Against the background of increasingly frequent global cultural exchanges, dance, as a form of cultural expression and embodied cognition, has become an important medium in cross-cultural education. This study investigates the teaching practice of Asia-Pacific traditional action vocabulary in dance classes at University of London, focusing on the process of cross-cultural translation and contemporary context reconstruction. The study used a combination of teaching ethnography and action research to examine three representative cases, the teaching of “cloud hands”, the teaching of rotation movements of ethnic and folk dances, and students ‘independent choreography exploration. These cases demonstrate how traditional action vocabulary is interpreted, misinterpreted, negotiated and reconstructed in the teaching context. Research results show that Asia-Pacific dance has undergone three stages of transformation in a cross-cultural learning environment, from interpretation of cultural grammar, to adaptive movement translation, to re-grammaticalization and creative re-creation. This research advocates that in cross-cultural dance education, the teaching model should change from the traditional “teaching-imitation” to “comprehension-co-creation”. In the end, it calls for the construction of a diversified and dialogue-based platform so that traditional action vocabulary can gain new expression vitality through cultural flow and creative reinterpretation.
