1
Creative Background
A Dancer's Homesickness continues Dong Jilan's years-long search for roots. It begins from returning to Dali, Yunnan and to Shilong Village, bringing tree, water, mountain paths, hearth, Bai folk song, and bodily memory back into the creative site.
The work is not simple nostalgia, nor does it turn home into stage scenery. It is closer to a return of attention: how can a dancer who has moved from village to world stage face the place she came from again, and transform the rhythms, labor, sounds, and natural textures of home into today's body language?
2
Homesickness Is Not Scenery
In this creative line, homesickness is not a distant place to look at. It is an order still living inside the body. Mountain paths shape the step. Tree shadow changes breath. Water sound pulls at stillness. Hearth and sitting together keep a memory of distance between people.
Dong Jilan places these details of life back inside the body, allowing movement to become a form of recognition. She recognizes where she comes from, and how tradition still affects muscle, joint, center of gravity, and breath today.
3
Relation to Other Works
If Ba Wang Whip asks how folk dance enters contemporary theatre, and A Yang Bai asks about mother, stone, and the source of life, then A Dancer's Homesickness is a return path between them. It opens the local experience again, letting the audience see the real land behind the works.
It also resonates with 100 Villages, 100 Heritage Practitioners. One begins from personal return; the other begins from broader village fieldwork in Yunnan. Both ask the same question: how does the body preserve culture, and how can tradition continue to enter the present?
4
Final Direction
This page preserves stage and moving-image materials related to A Dancer's Homesickness as a return chapter in Dong Jilan's creative archive. It lets the work index include not only representative theatre projects, but also the field, homeland, and bodily experience that keep generating new creation.
