The David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center was packed to its 2,586-seat capacity on Sept. 18 for the Chinese dance drama "Mulan," a production by Ningbo Performance & Arts Group that arrived in New York as part of a tour bringing Chinese cultural traditions to American stages.
Among the attendees was Emily Wilcox, a professor of Chinese ethnic dance at the College of William & Mary who has become a cultural bridge-builder in her own right. For Wilcox, this particular performance marked her third encounter with the work—and the moment when everything finally clicked into place.
Wilcox's journey with "Mulan" began three years earlier, during the production's American debut in September 2023. The show played six performances at the Boch Center in Boston and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. At the time, Wilcox was co-hosting a lecture on Chinese dance culture with the local Xuejuan Dance Ensemble when her students proposed an experiment: study dance culture during the day, experience the show at night. She drove three hours to Washington to join them.
Watching from the audience that evening, Wilcox observed something that would shape her engagement with the work for years to come. A group of Chinese-American girls sat transfixed, their faces reflecting genuine wonder. One of them, a student named Ziying, was so moved that she resolved to pursue studies in Chinese ethnic dance. Within a year, Ziying had become an international student at the Beijing Dance Academy—a tangible example of how cultural exchange can alter individual trajectories.
But for Wilcox herself, that first viewing left something incomplete. She understood the technical choreography and narrative structure, yet felt she hadn't penetrated the emotional and spiritual core of the Mulan character. What was being said beneath the movement? What did this contemporary retelling of an ancient story want audiences to understand?
Driven by these questions, Wilcox committed herself to deeper study. She spent nearly every winter and summer break traveling between China and the United States, serving as a visiting professor at Minzu University of China while leading American students through Liaoning, Inner Mongolia and other regions to experience ethnic dance dramas firsthand. She was building the scholarly and experiential foundation needed to truly understand what choreographers Han Zhen and Zhou Liya had created.
In April 2026, when China Performing Arts Group and Ningbo Performance & Arts Group were preparing "Mulan" for another overseas tour, they asked Wilcox to write a letter of recommendation. Recognizing this as an opportunity to deepen her own understanding, she traveled to Shanghai and purchased a ticket for a second viewing. This time, watching from Chinese soil and surrounded by the cultural context in which the work was created, new layers revealed themselves.
The subplot involving the orphan character Rou'er, which had seemed tangential during her first viewing, now emerged as a vital commentary on how war wounds ordinary people. The bronze mirrors that recurred throughout the choreography carried new meaning—they represented Mulan's homesickness and her internal struggle with identity. Yet even with this progress, Wilcox recognized that deeper dimensions of the newly adapted plotlines remained unexplored.
When the invitation came to deliver a pre-show lecture at Lincoln Center before the Sept. 18 performance, Wilcox initially hesitated. Her previous encounters with the work, thorough as they had been, had not fully resolved every interpretive question. But she reconsidered: a drama that had won major awards in China clearly contained expressions worth exploring with greater rigor. More importantly, she possessed the expertise to help bridge the cultural gap for American audiences.
The preparation was intensive. Wilcox traced the 1,500-year evolution of the Mulan legend across different versions and adaptations. She studied interviews with the choreographers. She read Chinese dance reviews and academic articles in depth. She dissected every adaptive choice the creators had made, asking why each decision mattered.
Then the final pieces fell into place. On the battlefield, when Mulan removes her hair bun to reveal her female identity and her fellow soldiers choose to respect and follow her into battle anyway, the choreographers were expressing a distinctly modern understanding of womanhood—one that breaks from traditional narratives. More radically, the ending itself departs from the classical Mulan trope of triumphant return and marriage. Here, the general dies on the battlefield. Mulan completes her spiritual journey alone, her fate returned to her own hands rather than subsumed into a patriarchal ending.
After delivering her lecture at Lincoln Center, Wilcox witnessed the impact of cultural translation. An elderly woman approached to thank her, saying the talk had finally helped her truly understand this Eastern art form. Sisters who had once lived in Nanjing found their curiosity about Chinese culture reignited. In these quiet conversations, cultural barriers seemed to dissolve.
For her third viewing, Wilcox took her seat in the theater transformed. As the revolving stage shifted between scenes of domestic tenderness and battlefield brutality, she saw Mulan anew: no longer a one-dimensional historical hero, but a multifaceted, vivid ordinary person. The drama maintained what she called "a prudent reflection on war and a delicate portrayal of women's circumstances"—elements that carried unmistakable relevance to contemporary audiences.
As the applause faded and Wilcox walked out of Lincoln Center with the crowd, she carried with her the image of those Chinese-American students whose eyes had gleamed with recognition and possibility. That shimmer of understanding across cultural difference was perhaps the truest measure of what the dance drama had accomplished.
