I chose to attend the dance symposium in Xinjiang because this type of professional gathering, organized not by officials in Beijing, but by artists in peripheral regions, is very rare if not unheard of right now. I thought it would be helpful to see how practitioners of ethnic minority dance who were actually based in the regions from which these dances "originated" discussed and presented their work. It was also a rare chance for me to connect with eminent professionals in the field and to witness, however briefly, the presentation of dance as it intersected politically with the specific context of Xinjiang’s ethnic constellation.