Los Angeles Times, September 18, 2005
DANCE;
Making 'Lantern' a beacon for China;
Born of a provocative film, the National Ballet production mirrors a society aglow with change.
Allen Robertson, Special to The Times

THE notorious Madam Mao may once have been its patron, but these days, the National Ballet of China proudly stands on its own merits. Pushing against all preconceptions, the company's artistic director, Zhao Ruheng, is intent on rewriting -- or should that be "re-righting"? -- history.

The era in China is long gone when politics controlled art to such an extent that what appeared onstage needed to satisfy some demagogue's skewed vision of the world. Zhao is now even willing to court controversy. Nothing proves this so pointedly as the 2001 ballet "Raise the Red Lantern," which had its American premiere this month in Berkeley and will be danced at the Orange County Performing Arts Center for six performances beginning Tuesday. (The company then goes to the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York.)

Saturated in hothouse colors, the three-act "Lantern" is an intense dance-theater version of the multi-award-winning film by Chinese auteur Zhang Yimou ("Hero," "House of Flying Daggers"). The stage version is as lush and fluidly cinematic as Zhang's -- which, ironically, was banned in China when it was released in 1991.

The 60-ish Zhao is immensely proud of the outcome. She calls it a "milestone," not just in terms of her company's growth but also, she believes, for Chinese art as a whole. She sees the production as a watershed in her nation's moves into the 21st century.

However, national pride, expressed through the international art of classical ballet, is no longer enough to keep her happy. Instead, Zhao and her 60 dancers are striving to make certain that distinctly Chinese touches are woven into their work. So "Raise the Red Lantern" mixes classical ballet with kung fu acrobatics, elements of traditional Peking Opera and even Chinese folk melodies incorporated into its commissioned symphonic score.

Of course the company -- one of Asia's largest and most prestigious -- is hardly the only Chinese institution in the throes of rapid change. Beijing will be hosting the 2008 Olympics, and as citizens of Los Angeles already know, the Games really do make a difference. When they move beyond the West, the effect can be profound. Seoul, as its residents still proudly proclaim to visitors, was forever upgraded by the 1988 Olympics, and 20 years later, Beijing is likely to be altered in ways that could hardly have been envisioned when China was awarded the Summer Games in 2001.

Already, everywhere you turn, this is a city in a rush. Cranes dominate the skyline. Newly erected hotels and sky-scrapers butt up against residential streets where drying laundry and cooking facilities share tidy but tiny front gardens a block away from eight-lane highways.

It is also a city of contrasts. Majestic historical monuments such as the circular 600-year-old Temple of Heaven and the vast expanses of the Forbidden City are serene islands marooned within the speeding swirl of modern life. Erupting just beyond their confines are miles of stalls. Minuscule shops open onto the street. Everything you'd ever want is available, including plastic kitsch and suspect "antiques." There may be more cellphones than bicycles these days, and there's a Starbucks within the Forbidden City's moated walls.

For a visitor, maybe for most of its citizens, Beijing is not only incomprehensibly huge but also a continually ex-panding jigsaw puzzle. The only one of the world's major capitals not built on either a river or an ocean, it is free to extend itself across the North China Plain at will. Its population is expected to top 15.5 million by the time the Games begin.

Opposite my hotel, there's a megastore outlet of a food chain whose name -- outlined in gigantic bright fuchsia neon characters -- translates as "Buy Cheap Eat Happy." Each morning at 6, the store's parking lot comes to life as hundreds of people of all ages turn up to take part in an open-air tai chi class, just like untold numbers of devotees across the city and throughout the country.

I doubt that many of the National Ballet's dancers bother. They already start off each day with classes of their own. These exercises, coupled with the daily grind of refining their technique, are instantly familiar to anyone who has ever set foot in a ballet studio: Despite some strange accents, the universal terminology of the ballet classroom remains French.

Pushing the creative envelope

THE initial model for the company was Soviet. It has been dancing "Swan Lake" since its beginnings in 1959, and the repertory includes the usual suspects, among them "Don Quixote," "The Nutcracker" and "Romeo and Juliet."

For most of its life, Zhao says, this repertory could be divided into "the red and the white": white for ballets such as "Giselle" and "Swan Lake," red for patriotic works such as Chairman Mao's favorite, "The Red Detachment of Women," created in 1964. Back in the 1970s, that ballet's agitprop athleticism served as the company's passport to international touring.

Since the late 1990s, Zhao, who was appointed director in 1993, has set about erasing the color bar. She's added a small selection of George Balanchine's neoclassical works, along with one-act ballets by Kenneth MacMillan and other Western choreographers. But it was her idea of bringing "Raise the Red Lantern" to the stage that really pushed the creative envelope.

As might have been expected, the prospect stirred up a fair share of negative press -- not because the film was con-sidered bad art but because the story dares to shine an unflattering light on an aspect of pre-Communist society that most Chinese might be happy to sweep under the carpet. It is set in the insular world of the 1930s, when feudal prerogatives still allowed rich lords to treat their multiple wives not just as concubines but as nothing more than property to be summarily disposed of when they had displeased their masters.

The lord of this story has just acquired a young third wife, who is immediately despised and plotted against by his two elder spouses (who, in turn, hate each other). Her unwanted initiation into the household -- the lantern of the title is used each night to indicate which of his wives the lord wants in his bed -- amounts to nothing less than rape. In the ballet, this is startlingly reenacted from behind a stage-wide screen that transforms the two dancers into loomingly grotesque, strug-gling shadow puppets.

Jealousy, illicit love, insanity and betrayal culminate in a horrific finale. And despite the ballet's elegiac coda, the cruelty that wraps the last scenes in terror is as gut-wrenching as that in any Tarantino film, only all the more powerful for the ways in which it has been stylized far beyond the literal.

When Zhao had the brainstorm to transform the movie into a ballet, she wasn't certain that Zhang would go for the idea. But, far from being put off, the director became intimately involved in the project, coaching the dancers in their acting, overseeing the evocative designs, even making changes in his narrative in order to clarify the plotline for the nonverbal art of ballet.

Zhao remembers that he got so wrapped up in the new possibilities for his story that he would phone her at all hours from wherever he happened to be with a stream of elaborate suggestions.

Giving credit

IN any case, Zhang, 53, one of China's leading international celebrities, has happily branched out into live theater. His monumental 1998 staging of Puccini's opera "Turandot" was performed on the grounds of the Forbidden City for a nightly audience of 36,000. The event made headlines around the world. Widely expected to stage the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Games, Zhang is also contemplating another ballet for Zhao's company.

"I'm an amateur in ballet," he says through an interpreter during a preshow interview in one of the dressing rooms at the ultramodern, 1,200-seat Tianqiao Theater, the National Ballet's Beijing base. Zhang, who is combining a quick meal with a discussion of his ballet, insists that the media have put far too much emphasis on him. He says it is the others involved in the project -- choreographers Wang Xinpeng and Wang Yuanyuan, composer Chen Qigang, the designers and, especially, Zhao -- who deserve the credit for his film's transformation from celluloid to the stage. Tapping a finger on his forehead, he says his contribution was simply to help them "see into my mind."

Zhao was one of the company's earliest members (to this day, all are graduates of the Beijing Dance Academy). She joined the troupe, originally called the Central Ballet of China, in 1961. Forced to stop dancing in 1972 because of a serious injury, she has spent the intervening years working behind the scenes.

Because she has weathered decades of political storms, it is small wonder that Zhao is adept at deflecting questions she doesn't care to answer. Even so, she says it is ultimately a positive thing that audiences, to say nothing of some Beijing critics, were initially disturbed by both the subject matter of "Raise the Red Lantern" and the ballet's amalgamation of styles.

Zhang is more forthright. He insists it is essential for the Chinese to look back at "the darkness of the society." He believes you need to confront the past if you wish to shape the future.

"Who knows?" he asks with a disarming smile. "Maybe one day we will be able to reform the West's ballet."

 

 

__________________

with kind regards,

Matthias Arnold
(Art-Eastasia list)

http://www.chinaresource.org
http://www.fluktor.de

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