Ballet

Dancing for Mu

Robin Young

Returning to London after a month in the People's Republic of China I was confronted with a senseless and bewildering variety of ballet on offer — the Royal at the Coliseum, and the Nederlands Dans Theatre at the Wells, both with a multiplicity of disjointed programmes. They order things more simply in China. Only two full-length bal

lets are performed (both of which, can be seen on film at the ICA on July 24). The Shanghai company dances The White-Haired Girl, and Peking does The Red Detachment of Women, and that is that. Factory or school-based amateur groups perform excerpts from these standard works, or devise new dances which avowedly imitate their style. A textile factory troupe, for instance, were recently presented in Peking with their new ballet, Women Weavers, in frank imitation of The Red De tachment of Women: "only the vigorous style and broad ex pression of The Red Detachment of Women would properly serve our theme."

Music from the two standard ballets is frequently heard in the programmes of revolutionary music on radio and on the railway train loudspeaker systems. The se quence, Happy Women Fighters'

from Red Detachment, was the token piece of Chinese music

which John Pritchard chose to add to the London Philharmonic's repertoire for their concerts in China. Films of the standard bal lets are shown in the cinemas and on television, though with markedly less frequency than the Peking revolutionary operas. There are six of them.

The ballet scores are both grandiloquent, based on Western orchestration, but enriched by a dramatic use of traditional Chinese instruments. White-Haired Girl includes some solo singing in the heavily stylised manner of the Peking opera, a closed method of singing in which high-pitched notes are sustained for a long time with an exaggerated vibrato. It was a famous film long before the Cultural Revolution, and is the story of a peasant's daughter, taken into slavery by an oppressive landlord, who runs away and hides in the mountains until she is found and rescued by her fiancd, now a victorious guerrilla. In the earlier version she was raped by the landlord, and bore a .child which died in infancy. This blot on revolution's escutcheon is expunged in the personal supervision of Chiang Ching. Mao Tsetung's wife. The change may reflect China's puritanism, or Mao's dislike of overstatement. The girl's reunion with her fiancé, in a cave to which he pursues her, is suitably protracted in the manner of popular entertainment the world over — but when they do at last rush into each other's arms it is to swear union in further revolutionary struggle rather than to kiss.

Red Detachment of Women has a similar theme of landlord oppression and proletarian revenge. The heroine defies her landlord, is chained and whipped, and, like the White Haired Girl, escapes and is hunted and left for dead. She joins the guerrillas, but in her first engagement — a raid on the landlord's palace where local despots are conferring — she fires too soon and allows the enemy to escape. In later battles she distinguishes herself, and though the guerrilla leader is captured and burnt alive (cue for symbolic red suffusion of the scene) the guerrillas finally triumph. There is more ensemble dancing in Red Detachment and the fight scenes are more acrobatically vigorous than anything in White-Haired Girl. A charming interlude shows the women fighters' training Camp as having all the organised jollity of Butlins. Oddly enough a real-life cadre school outside Peking, where intellectuals and administrators go for a compulsory programme of physical labour and political study, managed to convery exactly the same impression.

The dance is a simplified and streamlined version of classical ballet of the Russian school, with the emphasis on thrills rather than frills. There are, for instance, point work and jetes, but no fouettes or battements. The most typical piece of expressive mime is a gesture with forearm diagonally across the chest, clenched fist, and jutting chin. This shows revolutionary determination, agreement on a course of action, solidarity. Heroes and heroines are upright and alert; villains are bent.

The Chinese audience (who paY less than 20p for good seats), talk through the overture, and chatter excitedly at the best bits of the show. They also indulge the Chi nese habit of clearing the throat and spitting loudly on the floor, which would not do at Covent Garden.

-Thi West might be tempted to dismiss their ballets as political tracts disguised as art. Certainly the ideological content is all important (and not to be confused with the cloyingly emotive efforts of the North Korean company who visited London recently). But the ballets are entertainments before they are art. They are not grim and humourless, but vivid stories well geared to catch and hold the attention of the "workers, peasants and soldiers" to whom, Mao says, art should be servant.

The only entertainment devoid of ideology which we saw in China was the Shanghai acrobatic troupe — who are coming to the Coliseum in July. Theirs is a straight succession of top-notch circus acts — pole balancing, slack-wire walking, foot-juggling, trident-tossing and so on.

Natalia Makarova, at a Friends of Covent Garden lunch-time interview in the Opera House, bemoaned the lack of new fulllength ballets. Audiences, she thought, were getting tired of one-act ballets which could not &yaw character or story, and which were over before the audience could properly grasp them. (Some of the Nederlahds Dans Theatre's one-acters take some grasping.) She had in mind a cho

reographic version of Dostoyevsky's The Idiot, and doubt

less an artist of her sophistication would not be satisfied with the uncomplicated characterisations of Chinese ballet.

One cannot help thinking, however, that a visit from a Chinese ballet company might have a salutary effect upon our own too precious choreographers by convincing them that it is possible to Stator June 2, 1973

tell a good story concisely and ‘vell in dance. It would also attract an audience — not all politicallY motivated — who will never be attracted by the effete, romantic abstractions which are the present ballet public's standard fare.