It follows that many contemporary dance works engaging with ethnic folk dance are centrally concerned with dismantling the typified movement norms that ethnic folk dance upholds, along with the collective authority of transmission those norms imply. Built primarily on each performer’s life experience and incorporating extensive solos and personal monologues, the performances place the traditional bodily vocabulary of ethnic folk dance alongside the lived experience of the performers, asking what kind of ‘folk’ is represented in staged ethnic folk dance, by whom, and through what mechanisms. After 1949, folk dance scholar Xu Shuying and others, influenced by the Soviet system, systematically ‘elementalised’ folk dance into stylistic movements and representative imagery, forming a set of teachable, reproducible bodily norms. Wu Xiaobang, ‘the father of Chinese new dance’, divided Chinese dance into ‘classical dance’ (古典舞), ‘folk dance’ (民间舞), and ‘ethnic dance’ (民族舞). Combining different categories, ‘ethnic folk dance’ thus became a crowded category, defined by the establishment, subsuming all dance forms from ethnic minorities as well as those from non-classical Han folk dance (Liu and Zhao 2015: 1–5).