Jin Xing is now the only free-lance choreographer and director of an independent dance group in the whole of China. With commercial appearances of all kinds, including modelling and television appearances and commercials, she earns enough to live grandly with a house and car of her own. She has also turned to work in films and runs a hotel and small theatre.
Not only has her lifestyle changed. She has also bid farewell to all main roles in the Chinese style, to revolutionary ballet and to lyrical figural sequences. "I used to be a dance-machine" she said once with a smile. Now she is still keen to dance but only such roles, parts and themes as really interest her, and increasingly in an enthusiastic exchange with Western choreographers and ensembles.
In "Person to Person" (2002) for instance, produced for the House of World Cultures, the Berlin group Rubato and Jin Xing first wished to work on gender aspects of the movements of dancing, but Jin Xing was really not very keen on the theme.
It was already seven years since she had managed more or less to free herself from social norms and economic pressure, enabling her to assert the femininity of her movements.
She no longer wished to treat it as a problem - so viewers were offered no exotic scenes of Chinese ballet or a Shakespearean show of sexual confusion, with a man dancing as a woman impersonating a man. But "Person to Person" does have a lot to communicate about changes of sexual, social, artistic and political identity and how dancing can help define one's own way of life.
According to Jin Xing this is not to be had without paying a high price, but she herself embodies the will to pay it: "Complete happiness costs absolute pain. Only whoever suffers can live!" she says. Elsewhere she declares: "There is always enough space to accomplish something incredible."
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