Chinese Dancers Dazzle D.C.
Distinctive ballet, modern and traditional dance were part of the $5 million splashy Festival of China that the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts brought to Washington, DC. The October, 2005, month-long celebration was the most intensive and extensive by a U.S. arts institution and the most ambitious and costly international collaboration in the Kennedy Center's 35-season history.
From Hong Kong and the mainland, 53 performances featured 874 artists--dancers, opera performers, acrobats, folk singers, shadow puppeteers, jugglers, drummers and fire spitters. This pageant of identity and nationhood filled Kennedy Center stages and hallways, transformed an outdoor balcony into an open-air Beijing market, and displayed fireworks against a nighttime sky.
The festival's organizing, under the stewardship of Michael M. Kaiser, president of the Kennedy Center, took over four years. Curator Alicia Adams attended multiple performances in nine trips to China to select performers. The Kennedy Center contributed $2.8 million dollars and the Chinese government, $1.7 million; the remaining $500,000 was raised through ticket sales.
The mélange of Chinese artistic wealth delivered glimpses of contemporary expression that China apparently hopes will broaden and soften its image before the American public, balancing the view of China as an emerging threat with it military buildup, purchase of American companies and cheap labor.
I'll describe merely three performances.
National Ballet
of China
The 60-member National Ballet of China performed an adaptation of Zhang Yimou's 1991 film, "Raise the Red Lantern," originally banned in China. The story critiques a feudalism that strangles young lives and squelches beautiful love. Zhang directed and Wang Xinpeng and Wang Yuanyuan choreographed a resplendent drama set in the 1930s. The bold colored dynamic sets with billowing red fabric and dancers' use of lanterns, fans and scarves provided lush effects highlighting first-rate dancing of unexceptional choreography and music reflecting western and Chinese traditions.
As a young girl (Zhu Yan) is forced into a bridal palanquin to be the Master of the house's second concubine, she remembers her true love, a young actor from a Peking Opera group. The Master's wife and first concubine welcome the newcomer in a joyful wedding atmosphere, although there is a dark emotional undertone. The wedding night occurs behind a scrim the entire size of a stage curtain, much like a shadow puppet theater presentation. Resisting the Master, however, the girl breaks through the scrim and then is chased back, only to jump through and back time and again. The Master spends time with his women by watching Peking Operas and playing mah-jongg. The girl sneaks out to meet her former lover, but the jealous first concubine (Meng Nigning) discovers their secret. She tells the Master about this infidelity. He catches the two lovers who bravely confess. The snitch falls out of favor with the distressed Master. Driven by anguish, she grabs the lighting stick, a symbol of the master's power over his household and lights all of the red lanterns hanging in her yard, breaking house law. The two lovers and the first concubine facing death reconcile in the spirit of forgiveness. As the three huddle together, the Master's men march across the stage, each carrying a 15 foot-long paddle and, in turn, loudly striking the white backdrop, leaving a bloody blob, in effect executing the doomed. As snow then falls, beauty is not denied.
The Shanghai Song and
Dance Ensemble
For the past five years, 28-year-old Doudou Huang has been artistic director, leading dancer and choreographer of The Shanghai Song and Dance Ensemble, started in 1979. The company is one of many Chinese "official" performance troupes in various provinces and cities, with a half-dozen in Beijing.
Doudou is a cultural icon of stage and television, and he holds the coveted Chinese government designation of "A First Class National Artist." He combines ancient, classical and contemporary traditions and techniques to forge a distinctive, athletic (for the men) modern dance vocabulary based especially on martial arts. Doudou believes the rhythmic movements make them a fit with contemporary music. Startling contrasts of spiritual stillness and explosive, percussively strong movements capture the attention, as do articulations of many parts of the body, colorful sets and luxuriously colored costume.
The program begins with "Symbols of China," a four-part suite. Part l, the "Soul of the Terra Cotta Warriors," was modeled on the incredulous discovery of 7,000 Qin Dynasty 2,200 years-old life-size pottery warrior figures buried underground (one was on view at the Kennedy Center). Doudou becomes a soldier from the Ching Dynasty when the first emperor lived. Attracted to the military, Doudou imitates their historical gestures and also expresses his feelings about the warriors. Stern and focused, his male dancers combine dance, martial arts and acrobatics. Doudou, the central warrior, moved most spectacularly with spins, split leaps, back flips, rolls, pencil tight turns, balance on one leg with the other tucked behind ear and combinations of acrobatic feats. He defies gravity and moves across the stage in split seconds.
Part 2, "Sleeves," is a lyrical dance portraying the long silk sleeves worn by female characters in Chinese operas. "Spirit of Martial Arts," Doudou's choreographic debut in 1998, is Part 3. Finally, in "Chinese GO," the oldest Chinese board game (also called Weiqu and similar to backgammon), Doudou explores the human condition, the mysterious relationship between individuals and among individuals in a group. Using a simple contrast, the males dressed in black, need the female characters, dressed in white, but also fight with them often.
The "Collection of Chinese Folk Dances" suite, presented in a cabaret-style, included a sample of China's 56 ethnic groups, each with its own culture. The Tibetan cow horn dance with dancers using large horns to make a column was unique.
Slow moving, "Six Dance Imageries from the Zhou Dynasty" built upon the 1978 unearthing of a set of calligraphy-inscribed heavy bronze gongs, buried for 2,400 years but still playable. An imposing reproduction of four rows of 64 gongs descending in size, the lowest tier with barrel-like gongs nearly covered the width of the stage. Six musicians of the Hubei Imperial Bronze Bell Ensemble played the instruments with wooden poles or mallets in an evocative score by Chinese composer Tan Dun. The sound, seemingly suited to a temple ritual, resonated between periods of silence. Topless with a feather headdress, Huang's solo combined his skills in what appeared as a series of moving vignettes and frozen friezes. A group of masked dancers join him.
Shen Wei Dance Arts
Born in China, Shen Wei came to U.S to escape restrictions in his homeland. His parents, directors and performers in opera, had fallen victim to the Cultural Revolution that sent all artists into the countryside to labor alongside the peasants. Shen was spied on for befriending a group of Taiwanese dancers and prevented from touring with the Guangdong Modern Dance Company he helped found. So he quit and as an unemployed person he was no longer under government surveillance and therefore free to accept an offer to study at the Alwin Nikolais/Murray Louis Dance Lab.
His company, mostly non-Chinese, originated five years ago at the American Dance Festival in Durham, N.C., when he auditioned students from the summer program for a piece he was creating. Several of them are still with the 11-member troupe that is now in demand worldwide.
Shen is an original. Not only does he choreograph dances with theatrical, stylized, emotionally cool, mesmerizing, distinct abstract movements, but he also designs the costumes, sets and makeup. He fuses art forms of dance theater, Chinese opera, painting and sculpture into a hybrid of western and eastern cultures.
For his "The Rite of Spring," set to a four-handed piano version of Stravinsky's score composed by Fazil Say, Shen says, "In keeping with my interest in abstraction, it is only the melodic and rhythmic qualities of the music, rather than the story it tells, which inform the choice of movement vocabulary....Suspension, momentum, spiral, joint, muscle, and nerve initiations were explored....The piece in its final form is a set structure within which there is a balance between movement exactitude and movement intuition. As in unstaged life, alongside that which is definite, there will always exist the coincidental, the uncontrollable, the chance happening," Twelve dancers, energetically moving across a patterned floor reflected in their costume patterns, create unique body shapes.
Shen first created "Folding," inspired by the folding drapes of costumes, in China for the company he left. Dancers move with Geisha-like mincing steps, elbows held out to the side, hands on upper thigh. With white-painted faces, elongated flesh-colored capped- skulls, and nude torsos (women wear flesh colored bras), dancers appear unisex and butoh-like in their eerily slow, meditative pace. Their stunning long red skirts are choreographed like waves lashing the shore. Black-skirted couples bound together horizontally and vertically by the folds arch and intermesh. The backdrop, a reproduction of an 18th century abstract painter, Ba Da Shen Ren, ultimately becomes a void into which the dancers ascend stairs to enter the blackness--except Shen, who stumbles to the floor and is left behind. Tibetan Buddhist chants and John Taverner's music accompany the dance.
Whatever the political tension between the U.S. and China, audiences at the Kennedy Center marveled at the grand cultural showcase.