Performers › Stage Performers
Dai Ailian
Dancer and teacher who drew on Yao, Yi and Tibetan folk dance for Yao Drum and Lolo Love Song and staged the 1946 Frontier Music and Dance Festival in Chongqing.
Mural of the cultural record “Dances of the Southern Peoples”, which this person is tied to.
Dai Ailian, whose family came from Jiangmen in Guangdong, was born in Trinidad in 1916. From 1930 she trained in ballet and modern dance in London, studied with Mary Wigman and Kurt Jooss, and learned Laban's system of movement analysis. Back in China she taught at the Yucai School in Chongqing and elsewhere, collected folk dances in Xikang and western Sichuan, and created Yao Drum and Lolo Love Song; in 1946 her Frontier Music and Dance Festival in Chongqing brought the folk dances of many peoples onto the modern stage for the first time. She later made Lotus Dance and Flying Apsaras, headed the Beijing Dance School and the Central Ballet, and promoted Labanotation. She died in Beijing in February 2006.
Life and times
- 1916 CEBorn
Republican Era
Modern Era - 2006 CEDied
Works
Stage · Dances3- Lotus Dance1953Dai Ailian's group dance drawn from a Longdong folk lantern dance, a prize-winner at the 1953 World Youth Festival
- Spring Outing1946 (Frontier Music and Dance Plenary, Chongqing)A dance Dai Ailian adapted from Tibetan dance, staged in Chongqing in 1946
- Luoluo Love Song1946 (Frontier Music and Dance Plenary, Chongqing)A group dance by Dai Ailian based on the court dance of the aristocratic Black Yi, staged in Chongqing in 1946