交谊舞到迪斯科:当代中国日常舞蹈的兴衰(下)

From Ballroom Dance to Disco: The Rise and Fall of the Daily Dance in Contemporary China(Ⅱ)

交谊舞与迪斯科舞同为1980年前后兴盛于中国大陆的社会文化现象,两者均为当代中国的社会变迁提供了一个来自民众身体、人际关系及日常生活领域的重要源头,与当时的意识形态、道德观念及文化政策法规产生了多层次的冲突与协商关系。本文分上、下两篇。上篇主要描述了交谊舞在1979年之后的复归、在社会上迅速而广泛的流传,以及与此一时期精英文化和民众文化所构成的互动关系。认为作为一种民众日常生活中的舞蹈,交谊舞与政治意识形态及国家文化政策法规之间产生了激烈的"拉锯",由此形成了20世纪80年代社会变革过程中的一种民众文化主导模式。下篇比较了交谊舞与迪斯科在舞蹈动作、舞会形态、音乐与场所及文化功能等方面的差异,描述了两者从同台迭代发展为相互区隔的过程,重点阐述了迪斯科舞对青年原子化个性形象、电子媒介技术的运用、城市建筑及城市文化等方面所造成的影响。本文认为,迪斯科舞厅既是当代城市消费文化的一个重要发源地,也是它曾经拥有的文化变革功能被娱乐文化及其资本力量所规训和终结的场所。

After the 'Ban on Dance' was cancelled, there emerged a variety of types of balls at the weekend nights in the large and medium-sized cities. People joined the balls with hope that they could find one or more partners so that they would dance continuously. Balls were the stages for common people, where they could be both the audience and the performer.While they were dancing, the partners had a closed and face-to-face relationship, a private one — 'only you and I' — temporarily built at the crowded and noisy public dancing floor. This relationship was more intimate than that between strangers in daily life and more aloof than that between the lovers;it is a social relationship in between. In this way, ballroom dance had established a brand new connection in terms of social body, experience, and emotion, which was totally different from the previous politicized interpersonal relationships and body behaviors. Dancing was not a type of hand-to-hand and shoulder-to-shoulder interpersonal relationship like that in the labor work or in revolution. It was also distinct from being in contact with other people while shaking hands as a social manner or in a crowded metro. The face-to-face relationship established within a piece of dancing music between the strangers was a special and one-time interpersonal relationship. A ball was like a public society composed of innumerable interpersonal relationships, in which people knew each other quickly and separated quickly, an 'accidental, transitional, and fleeting' modern experience.The balls at that time had elite features, represented by a sense of ritual, the western origin and style of the dancing music, and its close connection with western literature, arts, as well as film and TV works. More importantly, ballroom dance was mass-based and social. In the process of dancing, the self was made to be the leading role. People were the carriers to make this specific culture rise and popularize.As China saw the rising of ballroom dance, disco suddenly entered into mainland people’s life. The Chinese films at that time featured certain contents on disco. Different from promoting ballroom dance through television, disco was prevailing through film — the TV ownership in China's Mainland at that time was still quite low and there were larger group of audiences/users of film, radio, and tape recorder. The dissemination process of film as a central source of information was not a progressive transmission from the center to the edge. Rather, the information of film would not weaken, resulting in an average and extensive effect within the whole society.The body movements of disco are freer than those of ballroom dance. It seems to be an instinct of human body to dance spontaneously with the music. Relatively speaking, disco is a dance form free of thoughts, languages, and emotions. It is a type of dance for ordinary people, embodying the amateur spirit and the form of daily life and erasing the traditional sense of ritual of ballroom dance. At that time, most famous disco songs were in English. It brought by the features more heterogeneous than that of Waltz. It exposed a great number of Chinese dancers, who didn’t speak English at all, to the globalized and westernized settings without understanding the meanings of the lyrics or the cultural context. Also, disco is composed of lonely and self-fulfilling body movements. Through one’s body expression, every disco dancer could become a star-like dancing performer. Meanwhile, it coincided with people’s needs in the 1980 s, especially those rebellious urban young people;or at least it was the catalyst for the demand to rebel.In the 1980 s, the dancers of ballroom dance and disco could be in the same room. They built a unified dance text and a mixed scene in which two forms of music overlapped and performed together, which blended their differences as the importing cultures in terms of receiver, text, and historical context and constructed the iterative cultural practices that would actively absorb, integrate, and mutually conflict as needed. In the late 1980 s, when the break dance entered into the mainland, it emerged the iteration among ballroom dance, disco, and break dance on the same stage.In the 1990 s, a large number of private and foreign capitals built discotheques with spectacular architectural appearance in the central areas of the large and mediumsized cities. The inside of the discotheque was a text combining images, scenes, electronic technology, and capital. It had the dream-like lightening affect, professional audio control system, DJ guiding and adjusting the mood and atmosphere, luxury boxes, and bar services. It also hired some pretty girls as leading dancers or backing dancers. All of these can be seen as the systematic deployment of the young consumers’ body senses, making it a night paradise for a large number of urban young people. The discotheque was like the 'heart' of the metropolis, the most important source of the charm of the city. In this way, disco had become the forerunner of the contemporary cultural consumption, declaring the coalition between the body desire and capitalistic entertainment culture. Meanwhile, ballroom dance was transferred to the free public places and became a means for the elderly to keep fitness and make friends, locating in the same space as the square dance did. To today’s young people, ballroom dance is an insignificant and outdated physical skill, in the process of extinction. Similarly, the past instinctive impulse that body would swing and twist along with the disco music is disappearing. The cultural iterations in the social dance have moved toward the cultural separation. This may mean that the dance in daily life has become the plain and common life entertainment, losing the possibility to trigger further cultural change.