoples' Dance”, which this person is tied to.
Also known as Called the Dance God of the East
Jia Zuoguang, a Manchu, was born in Shenyang, Liaoning, in April 1923. As a youth he trained at the actors' school of the Manchukuo Film Association under the Japanese dancer Ishii Baku, learning the basics of ballet and modern dance. He then spent decades in Inner Mongolia, distilling a Mongolian dance vocabulary from herders' daily life, and was called a son of the grasslands. His works include Herding Horses, the Ordos Dance, Ocean Waves and Rainbow; the Ordos Dance won a gold medal at the 1955 World Festival of Youth and Students. He formulated a ten-word code for dancers (steadiness, precision, agility, cleanness, lightness, softness, vigour, rhythm, beauty, feeling) and published a collection of writings on dance. He died of illness in Beijing on 6 January 2017.
Life and times
Dates 1923 CE–2017 CE