SanSan Kwan's Kinesthetic City is a welcome addition to the fields of sinology, dance studies, and urban studies, especially at a time when these areas are being re-examined and even contested. This engaging book draws upon Kwan's auto-ethnographic experience as a movement practitioner who traveled to various sinophone cities, observing the kinesthesia and bodily movements of dancers and people on the streets. She pinpoints five urban spaces for the three main chapters, flanked by a preface, an introduction, and an epilogue. In Shanghai, Taipei, Hong Kong, New York, and Los Angeles, she draws upon concert dance and pedestrian movement examples in relation to the respective Chinese urban spaces at critical historical junctures, using her own awareness as a flâneuse walking, biking, or driving through these cities as her points of reference. Kwan writes: “Putting kinesthesia and movement analysis together to understand recent formations of Chineseness relies fundamentally on a theory that moving bodies, space, time and community identity are interrelated processes that can, in fact, be studied through choreography as both subject and method” (xxxv).

In the Preface, Kwan analyzes Shanghai Tango (2005), by transgendered female choreographer Jin Xing, as an embodiment of the feminine aspect of a city that emphasizes commerce and culture, both associated with the feminine (xxx). Then in the first chapter, she reveals how Cloud Gate Dance Theatre's three signature works, Legacy (premiered in 1978), Nine Songs (1993), and Moon Water (1998), are ways of choreographing nationalism when, paradoxically, Taiwan is a nation-state that is not formally recognized by China. Chapter Two draws upon two vastly different ‘case studies’ from Hong Kong. The first is a full-length concert dance piece choreographed by Helen Lai for City Contemporary Dance Company (CCDC), which addresses the issue of the then-looming 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China by the British. Titled Revolutionary Pekinese Opera: Millenium Mix, Kwan highlights the jaggedness of the work and juxtaposes it with her other example from Hong Kong, the banned-in-China Falun Gong religious mass protests (which often take place in meditative stillness in public outdoor spaces). Kwan argues that the effective use of stillness, incorporated in both Lai's concert dance piece and the Falun Gong outdoor sit-ins, countered the speed and “liquidity” of Hong Kong at the crucial time of the political handover.

Chapter Three is perhaps closest to Kwan's heart, since she lived in New York's Chinatown neighborhood (2001–2003), where the company founded by H. T. Chen is based. Kwan danced with Chen and Dancers from 1994 until 1996. Aptly choosing the 9/11 attack as a crucial point in American history, she analyzes Chen's post-9/11 ritual piece Apple Dreams, which premiered in 2007 at the Winter Garden of the World Financial Center, located adjacent to the site of the former World Trade Center. Apple Dreams is loosely based on Victor Turner's model for social drama “as a way a society experiences and recuperates from traumatic events” (98). For the Epilogue, Kwan takes us to the ‘ethnoburbs’ of Los Angeles's San Gabriel Valley, where the more affluent recent sinophone immigrants from China and Taiwan choose to live. Interestingly enough, Kwan's dance analysis this time is centered on Hood, Veil, Shoes (premiered in 2007, Taipei) by Los Angeles–based choreographer Cheng-chieh Yu from Taiwan. The piece was created with the Sun Shier (literally meaning “thirty” in Mandarin Chinese) Dance Theatre of Taiwan during Yu's visit to Taipei after having been away since 1989. The work is based on Yu's culture shock at seeing the busy Taipei traffic, filled with mopeds, cars, and pedestrians.

In the past few decades, with the economic and political rise of China, the topic of Chineseness has been hotly debated. This debate has been especially spearheaded by various critical scholars mainly from the already problematic field of Asian-American studies.

Like the views of some of these scholars, Kwan's discussion of the Chinese transnational imaginary also aims to decenter Chineseness from nation-state and ethnicity. In her Introduction (12–4), Kwan addresses Chineseness as one of the core themes throughout her book, interwoven with the specific locales and dance/movement case studies in different scenarios. Summarizing key arguments raised by Asian/Asian-American scholars such as Allen Chun, Ien Ang, Rey Chow, Aihwa Ong, and Donald Nonini in this debate, she acknowledges Shu-mei Shih's term “Sinophone Pacific” as a “logic that reconceptualizes Chineseness away from terms of nationality or polity” (9).

Shih's theoretical concept of the sinophone has gained wide attention since her book Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations Across the Pacific (Reference Shih2007) was published. In 2013, as co-editor of Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader, Shih reiterated that “the notion of the Sinophone [was coined] to designate Sinitic-language cultures and communities outside China as well as those ethnic communities within China, where Sinitic languages are either forcefully imposed or willingly adopted” (Shih 2013, 30). Shih, who taught at UCLA for many years, and recently at the University of Hong Kong, notes that “Sinophone as a concept … allows for the emergence of a critical position that does not succumb to nationalist and imperialist pressures and allows for a multiple-mediated and multiple-angulated critique … the Sinophone can also be considered a method” (2013, 39). Many papers in this vein were presented at the 2012 “Global Sinophonia” conference organized by the Association of Chinese and Comparative Literature (ACCL) and hosted by the Academia Sinica in Taipei.Footnote ¹ Kwan's book is a worthy addition to this discourse, engaging with Shih's notion of sinophone as method but via the analysis of corporeal movement and dance.

In addition to its academic aspect, Kwan's book is also a literary achievement. It is vividly written, with poignant insights and numerous photos taken by Kwan and her late husband Kenneth Speirs to illustrate the points in the text. I read through the chapters with great zeal for several reasons, the first being that the content is quite close to my heart. As a dance scholar from Taiwan, I lived in North America for extended periods of study, stayed for various lengths of time in all five of the urban centers she discusses, and have written about the works of Cloud Gate and City Contemporary Dance Company (1994, 2004, 2010, 2012). I was captivated by Kwan's sensitive kinesthetic awareness of her corporeal presence as she moved through the cities, situating her personal experience within a specific historical time and place, and thus providing contextualization to her readings of the choreographies in discussion.

Kwan's Introduction—the only section without photographs—lays the important foundation needed to persuade readers of her experimental ethnography, which is based on her own kinesthetic awareness, historical research, and creative writing skills. Drawing upon Pierre Bourdieu's theory of habitus, Lena Hammergren's idea of the flâneuse (via Walter Benjamin's flâneur), Saskia Sassen's “global cities,” Henri Lefebre's concepts of space, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, among others, she guides readers through the journey of her own moving body to the communal subjects' identities in the Chinese urban sites she discusses.

On a personal level, I have known Kwan for over a decade, since she first approached me as a graduate student conducting fieldwork for her doctoral dissertation (Kwan Reference Kwan2003).Footnote ² Since then, we have presented papers at the same panels, including the CORD conference at New York University in October 2001.Footnote ³ Other rendezvous took place at various dance symposia in Shanghai, Taipei, and Los Angeles over the years. Thus, to read the fruit of her years of labor was a much-anticipated moment indeed. I especially appreciated her chapters on Hong Kong and New York's Chinatown, as I felt she has a firm grasp of those cities' socio-economic politics as well as the aesthetics of the works analyzed.

However, I am a little less convinced by her chapters on Taipei and Los Angeles, both cities where I have lived for many years. As a resident of Taipei, I can truly associate with the crowdedness of walking the narrow streets and alleys that Kwan experienced during her stay. She conveys the sense of multiple modes of transportation moving together and around each other—“loosely, fluidly, ceaselessly,” with the “national kinesthesia” she observed in the dance of Cloud Gate as well (29). However, urban planners from the Japanese Occupation era in the early twentieth century also built large boulevards lined with trees and lawns (such as Ren-ai Road) for city-strollers, inspired by the Champs-Elysees, remnants of the early era of Westernization and urbanization.

In my opinion there are also a few discrepancies in the first chapter on Cloud Gate. For example, Kwan describes Cloud Gate as a “national” dance company of Taiwan (30). Obviously, the adjective “national” has many definitions, to be differentiated from “nationalistic.” Undoubtedly, Cloud Gate and its founder Lin Hwai-min's iconic status in Taiwan's cultural arena and in the international dance world often leads people to equate his company with a state-operated organization. Nevertheless, in order to remain autonomous, Lin stands firm in making sure that Cloud Gate functions under the Cloud Gate Dance Foundation, with currently only about one-third of its total revenue coming from state grants.Footnote ⁴

Kwan also writes that Lin Hwai-min's father, Lin Jin-sheng, was the former Minister of Culture (35). Although the senior Lin was a high-ranking officer, who had been elected Chiayi county mayor and served as the Minister of Transportation and Interior Affairs, among others, he did not serve under Taiwan's Ministry of Culture, which was only established in Reference Lin, Yunyu and Burridge2012, and was formerly known as the Council for Cultural Affairs.

As for the Epilogue on Chinese Los Angeles, another minor correction: Cheng-chieh Yu studied dance at the National Institute of the Arts (now the Taipei National University of the Arts) from 1984 to 1989 (then a five-year program), so could not have left for the United States in 1984, as Kwan states (135). More importantly, I wish to highlight a pertinent point about insider/outsider perspective. Cheng-chieh Yu, in her Hood, Veil, Shoes, originally intended to depict the tale of “Little Red Riding Hood” but eventually transformed the theme into one inspired by contemporary Taipei, where women in scooter helmets, rain ponchos, and red stilettos travel the city streets. The work is a response to Yu's amazement at such a sight upon having returned from the United States after years away. I attended the world premiere in Taiwan the year before it went on tour to UCLA, where Kwan saw it. Kwan notes that the Taiwanese director of the Shan Shier Dance company, Hsiu-ping Chang, “responded bemusingly [sic] that Yu's was an outsider's perspective of Taipei. The perceived threat of violence and the new phenomenon of women drivers was not something a local would take note of” (137). Indeed, one often is blind to what may seem highly unusual situations to outsiders. I found it amusing that my own reaction was more akin to that of Hsiu-ping Chang, as I constantly witness our students—male and female alike—roaming about campus and the streets of Taipei on their motorcycles, oblivious to the possible danger or “violence” (in the words of Yu) which may arise.Footnote ⁵

In the concluding paragraph to the Epilogue on “Los Angeles Embedded in Taipei,” Kwan writes: “The leap I make from the personal-kinesthetic to the socio-spatial is a risky one” (140). Indeed, some readers may go along with Kwan on this whole journey, while those who know the “routes,” so to speak, may be curious to compare Kwan's interpretation with their own kinesthetic experience of the cities mentioned.

The interdisciplinary discussions among dance, history, and politics have certainly contributed to enlarging the field of dance studies. Kwan's book, along with works by various dance scholars from Taiwan (such as Ya-Ping Chen Reference Chen2011, Yuh-jen Lu Reference Lu2002, Chiayi Seetoo Reference Seetoo2013, and myself 2014), Hong Kong (such as Wai-luk Lo Reference Lo2010), and China (Jiang Dong Reference Jiang2007), among others, including those published in the sinophone language, contribute to the interconnected globalized fields of dance studies, urban studies, and sinophone studies, regardless of language barriers.