It was in Moscow that Chen satisfied the Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes, who was in the Soviet Union to movie “Black and White,” about race relations in the American South. The two commenced a flirtatious friendship (Hughes’s archives are filled with letters to her), however Chen mentions him in her memoir only in passing, producing that “Langston had been a sailor and walked like one particular.” She also provided a poem he wrote about her: “I am so unhappy/Over 50 percent a kiss/That with fifty percent a pencil/I publish this.”
Chen afterwards fulfilled Jay Leyda, an American movie pupil who was finding out with the Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein. They fell in appreciate and honeymooned in Leningrad ahead of relocating in 1937 to New York Town, exactly where Leyda was hired as an assistant movie curator at the Museum of Contemporary Artwork. Because of the Chinese Exclusion Act, Chen experienced to leave the United States just about every 6 months and reapply for re-entry.
In New York, Chen joined the socialist New Dance Theater and finalized her repertoire, which bundled dances celebrating the bad and doing the job-class of China (a beggar lady, a “rickshaw coolie”) and condemning bourgeois forms (“a jingoistic American lady” and “that very ‘arty’ type of artist,” as she wrote in her notes). She also introduced American audiences to dances from Soviet Central Asia.
All through the Next Sino-Japanese War (1937-45), she went on tour throughout the United States to increase revenue for the China Help Council. An posting about Chen ran in The New York Post with the headline, “Chinese Woman to Fight Japs with Dance of Propaganda.”
Despite her attempts to steer conversations towards the struggles going through the inadequate, reporters, present promoters and colleagues continued to sexualize and exoticize her. A flier for a 1938 effectiveness hosted by the American League for Peace and Democracy read, “Spend ‘A Night in China’ with Si-lan Chen, Exotic Danseuse.” John Martin of The New York Periods reported of her New York debut that calendar year: “She provides an eye-catching appearance, with a trig minor determine and a energetic and animated facial area. Her motion is crisp and intelligent and absolutely sure, with a little something of the characteristic clarity and precision of her race.”
Chen returned to now Communist-managed China in 1959. Invigorated by what she explained as a “new China, a socialist China,” she choreographed a ballet known as “Hu-tung” (“Lane”), which celebrated Beijing’s road tradition, with an emphasis on the video games she saw young children playing outside the house. It was accompanied by Bizet’s piano suite “Jeux d’Enfants.”
But the Chinese authorities reprimanded Chen for her option of Western new music — criticism that annoyed her simply because it was specifically this borrowing from and combining of cultures that was at the coronary heart of her philosophy of dance. Further, it was how she recognized her function in the environment as a mixed-race socialist fully commited to making intercontinental solidarity.
