{"id":62743,"date":"2022-01-11T15:56:25","date_gmt":"2022-01-11T15:56:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=62743"},"modified":"2022-01-19T02:06:57","modified_gmt":"2022-01-19T02:06:57","slug":"overlooked-no-more-si-lan-chen-whose-dances-encompassed-worlds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=62743","title":{"rendered":"Overlooked No More: Si-lan Chen, Whose Dances Encompassed Worlds"},"content":{"rendered":"

Overlooked No More: Si-lan Chen, Whose Dances Encompassed Worlds<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/a>
\n2021-05-27<\/p>\n

Jennifer Wilson<\/strong><\/a>, Contributing Writer
\nThe Nation<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a>
Si-lan Chen<\/a> in 1944. A socialist, she approached dance as a way to build international solidarity.
\nMan Ray 2015 Trust\/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, ADAGP, Paris 2021; Telimage<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.<\/em><\/p>\n

As a dancer and choreographer, she sought to represent a broad range of ethnic groups, but audiences often sexualized and exoticized her by focusing on her mixed race.<\/em><\/p>\n

In 1945, the dancer Si-lan Chen<\/a> sent a draft of her memoir to the writer Pearl S. Buck<\/a>, with a letter asking for her thoughts on why she was struggling to get the attention of a publisher.<\/p>\n

The problem, Buck explained, was that while Chen had dined with the Nationalist<\/a> leader Chiang Kai-shek<\/a> in revolutionary China<\/a>, had been romanced by the poet Langston Hughes<\/a> in Soviet Moscow<\/a>, and had worked in Hollywood<\/a> for the producer Joseph Mankiewicz<\/a>, no one actually knew who she was.<\/p>\n

The autobiography, Buck said, of a mixed-race girl growing up in Trinidad<\/a>, studying ballet at the Bolshoi<\/a> and choreographing films like \u201cAnna and the King of Siam<\/a>\u201d (1946), was too focused on, well, her…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As a dancer and choreographer, she sought to represent a broad range of ethnic groups, but audiences often sexualized and exoticized her by focusing on her mixed race.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,24,16,1245,21,8,20,25],"tags":[32743,6725,12367,32745,32740,2640,12823,32741,32788,32742,2327,32744],"class_list":["post-62743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-arts","category-asia","category-biography","category-latincarib","category-media-archive","category-usa","category-women","tag-chen-xuelan","tag-dance","tag-jennifer-l-wilson","tag-jennifer-louise-wilson","tag-jennifer-wilson","tag-new-york-times","tag-pearl-s-buck","tag-si-lan-chen","tag-sylvia-si-lan-chen","tag-sylvia-si-lan-chen-leyda","tag-the-new-york-times","tag-32744"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62743","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=62743"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62743\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62744,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62743\/revisions\/62744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=62743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=62743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=62743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}