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"The First Chinese "

Eva S. Chou CUNY Bernard M Baruch College

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The First Chinese Swan Lake from Ballet Review Fall 2015

Cover photo by Zoran Jelenic, Trockadero: Yakaterina Verbosovich (Chase Johnsey) and Vyacheslav Legupski (Paolo Cervellera) in . 4 Brooklyn – Robert Johnson 6 Washington, D.C. – Lisa Traiger 7 Chicago – Joseph Houseal 8 New York – Karen Greenspan 13 London – Leigh Witchel 15 New York – Harris Green 17 Toronto – Gary Smith 19 London – Christine Temin 21 Washington, D.C. – Lisa Traiger 22 New York – Joseph Houseal Wiebke Hüster 52 24 Alexei Ratmansky on Ballet Review 43.3 Reconstructing Fall 2015 Paul Parish and Susan Weber Editor and Designer: 32 Sally Streets Nichols Marvin Hoshino in Conversation Managing Editor: Roberta Hellman Joel Lobenthal 44 Ze Swan in Brooklyn Senior Editor: Don Daniels Barbara Walczak Associate Editor: 74 52 Doubrovska’s Class Joel Lobenthal Eva Shan Chou Associate Editor: Larry Kaplan 59 Ze First Chinese Swan Lake Webmaster: Peter Sparling David S. Weiss 66 Kyle Abraham Copy Editors: Michael Langlois Barbara Palfy* Naomi Mindlin 68 Ze Season in Miami Photographers: Marvin Hoshino Tom Brazil 32 74 Current Events Costas Associates: Karen Greenspan Peter Anastos 86 Batsheva at 50 Robert Greskovic George Jackson Davie Lerner Elizabeth Kendall 91 Double Odyssey Paul Parish Nancy Reynolds Michael Langlois James SuYon 94 A Conversation with Tory Dobrin David Vaughan Edward Willinger 24 106 London Reporter – Clement Crisp Sarah C. Woodcock 108 – Nancy Westman 111 Music on Disc – George Dorris 116 Check It Out

Cover photo by Zoran Jelenic, Ballets Trockadero: Yakaterina Verbosovich (Chase Johnsey) and Vyacheslav Legupski (Paolo Cervellera) in Don Quixote. The First Chinese nese, the Soviet connection gave Swan Lake great cultural prestige, and, in China, it came Swan Lake to uniquely exemplify ballet. Even so, a Chinese Swan Lake at that time was an ambitious undertaking, as well as an Eva Shan Chou i deologically and thematically incongruous choiceforanewlyandzealouslysocialistcoun- The first full-length Swan Lake by Chinese try. But there were important factors in its dancers took place on July 1, 1958. It was the favor. Perhaps most important was Premier graduation performance of the first class of Zhou Enlai. He had seen the Russian ballet the Beijing Dance School’s ballet division and companies in China and, on an official visit to also the first public performance of any clas- Moscow, in 1957, had attended a performance sical ballet by Chinese dancers. In 1950, there by Maya Plisetskaya at the Bolshoi. He men- hadbeenaspectacle-pageantforthefirst-year tioned SwanLake on a number of occasions and anniversary of the People’s Republic of China, finally specifically asked whether it was pos- DovesofPeace,butthathadcontainedonlyshort sible for the dance school to preparen a Swa passages of ballet and only one pointe role. Lake for performance. There was also a LaFille Mal Gardée given in As the third highest-ranking government 1956, but it was not a public performance. official, Premier Zhou regularly used his in- The Beijing Dance School had been found- fluence to promote and direct the arts and its ed in 1954 with divisions in ballet, “tradition- institutions, often taking a detailed interest al dance,” “folk dance,” and “folk dances of in individual projects. Given his support, this other nations” (the character dances in bal- Swan Lake was able to draw on musicians and let). Then, in 1957, the school was reorganized the set and costume designers from other art into just two divisions: ballet, including char- schools, while the lighting, props, and more acter dance, and “national dance,” which in- drew on personnel from every corner of the cluded folk dance and the dances of China’s school. During the years of famine Zhou saw ethnic minorities. to it that the dancers and staff received ade- The year after the first Chinese Swan Lake, quate food and clothing. the Beijing Experimental Ballet Troupe was The person to whom Zhou made the request formed, with twenty-two graduating dancers concerning Swan Lake was Pyotr Gusev, the and teachers from the school and an eighteen- most prominent of the half-dozen Soviet ex- member orchestra. This company became, perts who came to Beijing beginning in the throughintermediatestages,theNationalBal- mid-1950s. Gusev was born on December 29, let of China of today. 1904, in St. Petersburg, graduated from the SwanLakewaswellknowninChinathrough former Imperial Ballet School, and joined the the ballet companies that the Russians fre- Mariinsky company in 1922. He worked with quently sent in the 1950s. The January 1958 in- Fyodor Lopukhov in the 1920s, was a member augural issue of the official magazine Wudao of Balanchine’s Young Ballet group, married (Dance) featured on its back cover a color pho- Olga Mungalova, and then joined the Bolshoi tograph of the Swan Queen and Prince of the in 1935, where he partnered Ulanova and Pli- NovosibirskBallet.UlanovaperformedinChi- setskaya. After retiring from the stage, Gusev na in 1952 and again in 1959, on the country’s wasdirectoroftheMariinsky(1946-1951),Bol- tenth anniversary, and the newsreels of her shoi(1956),Mikhailovsky(1960-1962),andNo- performances were shown repeatedly in the- vosibirsk (1963-1966) ballet companies. aters for a long time afterward. For the Chi- Between 1958 and 1960, Gusev taught at the Eva Shan Chou, professor at Baruch College in New Beijing school and helped set up ballet acade- York, is at work on a history of ballet in China. mies in Shanghai and Guangzhou. In this brief ©2015EvaShanChou 59 time, he brought to the students and teachers ed, and there were few windows into the out- the ballets he had set and coached in : side world, many people went repeatedly to SwanLake, LeCorsaire, , and, possibly, ex- this movie just to hear again the passages of cerpts from Les Sylphides, while The Fountain of Tchaikovsky’s music or to watch the dancing, BakhchisaraiandEsmeraldacameintothereper- often leaving after the sequence was over. tory soon after.1 Moreover his production of Others I have talked to saw the film as “sent- Swan Lake lasted essentially unchanged until down youths,” when the film was brought to 2007, when Natalia Makarova, who has staged the countryside by teams of cadre who trav- the ballet around the world, was commis- elled with movie projectors andportable gen- sioned to make a new version for the compa- erators. ny. Despite the difficulties, a Chinese Swan Lake An unusual occurrence for ballet in China wasanatural,indeedoverdetermined,choice. involves the 1939 Russian film Lenin in 1918 Rehearsals began soon after Zhou’s request. about the Russian Civil War, which contains As a piece for a fledgling dance school, the bal- a sequence set in what is meant to be the Bol- let has the advantage of having only two ma- shoi Theater during a performance of Swan jor roles, while having many soloist roles and Lake. (The entire film is on YouTube, ballet: dancing in each act for the corps. As Wudao minutes 18-22). In the Chinese-dubbed DVD magazine noted with pride in July 1958, it will and in the IMDb entry online, the dancers are “need more than 100 performers.” not credited, but the Odette is Irina Tikho- TheprincipalrolesweretakenbyBaiShux- mirnovaandPrinceSiegfriedisMikhailGabo- iang (b. 1939),then a fifth-year student, and vich. Imported into China some time before Liu Qingtang (1932-2010), who had entered the 1956, the film was shown widely in cities and ballet program only two years before, at the in the countryside.2 late age of twenty-four. Typical of dancers in The camera arrives in the theater during a first-generation ballet world, both had be- act 2 when the famous pas de quatre is being gun in another type of dancing. Bai, who is of danced (by six cygnets!). It cuts away from Manchuriandescentandwhosefamilyhadre- timetotimetofollowthreeforeigndignitaries turned to the northeast, was selected in 1952 in their theater box plotting against the Bol- for the Children’s Division of the Northeast sheviks, while sailors and ordinary citizens People’s Arts Academy. With them, she went sit in the stall seats. Then the film returns to to North Korea in 1953 on a “friendship visit,” the White Swan pas de deux. Near the end of one of the youngest among the dancers. The the act, just as Rothbart has swooped down on following year she was accepted into the first Odette, a uniformed man steps onto the stage, year of the ballet program at the Beijing Dance stops the performance, and announces that School. Czar Nicholas II and his family have been ex- The dance preparation of Liu, the Siegfried, ecuted. The sailors clap; the men in white ties was less direct and showed remarkable per- are visibly perturbed. severance.AlsofromChina’snortheast,hewas Among Chinese who were young adults at chosen in 1948 for the first class at the region’s some point in the 1966-1976 decade of the Cul- BaishanArtsSchool.Heappliedforadmission, tural Revolution, this is a very well-known he told school officials, because he was hun- four minutes of film. When I mention my in- gryand,atsixteen,wastooyoungforthearmy. terest in Swan Lake, many people spontane- By 1951, hehad the solo male role (with six ously tell me of this bit of the movie. Some of women) in The Dance of Fans, which was cho- themarerecallingitforthefirsttime,prompt- sen to represent China in the Moscow-orga- ed by my question. nized Third World Youth Festival in East I have been told that because only a very Berlin. limited number of foreign films were import- The dancers stayed in Europe for fifteen 60 ballet review months, visiting the Warsaw Pact countries ontoprincipalrolesinLeCorsaireandTheFoun- and Austria. During this time, Liu saw classi- tain of Bakhchisarai, and she danced Giselle. cal ballet for the first time. On the dancers’ re- Bai and Liu were also the two leads in Red turn, they were instructed to remain in Bei- DetachmentofWomen when it was given its pre- jing, and, in December 1952, they became the miere,in1964.Thereafter,theirfatesdiverged. From the beginning, Liu had taken an active political role in the dancers’ ranks and in the Communist Party unit attachedtotheschoolandthe company.DuringtheCultur- alRevolution,heretainedthe leadinRedDetachment,anim- portant fact given that it and White-HairedGirlfromShang- haiweretheonlyballetsper- mitted until late in that de- cade. Liu became de facto head of the company,carrying out the orders of and her allies, and, in 1976, he reachedtherankofvicemin- ister of the Ministry of Cul- ture. That same year, how- ever, his patrons fell from power, and Liu was arrested, tried,strippedo fCommunist Party membership, and sen- tencedsixyearslater(thede- lay was common) to seven- teen years of imprisonment, from which he emerged in the early 2000s. By contrast, Bai lost her role in Red Detachment after two years when her father’s past with the Nationalist Bai Shuxiang and Sun Zhengting in a photograph from Chinese government in war- a 1962 issue of China Pictorial. timeChongqingcamebackto nucleus of the new Central Dance and Song taint her. She was “struggled,” bowing deeply Company. When the Beijing Dance School was beforehermassedcritics;behindherwerebig- founded, Liu, already twenty-four years old, character posters stating her crimes. Bai was overcame the objections of his superiors and sent for reeducation to Cadres School, where entered as a student in the ballet division. It she performed subsistence work during the is said that he was selected for Swan Lake be- day and attended self-criticism sessions at cause he had the strength for the many Sovi- night. Recalled in 1974 to fill the thinning bal- et-stylelifts.AfterSwanLake,BaiandLiuwent lerina ranks, she is still active today and much fall 2015 61 interviewed as a living link to the founding photographsoftheSwanLakerehearsals.5They days of Chinese ballet. showthefollowingposes:SwanQueeninbent- Liu, who died in 2010, is seldom mentioned. leg arabesque, balanced on the thigh of the Brief footage of Bai and Liu in undated Swan kneelingPrince;Gusevadjustingapasdedeux; Lake productions is shown in the third and thecorpsdeballetofeighteenswansinasemi- fourth of eight-minute sections in a Chinese circle and four cygnets in front; Swan Queen ballet documentary.3 He can also be seen as inarabesqueplongée;and,finally,anotherpas the male lead in the 1971 film of The Red De- de deux pose, this of a kneeling Prince sup- tachment of Women. porting with his outstretched arms the Swan Rehearsals for Swan Lake began in February Queen in arabesque penchée. Liu is identified 1958, barely months after the arrival the pre- as a teacher, which perhaps he was in the na- vious fall of Gusev and specialists in varia- tional dance division. tions, partnering, and character dancing. Wu- The photographs’ publication in Wudao dao reported that soon after they began, stu- must constitute a semiofficial record of the dentsandteachers“undertheencouragement progress that the ballet division was seeking of the Great Leap Forward and in a burst of todocument.Overalltheyprovideinsightinto revolutionary fervor. . . greatly shortened the many of the project’s practical difficulties; the rehearsal time” and “moved up the perform- pictures clearly do not represent the dancers ance date” “by more than a year.”4 The result at all well. The lighting is unflattering, espe- was that after five months of rehearsal, the cially in the first and last images, with a semi- performance of Swan Lake took place on July circular glare of light and the dancers’ stark 1st. shadows. The originally planned premiere of “more The photographer is listed as Wu Huaxue, than a year later” must have been intended for who was with the government news agency the tenth anniversary of the People’s Repub- Xinhua and appears to have been both a re- lic of China. At the time, the imperative for porter and photographer on his stories. He speedwaspresseduponallsocialandeconomic was probably also sparing with the film for activities.FollowingtheSovietmodel,thegov- his camera. Resources, even among govern- ernment’s centralized planning had set year- ment agencies, were extremely scarce. Stills ly goals in industrialization in a First Five- and footage available online today, such as in Year Plan and then, in 1958, in a Second Five- the Chinese documentary mentioned above, Year Plan. show the dancers to better advantage, but “The Great Leap Forward” was the motto by those resources rarely provide dates. We can which individual and group efforts on every only be sure they predate January 1965, when level were bent toward universal participa- the last Swan Lake before the Cultural Revolu- tion in that effort. “Backyard furnaces” – real tion was performed, and that those that in- ones in the backyards of communes – exem- clude Gusev predate mid-1960, when he re- plifiedthefervorurgedoneachandeveryper- turned to Russia. son. All the arts, including dance education, At this point, the most dramatic supported were also asked to increase productivity. In pose that the dancers could project seems to addition, students went out to learn from or- be the one in the first of the photographs in dinary people. The January 1959 issue of Wu- Wudao, that of the Swan Queen balanced on dao carried a photograph of a furnace being the thigh of the Prince, probably from the fi- tended by a dance student, and the magazine nal moments of act 2. This guess is reinforced said that, in ten days, the dance troupe had by the fact that there are two other staged learned some of the skills of the smelters, who photographs of this pose (one in color print- were themselves amateur metal workers. ed in China Pictorial), and movie footage is Thereareonlyfivepublishedcontemporary preserved of this part of the staging in what 62 ballet review must be a later rehearsal, with Gusev making it on is capable of performing all classical bal- adjustments.6 lets. The further reason for our pride is that Costume and makeup, especially for the this Swan Lake was executed by the students prince, make a difference in the viewer’s im- at the Dance School. This is unprecedented in pression and also are possibly a reflection of the history of world dance – there has never improved skill, even over a short period of been a dance school in the world that has time.IntheChinaPictorialpicture,thecostume performed this ballet in its entirety. Usually is vaguely medieval (crenellated edges at the thegraduatingstudentsofadances choolmust tunic’s bottom). In the other photograph (not be trained for a great many years before they shownhere),itisvaguelyChinese(intheneck- can undertake a role like Odette, and usually line), so we see there was some experimenta- members of even the corps de ballet have all tion with the look of the ballet. already graduated from dance schools. But in The graduation performance was given in this performance of Swan Lake are students theprestigiousvenueofTianqiaoTheater,still fromthesecond,third,fourth,andfifthyears. the company’s theater today, and was attend- The earliest among them could have entered ed by Zhou and by Vice Premier and Foreign ballet school only in September of 1954, and Minister Chen Yi. This endorsement signaled would have only studied for something over the arrival of a force on the Chinese cultural three years.”7 scene and began a pattern of high-level offi- What might have been drawbacks from a cial presence at the ballet on significant an- ballet viewp oint – the brief years of train- niversaries of the ballet or of the nation. Soon ing, the large number of dancers needed, the afterthisperformance,balletwasaddedtothe shortened amount of rehearsal time – were capital’s sights for the yearly convention of exactly the points of national pride. (The or- the three thousand or so members of the Na- chestra is not mentioned.) These views are of tional People’s Congress. a piece with the Great Leap Forward, the ide- This first performance was enthusiastical- ology that willpower and motivation can re- ly received. Zhou’s personal commendation of place other factors. Bai Shuxiang was widely and often quoted. “It What of the performance itself? We do not has not been easy for you to prepare the dance know how much of the ballet was presented, in such a short time. I hear that you worked but the essentials were there. The thirty-two very hard. I hope you will become outstand- fouettés, for instance. As the Beijing Review ing in this field!” Beijing’s Theater News ex- wroteina1961profile,“Manystudent-dancers pressed the prevailing view that the Chinese . . . vividly remember how . . . they all forgot did in three years what normally took others themselves and silently but tensely counted many years to achieve, and they did it with ‘one, two, three . . .’ until, with great relief and the sine qua non of ballets, Swan Lake. satisfaction, [Bai] finished all 32 to a tremen- Theater News staff writer Zhu Qing clearly dous burst of applause.” states the official support for the production As noted earlier, a rehearsal photograph as well as for the classical and foreign ballet shows a corps of eighteen swans and four repertory, just years before the xenophobic cygnets. The inaugural program also lists a : jester, a“pas de trois for swans,” and, in act 3, “The success of the performance of the Spanish, Neapolitan, andHu ngarian dances famed Swan Lake by the Beijing Dance School and a mazurka. Later Zhang Yuanshao also moved us and gave us a great sense of pride. danced the Swan Queen role. In the 1962 Chi- This was not only because this was the first na Pictorial photograph, the Prince is identi- performance in our nation of a ballet that has fied as Sun Zhengting, the inaugural Colas in been regarded as the acme of European clas- the Chinese La Fille Mal Gardée. Wu Zuting was sical ballet, so much so that whoever can put a third Seigfried.8 fall 2015 63 More detailed information on Gusev’s stag- an all-Asian company in a classical work. As ing and music is given by the English balleri- Marie Rambert says in an article written af- na Beryl Grey, who was guest artist in Beijing ter her company performed in China, “With in 1964 and who knew the Bolshoi’s Swan Lake make-up they manage to look at least as West- from her 1958 performances with the compa- ern as our artists become Eastern, by careful ny. She describes the Chinese act 3 as having lines and shades of make-up.”11 beenresetbyGusevontheBeijingdancersand Rambert’s comment is frank regarding the writes that the music for the Black Swan pas expectations of her world (and no less candid dedeuxnowuses“Tchaikovsky’soriginalmu- regarding ballet’s customary impersonation sic for this number”; “the prince and princess of exotic Easterners from “Tartars” to “Chi- dance directly to the court as well as to the nese”). Grey’s remarks are along the same audience”;and“theentirecompanytakespart lines: “Even in stage make-up, Wang [the in the coda and forms a semicircle during Prince] looked very Oriental with his slanti- Odile’s thirty-two fouettés, which heightens ng eyes and high cheekbones. The majority of the excitement and drama.” Of Gusev’s act 4, the company,however, looked more European she writes that Odette has a pas de deux with in stage make-up with eyebrows and eyes themagicianandasolo,“butsheneitherdanc- drawn on the lines we use in the West.”12 To es with nor meets the Prince.” “I did not care look more European must have been an ex- for this Goussiev version,” she concludes.9 plicit goal and, it seems, an expectation on all Swan Lake was performed again in October. sides. Beforethat,onthefirstofthemonth,thedanc- Today, the National Ballet of China’s prince ers had a float in the National Day parade. On does not wear a yellow wig, but I noticed that the flat roof of a tall vehicle, protected by a in one set of costumes for Swan Lake (I think low railing, a rim of swans repeated a moment from 2012), in act 1 the women at court wear, in act 2: the corps with their arms and upper not inappropriately, snoods over their hair – bodiesliftingandfalling.Alongthecenterline but they are dark-yellow snoods, also moder- were two pairs of Swan Queen and Prince, he ating the overall non-European look of a clas- supporting her in attitude. That section of the sical ballet. parademarchedunderthebanner“Artsinthe I will leave the story of the birth of Swan Service of Politics” and included bands and Lake with a quick look ahead to its role in lat- twenty-foot-high reproductions of art works. er years. There was one Swan Lake when bal- Swan Lake in its early years raises an inter- let was new in China and Swan Lake equaled esting question for us today, visible in a detail ballet as it largely did, and, to some extent, in China Pictorial image, published in 1962: the continues to do everywhere. There was no cap worn by the Prince, dark yellow in the re- Swan Lake when all the arts were suppressed production. At first glance, and probably from during the Cultural Revolution, except for the the distance of the audience, this large cap, handful officially permitted. Finally, after the which covers two-thirds of the hair, looks like reforms of Deng Xiaoping began, in 1979, the a head of hair – dark blond hair. Beryl Grey ballet, along with everything else in China, mentions in passing a “jeweled headband began to mix with the world at large. across the front of [her partner’s] wig.”10 So With the company ’s international emer- it is a wig. (This is not visible in the perform- gence,theballetbecameanimportantelement ance photographs in Grey’s book.) in the company’s self-definition and a part of One wonders if other such details existed. its history of itself. SwanLake was the first bal- The bleaching of the hair is even today com- let to be revived in its entirety (single dances mon premier danseur practice in Russia. We from Giselle were also revived), and it was might, however, also read in this blond wig performed, surely deliberately, at the school’s a struggle in an earlier time with the idea of first post-Cultural Revolution graduation, in 64 ballet review 1979. In its first tour outside the Soviet bloc, the company website, a deliberately chosen in 1986, the company took act 2; and, by the signature of the repertory, as the company 1990s, it was touring the full-length ballet. consciously lays claim to the central tradition Today Swan Lake is prominently featured on of classical ballet.

NOTES 1. Zou Zhirui names the first three ballets in Xin 9. Grey, Through the Bamboo Curtain, 39, 70. Grey Zhongguo baleiwu shi [History of Ballet in New China] watched a rehearsal of act 2 but did not comment (Beijing:TsinghuaUniversityPress,2013),36,while on differences except to say they were worked out Beryl Grey groups all the Chinese ballets she knew in her rehearsals with the company. Grey danced as Soviet in origin (ThroughtheBambooCurtain [Lon- the Swan Queen with the Bolshoi in 1958, the year don: Collins, 1965], 72). Gusev went to Beijing. About Moscow, she writes 2. Elizabeth Souritz identified the dancers, with that Chaboukiani, initially to be her Prince, “had the assistance of film and dance scholar Vladimir been away from the Bolshoi for six years and his Kremen. Independently, the Bolshoi Theater con- version of Swan Lake was the old one. In the inter- firmed the identifications. val a new, immensely successful version had been 3. www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmTr6uEvOMs staged by the master Messerer. So and www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehYsFAFGU6o. there were three different ones – the two Bolshoi 4. Xinhua News Agency, “The Beijing Dance ones and mine.” She danced the Swan Lake by Asaf School to Perform SwanLake,” Wudao (July 1958): 28- Messerer, “ballet master and choreographer of the 29. new Act IV,” and later called it a “difficult last act 5. Ibid., 28-30. with the different choreography” (Red Curtain Up 6. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehYsFAFGU6o, [London: Secker & Warburg, 1958], 15, 16, 23). 1'04"-1'23". 10. Grey, Through the Bamboo Curtain, 52. 7. Zhu Qing, “Swan Lake and the Beijing Dance 11. Marie Rambert, “Chinese Ballet School,” Danc- School,” Xiju bao (Theater News) no. 15 (1958). ing Times (Jan. 1958): 173. 8. Zou Zhirui, Xin Zhongguo baleiwu shi, 34. 12. Grey, Through the Bamboo Curtain, 52.

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