New Books in Performing Arts

In this episode, we trace how the horse-head fiddle has evolved in the People’s Republic of China — from a traditional steppe instrument to a cultural symbol reshaped through state representation and modern performance. We discuss how it is made, taught, and performed in China, how it is portrayed in Chinese institutions, and how young Mongols today engage with the instrument as a way to express identity, creativity, and belonging in contemporary China.

Our guest, Ying Song from Zhejiang University, is a PhD candidate in sociology whose research focuses on the horse-head fiddle and its role in shaping Mongolian identity. Beyond academia, she has also curated cultural exhibitions and organized numerous Mongolian music-sharing events, which you can find in the link below.

Ning Ao is a PhD student at the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies (ACE) at Lund University. Her research looks at generational differences among Chinese Mongols.

Episode producer: Ning Ao

Ying Song’s Rednote Page

Ying Song’s Email: songying182@163.com

Swedish physician and missionary Joel Eriksson in Inner Mongolia

The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the following academic partners:


Asia Centre, University of Tartu (Estonia)

Asian studies, University of Helsinki (Finland)

Centre for Asian Studies, Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania)

Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University (Sweden)

Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku (Finland)

Norwegian Network for Asian Studies


Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

On September 26, 1998, a video game made its debut in Japanese arcades. It was over seven feet tall and weighed just over 900 pounds. It had no characters, no story, no quests to fulfill or bosses to beat. What it had was a metal platform on which you were supposed to stand, put your feet into the right place at the right time, and dance.

Join two music critics, long-ago players, and Sota Fujimori fans as they take you on the astonishing journey through the artists, influences, and innovators of Dance Dance Revolution, a game two and a half decades in the making and still going -- in homes, arcades, and expos.

From its unexpected appearance to its social heyday to its reappearance in the American market, DDR has taken many forms -- not all of them sanctioned by Konami. It has spawned community, creativity, competition, lawsuits, 1,000+ songs that range from wacky to tacky to beautiful, and yes, a lot of dancing. While we were all leaning on the back bar, working up a sweat, DDR managed to change the world.

Jessica Doyle has a Ph.D. in city planning and a love for writing about the connections between pop music, globalization, and the built environment. She cares for her family in the Atlanta suburbs.

Jordan Ferguson is the author of J Dilla’s Donuts, #93 in the 33 1/3 series of record guides, and co-host of the Geekdown, a podcast about fandoms. He lives and works in Toronto, Canada. Find him online @jordan_ferguson.

Rudolf Thomas Inderst (*1978) enjoys video games since 1985. He received a master’s degree in political science, American cultural studies as well as contemporary and recent history from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich and holds two PhDs in game studies (LMU & University of Passau). Currently, he's teaching as a professor for game design and game studies at the HNU University of Applied Sciences Neu-Ulm, Germany, has submitted his third dissertation at the University of Vechta, holds the position as lead editor at the online journal Titel kulturmagazin for the game section, hosts the German local radio show Replay Value and is editor of the weekly game research newsletter DiGRA D-A-CH Game Studies Watchlist.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

The Choreography of Environments: How the Anna and Lawrence Halprin Home Transformed Contemporary Dance and Urban Design (Oxford UP, 2025) explores how objects and the domestic spaces seep into the aesthetic consciousness of movement-based artists, like dancers and urban designers, significantly shaping their approach to movement invention and choreography. If these objects and spaces happen to have been designed by a leading modernist architect and landscape designer working with the dancer, then the aesthetic imprint is amplified. Dance innovation becomes pressed into dialogue with spatial, environmental, and urban agendas. The Choreography of Environments builds on this premise to consider the use of ordinary objects from a private residence as lenses into viewing dance innovation.

Author Janice Ross posits the Halprins' 1950s iconic mid-century modern home and expansive outdoor dance deck as a hidden archive. She explores four objects from their house and gardens -- staircase, deck, chair, and window -- to trace how, despite the conservative postwar climate, this intimate domestic space became a radical template reshaping postmodern dance invention and its expansion into civic, social, and environmental engagement in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The work that happened in this white, middle class, Jewish-American home in a San Francisco suburb paved the way for changes that continue to resonate today across contemporary dance, performance, and urban design. These include: defamiliarizing urban landscape and gardens as cloistered theaters where civic identities are rehearsed, orchestrating collective problem solving and invention, normalizing the nude body, privileging a utilitarian and responsive rather than sentimental approach to dance in the environment, and re-positioning choreography as a vital medium for urban problem solving.

These four representative objects in the Halprin home are also used to trace the burgeoning of dance as a forceful medium for civic engagement, and its valorization of the ordinary in movement. As a whole, this book shows how dance, architecture, and landscape design would have a profound confluence through these shared domestic spaces and objects of the Halprins' lives.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

As permafrost in Siberia continues to melt and the steppe in the Gobi turns to desert, people in Mongolia are faced with overlapping climate crises. Some nomadic herders describe climate change as the end of a world. They are quick to add that the world has ended before for Indigenous people in North Asia, as waves of colonialism have left the steppe with a complicated web of apocalypses. A Song for the Horses by K. G. Hutchins examines cases in which people respond to the pressures of climate change by drawing on cultural heritage to foster social resiliency. In this episode, K. G. joins me to discuss his research on the morin khuur, or “horse fiddle,” in Mongolia, and how Mongolians use the traditional instrument to express and envision human and more-than-human futures against the backdrop of anthropogenic climate change.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

In September 1666, a fire sparked in a bakery on Pudding Lane grew until it had destroyed four-fifths of central London. The rebuilding efforts that followed not only launched the careers of some of London’s most famous architects, but also transformed Londoners’ relationship to their city by underscoring the ways that people could shape a city’s spaces—and the ways that a city’s spaces could shape its people.

Movable Londons: Performance and the Modern City (U Michigan Press, 2025) by Dr. Julia Fawcett looks to the Restoration theater to understand how the dispossessed made London into a modern city after the Great Fire of 1666 and how the introduction of changeable scenery in theaters altered how Londoners conceptualized the city. Dr. Fawcett makes a claim for the centrality of unplanned spaces and the role of the Restoration theater in articulating those spaces as the modern city emerged and argues that movable scenery revolutionized London’s public theaters, inviting audiences to observe how the performers—many of them hailing from the same communities as their characters—navigated the stage.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts