In DanceSport, dancers interpret transnational physical and cultural aesthetics through their choreographic performances based on the diversified origins of the ten dance styles. Given the increasing prevalence of DanceSport in China, it has generated the moral controversy between the couple dance and Chinese traditional culture and has presented contextually-specific configuration. The interaction between DanceSport and Chinese culture allows Chinese female DanceSport dancers to express their own performative identities which meanwhile reshapes the meaning and values of Chinese society. In this study, I attempt to explore the way in which female dancers, through performances, conform to and/or confront mainstreamed feminine identity in Chinese society. With the application of Foucauldian Discourse Analysis, I analyzed the videos of 19 DanceSport performances in two Chinese national competitions to investigate how female dancers choreograph their performances and how their gendered identities are represented through these choreographies evoking broader interplay with social culture. Through five aspects—themes, costumes, stage props, art forms, and role-settings, I demonstrate how Chinese female DanceSport dancers represented their features in choreographies. The choice of themes in the 19 performances broke the intrinsic frame of DanceSport and was closely connected to the social culture. In regard to the costumes, the Chinese dancers followed DanceSport conventions, but they simultaneously combined them with the symbols of Chinese culture. In terms of the application of stage props, dancers took cultural context into consideration and selected typical objects to effectively identify a character, symbolize a certain custom or establish a specific backdrop. At the same time, 15 out of 19 performances combined multiple dance styles together breaking out of stereotyped images of each dance. However, most of the dance techniques performed by the 19 dance pieces were still confined in the frame of DanceSport conventions. The most distinct feature of these dance pieces are the characterized roles which convey dancers’ ideas and understanding of social values and norms. Throughout the analysis of these dance elements, on the one hand, female dancers are normalized by Chinese aesthetic culture including uniform rules, movement vocabularies, dance styles and dance techniques. On the other hand, these dancers interpret new gender roles through their choreographies, diversifying gender representations and moving DanceSport routines beyond the constricting gender norms of traditional DanceSport. Rather than foregrounding feminine images in DanceSport, Chinese dancers stretched the bounds of gendered restrictions via the interaction between DanceSport and Chinese society.
