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Review 2, 11-25: Killing the Concubines
National Ballet of China's 'Red Lantern' Raises the Ante
By Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2003 The Dance Insider
PARIS -- With "Raise
the Red Lantern," the ballet, seen Sunday at the Theatre du Chatelet
and directed and lit by the director of the film of the same name,
Zhang Yimou, with choreography by Wang Xinpeng and Wang Yuanyuan,
the National Ballet of China exorcises the Orientalism mite that
has infested the story ballet for more than 100 years, projecting
a new vision of ballet spectacle that authentically merges 'Western'
classical ballet approaches with a modicum of traditional Asian
flavor.
Founded in 1959, China's
oldest company has, as Judith Mackrell pointed out in the Guardian
earlier this month, "historically been split between two traditions:
the classics imported from Soviet Russia and the ideological fairy-tales
enforced by Madame Mao. Between 'Swan Lake' and 'The Red Detachment
of Women' there's been little middle ground."
In France, which is
celebrating the Year of China through next July, we've got "The
Red Detachment of Women," too, in film clips shown earlier this
year as part of the "Alors, La Chine?" exhibition at the Pompidou
Center, and, on tour throughout the country, from the National Ballet
of China. For the company's Paris engagement, we lucked out with
"Raise the Red Lantern," called here "Epouses & Concubines," after
the title of the Su Tong novel on which the film was based.
If the ballet is not
overtly didactic, its ultimate raison d'etre might be perceived
to be so, in a Communist China context. The story here concerns
a young woman, identified just as the "Second Concubine" in the
program (Zhang Jian in the cast I saw) who becomes the reluctant
if not out-and-out unwilling second concubine to "The Master" of
the house, joining a household already rife with tension between
"The Wife" (Hou Honglan) and "The First Concubine" (Jin Yao). After
a wrenching wedding night, consummated under a stage-covering sheet
of red silk, a Peking Opera troupe comes to town and, low-and-behold,
the lead actor (Hou Qingfeng) is the Second Concubine's childhood
sweetheart. There's a backstage liaison, in which the lovers are
discovered by the First Concubine; a particularly loaded (and I'm
not talking about the dice) pas de quatre for the two concubines
and the two men over, on, and around the mah-jong tables; another
liaison; a couple of betrayals; three unfair death sentences, and
(I think) resurrection through redemption.
The choreography and
Chen Qigang's score are essentially on the Western model -- this
is a ballet company, so that's the palette. But the vocabulary for
a story ballet can be inflected by the story's milieu, and that's
what happens here -- selectively. Instructively, instead of being
triggered every time a Chinese dancer is on stage -- as was the
fate of the Asian dancer in Josef Nadj's recent "Il
n'y a plus de firmament,"" here the Peking Opera cymbals,
and high-pitched Peking Opera singing, are used sparingly and when
the situation calls for it -- for example, the performance within
the performance of the Peking Opera troupe. As for the gestures,
there's some use of the angled wrists and pointing fingers from
Peking Opera, but otherwise, in not just the dance but also the
mime sequences, the dancers pretty much express themselves in classical
ballet vocabulary, albeit sometimes contemporized. (The original
choreographer, Wang Xingpeng, studied modern dance choreography
with the Folkwanghochschule d'Essen in Germany after growing up
in the Peking Dance Academy, and performed with Essen's Aalto Ballet
Theater for five years. Wang Yuanyuan, who undertook the 2003 version,
teaches modern dance at the Peking academy.)
The choreography is
fine, standing out more for its use of space -- the mah-jong sequence,
for example, whose staging may owe as much to director Zhang --
but what really delivers this story ballet is the extraordinarily
clean and articulated dancing. Zhang Jian, the Second Concubine,
moves with velvety ease, whether sidling along the floor in a tryst
with Hou Quingfeng or executing a penche or a complete flip. The
corps men, comprising a sort of house army whose principal purpose
seems to be to capture, repress, and, when called on by the Master,
eliminate the concubines, transcend Jerome Kaplan's unimaginative
black costumes with genuinely fierce and fleet dancing, particularly
when storming across the stage as a sort of Furies. (Here again,
the usual jetes are spiced by the occasional smooth flip.) The corps
women mark the significance of the red lanterns with a sort of prelude
in which 18 of them rise on pointe with the right leg extended,
holding above their heads sticks with lanterns dangling from them.
Jin Yao's treacherous
First Concubine initially comes off as stereotypically scheming,
but the dancer-actress captures and ultimately breaks our hearts
with her fate and how she meets it: Expecting that the Master will
finally embrace her after she exposes the lovers, she is shocked
when he instead tosses her aside and dismisses her, supported by
the Wife. Clutching an orange scarf which he must have given her
in better days -- the Wife has an aqua one, and they've waved them
at each other throughout the ballet to symbolize who's out in front
for the Master's affections -- she staggers about the courtyard.
The house soldiers come after her, but retreat, cowering, when she
has the sudden impulse to light the red lanterns. Then she staggers
about blindly tearing them.
Unlike the film, in
which (as I understand it from reviews) it's explained that the
lanterns are placed outside the house of whichever concubine the
master will sleep with that night, for his ballet Zhang Yimou never
explains the significance of the red lanterns. But the story is
still powerful. After she's struck out at the lanterns, the First
Concubine joins the lovers on the execution dock. Here the story
takes a refreshing turn, for this epilogue is less a final embrace
for the two lovers than the First Concubine's struggle for their
forgiveness, and their struggle to offer it. At first they are repelled
(more than angered) at the thought, retreating from her as she grasps
after them, crawls after them, reaches out for their hands. But
then finally they extend their hands to hers, and the three, marching
forward, entwined, and finally crumpled together, meet their fates
together. When the tinselly snow begins to fall on them, we know
that the Master may have won the day, but those days are numbered.
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