Dancing class: Schooling the dance in colonial and post-colonial Hong Kong

Dancing class: Schooling the dance in colonial and post-colonial Hong Kong

• Vertinsky, Patricia School of Human Kinetics, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
• McManus, Alison Institute of Human Performance, University of Hong Kong
• Sit, Cindy Institute of Human Performance, University of Hong Kong

Sport, Education and Society, 12(1), 73-92, 2007

Routledge

2007

• M Teachers & Education for Teachers
  • MA Professional Education for Teachers
• G Curriculum, Teaching & Learning: Specific Disciplines
  • GH Sport Science, Health & Welfare
    • GHA Teaching Objectives, Curriculum & Evaluation

Physical Education Dance Dance Education Foreign Countries Teacher Education History Curriculum Foreign Policy Elementary Secondary Education Hong Kong

• Hong Kong

• 1990-1997.6
• 1997.7 onwards

• Secondary Education

Dance education has not played a significant role in Hong Kong schools. Teacher education may be at a crossroads in determining its future directions in relation to dance as art rather than physical activity. Taking Marcel Mauss's characterizations of the techniques of the body as the ways in which, from society to society, people learn how to use their bodies, this paper looks back at the context in which forms of dance education were introduced into the physical education curriculum of Hong Kong schools and examines social, cultural and political constraints upon their directions and development in a colonial and post-colonial society. Viewing dance education as forms of socially mediated practices, we show how bodies that are subjected to formal and informal programmes of dance education can be both inscribed and inscribing. Developments in dance education inevitably involve statements about the body, attempts to capture it, impose disciplines upon it, or mitigate their force. To reflect upon Hong Kong's changing destiny is to ask how the history of colonialism's disciplining of the body can be shaken loose from the domination of categories and ideas it produced and incorporated into the educational system, and what potency might dance education practices have in the future for troubling and negotiating meanings around identity and "Chinese-ness".
[Copyright of Sport, Education and Society is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13573320601081575 ]

• English

Journal Articles

• 13573322

• 10.1080/13573320601081575

https://bibliography.lib.eduhk.hk/bibs/bee99619

2010-09-08