http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/20/arts/dance/20dai.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Dai Ailian, the doyenne of dance in China, who as founder of the Beijing
Dance Academy and director of its affiliated National Ballet combined her ballet
and modern-dance training in the West with pioneering research into China's folk
traditions, died on Feb. 9 in Beijing. She was 89 and had divided her time in
recent years between Beijing and London.
Her death was reported by The Independent in London and The Shenzhen Daily in
China.
Ms. Dai was a familiar figure in international dance circles, first as a
dancer and choreographer who performed in London in the 1930's and in New York
in the 40's, then as the guiding force in China's first state-sponsored national
ballet institutions after the Communist government came to power in 1949.
In her remarkable life's journey, she both established ballet in China and
introduced the country's little-known ethnic traditions abroad. When the Central
Ballet of China, as the National Ballet of China was then called, made its New
York debut at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1986, Mayor Edward I. Koch paid
tribute to Ms. Dai from the stage.
Born in Trinidad and of Chinese descent, Ms. Dai spoke no Chinese when she
left London, where she had been studying, for China at the end of 1939. At the
outbreak of World War II, the China Institute in London offered to repatriate
Chinese students living there.
Ms. Dai was included although she was several generations removed from China:
her great-grandparents, she said, immigrated to Trinidad, where she was born on
May 10, 1916. "I had never been to China, but being Chinese, I always wanted to
go," she said. "My interest was to discover the Chinese dance and to develop
it."
After early training in Trinidad, Ms. Dai and her two sisters had been taken
by their mother to London in 1931 to study ballet with Anton Dolin. A former
star of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, Dolin kept up his connection with Ms. Dai,
and in 1983 he staged his showpiece ballet "Variations for Four" for the Central
Ballet.
In London, Ms. Dai also studied ballet with two other well-known teachers,
Margaret Craske and Marie Rambert. Her modern-dance training was mainly of the
German Expressionist persuasion, as her mentors were Kurt Jooss, Sigurd Leeder,
Rudolf von Laban and Ernest Berke. She learned the dance notation system known
as Labanotation, which she introduced into China.
As a choreographer, dancer and director, Ms. Dai drew upon this diverse
background throughout her career. Her first activities in China after giving
concerts for war relief in Hong Kong in 1940 were devoted to researching folk
dances of China's minority peoples in various regions. At this time she married
the distinguished painter Ye Qianyu. They were divorced in 1956.
As a prominent figure in dance before 1949 who was not averse to
choreographing works in support of China's new regime, Ms. Dai was a natural
choice to lead the dance institutions she helped develop. In 1949, she was named
deputy director of the Central Song and Dance Ensemble, and in 1954 she founded
the Beijing Dance Academy, becoming its principal in 1955. She also headed
China's first major ballet company, the Experimental Ballet Troupe, which was
reorganized as the Central Ballet of China in 1959. She was the company's deputy
director, then director in 1963 and '64, until she was removed during the
Cultural Revolution and reportedly did manual labor; her second husband, Ding
Ning, a dancer, divorced her during the Cultural Revolution. She was reinstated
as artistic adviser in 1978.
An elegant woman who retained her British accent, she traveled to
international dance events and was a juror at the 1990 New York International
Ballet Competition. She restaged some of her works in 1989 for the London-based
Chinese Dance and Mime Theater. In 1981, the Royal Academy of Dance placed a
bust of her in its London foyer.
