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Wang Haiying, a professor at the School of Music of SCNU and director of the Ministry of Education’s national heritage base for Lingnan traditional dance, was featured in the Insights program on the Chinese national television channel CCTV on May 9. In the interview, she shared how Lingnan dance has grown from a regional tradition into a nationally recognized art form.
The concept of “Lingnan dance” was first proposed in 2005 by renowned choreographer Chen Qiao. A year later, SCNU became one of the first institutions to launch systematic research into the form. Wang, serving as artistic director, helped establish the SCNU Lingnan Dance Troupe and began collecting dance materials across three major subgroups in Lingnan (a term referring to China’s southern regions including Guangdong Province, Hong Kong and Macao): Cantonese, Teochew, and Hakka.
Wang Haiying (right) with Chen Qiao (center), and Chen’s husband.
“True dance wisdom lives among the people,” Wang said. Over 19 years, Wang and her team have traveled to villages across Lingnan to build a “Lingnan Dance Gene Bank.” The fieldwork has yielded more than one million words of academic achievements and nearly 100 original works.
Wang leads the approved key project of the National Social Science Fund of China on “Research into the Discourse System of Lingnan Dance,” and her edited volume Chinese Ethnic and Folk Dance (Women’s Class) has been named a national planned textbook for undergraduate education under the 14th Five-Year Plan. In November 2019, SCNU was named the sole dance-focused institution among the 25 heritage bases in the Ministry of Education’s second national batch.
On top of that, Wang has brought Lingnan dance into primary and secondary schools. As one of the first universities selected and the leading organizer for Guangdong Province’s aesthetic education program, SCNU has introduced routines such as the Long Drum Dance exercise and the Lion Dance exercise into daily school life, reaching more than 130 schools across the province. Graduate students have carried the tradition further through volunteer teaching in Xizang, Xinjiang and other regions.
The team instruct students under the aesthetic education program.
Works by the SCNU Lingnan Dance Troupe have earned top national dance honors, including awards at the Lotus Awards for Chinese Dance and the National College Student Art Exhibition and Performance, and have been featured on CCTV on multiple occasions.
Wang Haiying (center) with the SCNU Lingnan Dance Troupe.
Source from SCNU News Center
Translated by Chen Bao, Xie Shaochai
Proofread by Edwin Baak
Edited by Li Ning
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