Dai Ailian

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.