On September 18, the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center in New York was sold out for a performance of the Chinese dance drama "Mulan," presented by Ningbo Performance & Arts Group, according to a report from IQINGDAO. In the audience was Emily Wilcox, a professor at the College of William & Mary who studies Chinese ethnic dance and who recalled first seeing the production three years earlier.
The work made its American debut in September 2023 with six shows at the Boch Center in Boston and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Wilcox, who at the time was co-hosting a lecture on Chinese dance culture with the local Xuejuan Dance Ensemble, drove three hours to Washington after students suggested discussing dance culture by day and seeing the show at night, the report said. A Chinese-American girl in the audience named Ziying resolved to study Chinese ethnic dance and a year later became an international student at the Beijing Dance Academy.
In April 2026, as China Performing Arts Group and Ningbo Performance & Arts Group prepared the work for another overseas tour, they invited Wilcox to write a letter of recommendation. Then a visiting scholar at Fudan University, she bought a ticket and saw the show a second time in Shanghai. To prepare a pre-show lecture before the New York performance, she traced the evolution of the Mulan story across 1,500 years of versions, studied interviews with the choreographers Han Zhen and Zhou Liya, and read Chinese dance reviews and academic articles, the report said.
In her lecture, Wilcox said the production turns Mulan from a one-dimensional hero into an ordinary person with many sides, and that it reflects on war and portrays women's circumstances. She said the ending departs from a triumphant return and marriage: the general dies on the battlefield and Mulan completes her standing alone. After the lecture, an elderly woman thanked her for helping her understand the Eastern dance drama, and sisters who had once lived in Nanjing had their curiosity about Chinese culture rekindled, according to the report.