The Chinese National Ballet production of Zhang Yimou's Raise the Red Lantern is nice to look at. The question is, what is it not telling us?
A recent front-cover Calendar piece in the L.A. Times used the Chinese National Ballet's adaptation of Zhang Yimou's controversial film Raise the Red Lantern to argue that China is indeed opening up politically and culturally, especially in these years leading up to the 2008 Olympics. Zhang's film (itself an adaptation of Su Tong's novella) was banned at home as it won acclaim internationally upon its release in 1991. For the same government's national ballet to embrace the film, and take the revamped stage version on the road (stopping Sept 20-25 at the Orange County Performing Arts Center) seems something of a revolution in national culture. What the L.A. Times article, nor any of the publicity materials -- which are full of more back-patting -- neglects to mention is that, though plot and character must be stripped down for the ballet, what is excised in this case are exactly those political elements that gave Zhang's film its fire. What's left is -- you guessed it -- illustrious sets, exquisite costumes, beautiful women, and exotic simulated sex.
Like the film, the ballet begins with the main character (played by Zhu Yan in the version I saw) being married off. However, immediately we realize that this isn't the feisty troublemaker played by Gong Li. Before she gets married, Zhu Yan's character -- donning girlish pigtails and what looks like Dorothy overalls -- dances innocently, as she dreams of her past lover, an opera singer. Then, she's suddenly captured and raped by her oppressive husband, who already has two wives. Whereas the film continues with the collusion and jealousies between the wives, a microcosm of women surviving in a patriarchal society, the ballet inserts the opera singer back into the mix, who subsequently heroically sweeps the third wife away from her master. The ballet ends with the execution of third wife, her lover, as well as the second wife -- played in the version I saw by Meng Ningning -- who steals the show after her character informs the master about third wife's tryst.
By inserting the opera singer and making him a martyr for believing in love, the ballet exonerates men for oppressing women. In the film, the only victims were women who took control of their own fates, a tragedy that draws attention to their helplessness in the master's compound, an allegory for the nation. Having the opera singer die with the two women essentially turns this into a Romeo and Juliet or Butterfly Lovers tragic romance -- in other words, fodder for classical ballet. Admittedly, there are scenes of female oppression -- as when the lead is literally encased in four walls held up by men dressed in black, or the red silk ribbon that the master uses as a leash before raping her -- yet these symbolic moments are, even by ballet standards, so heavy-handed and didactic that they lose their emotional power. The love-triangle turn in the final act renders such expressions of feminism irrelevant anyways.
Zhang Yimou, who is credited as director, artistic director, and lighting designer of this production, admitted in an interview, “I'm an amateur in ballet." Yet as you watch Raise the Red Lantern on the stage, you realize that he's done balletic work already, especially in his last two films, Hero and House of Flying Daggers. The similarities between the ballet and those two martial arts films (rather than the film upon which the ballet was based) cannot be understated. Each wife (and her entourage) is color coded, making for deliciously dynamic conflicts expressed in dance, as in the wedding scene, where a clash between wives becomes a dance between gold and lime green. Part of what makes it work is, as in those films, the choreography, which gives the colors meaning in movement. In an impressive scene, the master and second wife play mahjong with third wife and her lover under noirish shadows, and their gestures and synchronized arm and body movements rile up the fires of adultery. The acrobatic movements of the dancers, as well as the somewhat unnecessary Chinese opera scenes complete with martial arts revelry, put us in the place of Takeshi Kaneshiro's character as he watches Zhang Ziyi dance in the pink and green porcelain walls of the Peony Pavilion in House of Flying Daggers.
Included in my press kit is a review from The Dance Insider, in which Paul Ben-Itzak interestingly writes, “the National Ballet of China exorcises the Orientalism mite that has infested the story ballet for more than 100 years,” which rightly acknowledges the somewhat problematic tendency of 19th century European high culture to borrow from “Oriental” traditions (as with Impressionism's “borrowing” of Japanese prints). However, Ben-Itzak seems to imply that Orientalism somehow disappears (is “exorcised”) when it's the “Orientals” who make it, and thus Western audiences can gawk guilt-free at the acrobatic spectacles and Chinese opera interludes. This isn't Puccini doing Madame Butterfly or Turandot (which incidentally was a previous Zhang Yimou theater production), but the Chinese National Ballet; thus it must be authentic.
Which leads me back to the fact that Raise the Red Lantern is safely de-politicized and thus not the cultural revolution some are hailing it to be. Seeing the ballet in the same kind of building one sees a Puccini opera puts the ballet in a certain world. Namely, one from the past, something legendary or timeless -- like Romeo and Juliet or Butterfly Lovers. I remember the moment that jarred me most the last time I rewatched Zhang Yimou's film: in one of the rooms, we discover a phonograph, which becomes a central prop for the remainder of the film. Upon seeing it, we're jarred into realizing that this isn't the mythic past, but a story of China in the 20th century, probably the '30s. The sudden realization that these horrors aren't as distant as I assumed is part of what lends the film its political power. Needless to say, there is no phonograph in the ballet. Nor do the costumes -- which are highly stylized by French designer Jerome Kaplan -- indicate any historical time period. For the Western viewer and the high-class Chinese patron of the arts, this ballet is de-politicized because it's no longer truly about the China of today, or even one that actually ever existed. The Chinese National Ballet has essentially transformed Raise the Red Lantern's reputation in the public imagination from despised, traitorous film to ballet as timeless and harmless as Swan Lake or The Nutcracker -- all under the guise of “opening up culturally and politically.”
Many of the reviews and publicity materials mention that the Chinese National Ballet was responsible for performing many of the “model operas” like The Red Detachment of Women during the Cultural Revolution, and alas, see how far they have come, from propaganda works to adaptations of banned films. But beware, The Red Detachment of Women was itself an acclaimed film by Xie Jin in 1961 before it was co-opted and made even more one-sided for its opera and ballet versions during the Cultural Revolution. What we are witnessing may indeed be a new cultural revolution -- only one more insidious than Madame Mao could have ever imagined.
The Chinese National Ballet's Raise the Red Lantern plays at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa, Sept. 20-25. It then makes stops at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. (Oct. 4-8) and the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York City (Oct. 11-15).
Website for the Chinese National Ballet (in simplified Chinese): http://www.ballet.org.cn/