The traffic moving eastward from the west of Beijing was worse than usual, and by the time we reached the Tianqiao theatre near the Temple of Heaven, the show was about to begin, and everyone else was in their seats. Ours were in the middle of a long row towards the front and although I tried to manoeuvre my friend Song into the lead, he slipped behind just in time, leaving me to make the apologies as we stepped over a dozen pairs of knees to get there.
We had been in the same theatre only a few weeks earlier to watch a visiting company from St Petersburg perform Swan Lake, after which Song complained that the dancers weren’t really putting the effort in. This was rich coming from Song, who is possibly the laziest man in China, but it was true that the Russian dancers might have been on tour a little too long and the recorded music they had to perform to made the production seem all the more threadbare.
Taking no chances this time, we had come to see the National Ballet of China perform its signature piece, The Red Detachment of Women, complete with a full orchestra and choir. The ballet had its first performance at this very theatre in 1964, and the show began with a short newsreel, including pictures of Richard Nixon with Mao Zedong’s wife Jiang Qing at a performance in 1972.
Set on the tropical island of Hainan in the South China Sea in the 1930s during the civil war between Mao’s communists and Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists, it tells the story of Wu Qionghua, a young peasant woman who has been unfairly imprisoned by an evil landlord. She escapes and joins an all-women detachment of the Red Army, which is training in the countryside.
READ MORE
Under the guidance of Hong Changqing, the detachment’s handsome young commissar, Wu not only evolves into an accomplished soldier but also becomes a member of the Communist Party. The Red Army storm the landlord’s hideout in the end and releases those he has imprisoned, but not before Hong dies a martyr’s death.
Premier Zhou Enlai commissioned the ballet after he saw a production of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and suggested that a revolutionary-themed work should be created using both European and Chinese dance traditions. The Red Detachment of Women was to make revolutionary heroes, workers, peasants and soldiers the masters of the stage, in keeping with Mao’s call to “make the past serve the present and foreign things serve China”.
Championed by Mao’s wife Jiang, the ballet became one of eight model works that dominated the stage during the early years of the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976. These works were performed in schools, factories and fields, their music broadcast on loudspeakers and images from them appeared on stamps, postcards and posters.
The woman sitting next to me appeared, like many others in the audience, to be in her 80s and she hummed or sang along to every number. This was the music of her youth and although The Red Detachment of Women is full of nationalistic and ideological symbolism, it is also the story of adventurous young people taking the future into their hands.
Although the party frowned on overt representations of sexuality during the Cultural Revolution, as it does today, the ballet’s original lead dancer Xue Jinghua became a rare, permitted pin-up. An image of her performing an arabesque in Bermuda shorts and gripping a gun while the evil landlord cowered before her was especially popular during the 1970s.
When I told a friend in her 40s that I was going to see The Red Detachment of Women, she told me it was her father’s favourite work. This surprised me and it cannot have been because of any nostalgia for the Cultural Revolution, a time of great trauma for her father during which his parents took their own lives on the same night, leaving him to be raised by his teenage brother.
At times, the show was like a communist version of the Ziegfeld Follies, with pirouettes performed on pointe by dancers in army uniform clutching rifles or with their fists clenched. During a one-minute interval, the dancers performed a series of consecutive firebird leaps across the front of the stage, to the delight of the audience.
An army veteran choir in full uniform joined the orchestra a handful of times, most spectacularly towards the end when Hong the handsome commissar embraces his martyrdom. As he climbed on to a pyre beneath a giant banyan tree and the flames rose to envelop him, the choir sang the opening bars of the Internationale, quietly at first and then louder until everyone around me seemed to have a tear in their eye.
