Yesterday evening, I attended the Bent Festival.  It was much like going to a party I wasn't invited to, the guests were strangers--they were mostly middle aged men, some with mohawks, some with glasses and studious airs--and the chain of events unrolled with nerve racking abruptness.  It began in the dark, the surrounding horizon of concrete walls silently cast off its yellow glow.  Then the sound of an electric circuit, a concentrate of burning textured sound waves, rang out in the grey darkness.  On stage, the performer, a man with sunglasses, was playing with what appeared to be a microwave.  On top of it, soldier-like rows of metal prongs, and in between a pair of these, a thin, wavering stub of white current.

The concert's content was noise, or at least noise as defined in my high school music classes.  It wasn't easy on the ears, long bands of electrical slashes, at small intervals peppered with decipherable beats and melodies.   Following performances featured a girl in elvin attire and a cowboy who has lost his way in time.  The former threw out sounds of babies crying cut with electrical grumbling.  The cowboy lit a small furnace and the audience watched, curious, as a single wheel of a model locomotive began turning.

I left the cowboy and his locomotive to explore the premises.  To the right of the stage, a flock of cardboard boxes hung silently from the ceiling.  Further away, microphones had fallen into huge jars that smelled like candy.  (see pictures below)

I have begun yoga exercises.  This all started when my mother came to town the week before.  My mother has loving blue eyes which can take on an intense stare when she is talking about something she believes in.  She talked about yoga this way.  She had started reading an out-of-print bestseller, a yoga memoir of a balding writer who had experienced, and written about, the art's wonders.

I ordered two yoga DVDs over Netflix.  One is called Yoga for Losing Weight (it doesn't actually make you lose weight, it's the balance of your mind and spirit which gives you the strength to go dieting, supposedly...) and AM and PM Yoga.  And there I was, a week later in the living room, desperately trying to hold the poses illustrated on the TV set.  After three days, I have not yet noticed anything divine, or miraculous going on within.  The exercises do heat up my body, they give me a slight burning sensation in my palms (which I attribute to the work of the mind) and do relax my muscles.  Only to give me cramps the next morning.

On a different, but equally newsworthy note, I was invited to see Larry King setting off the Nasdaq opening bell last Friday.  It was a sympathetic publicity gesture that gave me an impressive glimpse of the American publicity machine (I spent nine months in China as a publicity manager, the comparison of American and Chinese publicity is illuminating my days).  The ceremony took place, as it does every morning and evening, in the Nasdaq studios at the base of 4 Times Square. The crowd of journalists and publicists skirted around the ring of cameras.  At the center of the semi-circle stood Larry King, and his wife (perhaps, probably).  Two minutes before 9 30, everyone was asked to begin clapping "you are live" boomed a tall woman with a headset after she had detailed the hardships of clapping for two-minutes straight.

Countdowns, any countdowns, make me nervous.  I guess they harken back to cinematic bombs which have crystallized in my subconscious through years of viewing and re-viewing.  By the time I had finished thinking this, the Nasdaq market had opened.

The Pipa Player Wu Man Discovers World Music in America

Director Zhang Yimou's ballet Raise the Red Lantern is adapted from the film of the same name.  Should the ballet have kept the name?  As the plot on stage progresses, the original screenplay is like a father left behind on the road: its outlines gradually blur and efface themselves in the landscape.  How is the screenplay betrayed and for what reasons?

In the film, the heroin does fall in love with a young man, but he is the son of her husband.  They give each other a minimal dose of longing glances but chicken out from action.  Instead, the third preceding wife, has an affair with her doctor.  The heroin is not raped by her husband on her first night at the palace.  He is drawn away by the third wife and she more than willingly complies during the rest of the film. 

Both on stage and on screen, the heroin is a student.  On screen, this component is the most interesting point of the film.  She is educated and initially refuses to get pulled into the squirmishes of the other three wives who claw for the husband's attention.  But gradually, her highbrow attitude is corrupted by the feudal marriage system and she decides to champion it, pretending she is pregnant to get the exclusive favors of the husband.  She is successful until she is discovered.  This psychological dimension is wiped out in the ballet, instead, she remains outside of the squabble (the three minus one other wives high kick each other alone on the stage) and dives in for the loving opera actor.

How much of these changes can be attributed to the transition from film into a ballet (dance is a medium which cannot articulate as complex conceptions as words can)?  How much of it can be attributed to changes in the mentality of the director Zhang Yimou (supposing he is the one responsible for the plot changes) and his slide from conceptual to commercial mode of production? (his last two block busters "hero" and  "house of the flying daggers" point in that direction)

A lot of the changes come through molding the screenplay for a different medium.  The first wife is wiped off, she has no active role in the film and her presence on stage would be superfluous.  The love story with the opera actor adds the possiblity of zipping in resplendant silk robes and diamond headwear along with spear fights and kungfu jumps on stage.  The love story is also necessary from a choreographical point of view.  All the aestheticism of the slow motion portes, sensual leg lifts and arabesques around the man's waist, the body's rolling over one another, would be absent.  These moves are crowd pleasers, the equivalent of a bare leg here and there in 1940s post code american musicals, and a plus in a production that wants itself commercial. 

Most of the film's elements--the plot of the second wife for power, the third wife's love affair, the heroin's insanity--are rubbed out to leave the space for a simplified ballet plot.  There is one complicating scene added in though.  That is the rape.  A ballet rape is a challenge to depict.  The dancing is fluid, yet rape requires violence, aggressivity (without mentioning the act itself a no-no for the stage).  So why go to the trouble of including it?  It demonizes the husband, pushes him over completely to the dark side.  Whereas in the film at times he displayed confusing benevolence.  The rape's complication carves a clear divide between evil and good and erases the film's middle ground shades of grey.

Why does the second wife die for denouncing the heroin and her lover?  Is it to avoid the guilty simplicity of a black/white plot, one where the baddies triumph and the goodies die?  Something a tad bit obscure had to be placed in the end to make up for the screenplay's erased psychological complexities.

Zhang Yimou must be mad, either that or he doesn't understand the word "ballet".  In a ballet, the female dancers wear tight white tutus, not colorful qipaos or silk robes with water sleaves that leap into the air.  In a ballet, gracefulness occurs on one restrained portion of the stage or cloned over a larger space, there are not chaotic split kicks and staggering pirouettes all over the place.  There are no chinese opera characters on stage, none of their soaring squeels and spear fights.  There are no percussionists clanking away or melancholy voice of an erhu floating over the beats.  Characters do not shred red lanterns, paper windows or flip over tables and other characters.

Zhang Yimou has all that and more in the ballet staging of his award winning film "raise the red lantern".  So what is it?  A ballet?  No much more: it's a ballet con chinese opera con chinese film. 

The plot of yimou's original film is slightly visible in the ballet as though through the floating gauze of the costumes.  In the film, a young school-girl is force-married to a rich old shadow whose personnality is contained entirely within his voice, we never see his face.  During her pouting and boring days wading around her sumptuous cage, she discovers her husband's third wife is having an affair.  She pretends to be pregnant in order to attract his attention, is uncovered by the second wife and in a drunk fit uncovers the third wife.  The third wife is exectued, the protagonist goes mad pacing around her room bumping into the windows indefinitely.

In the ballet, the evil husband is a dancing cutie, a long black beard is pasted on to his chin and when he isn't thrusting one of his wives bodies in the air, he runs his two fingers down its strands.  The night of her arrival, he rapes her.

How do you depict a rape in a ballet?  Exactly the same as you depict it in the movies, that is in Zhang Yimou's movies.  The lens swerves away from the steaming couple and films some wind beating trees or pouring red silk.  On stage, a shower of red silk flies over the scrambling couple.  Silence as the sea of silk settles down on the two figures.  She peeps her head out and claws at the fabric drawing its abundance around her tiny frame. 

The day after, she falls in love with an opera dancer of her husband's palace.  The second wife stretches her hand out right to her finger tips and points at their entertwined arabesques behind a dwarfing transparent panel.  All three of them are thrown into jail.  Thousands of pirouettes, stretches, crawling and portes later, their bodies are criss crossed over each other, diamonds of paper shower down and ignite their figures.

Can there be too much beauty, too much gracefulness?  Yes there can be and I won't settle for anything under overdose now.

thought i might put this on the blog

May 29, 2005
Shakespeare Brushes Up on His Chinese
By AVENTURINA KING
TAIPEI, Taiwan

MACBETH does a back flip from a 10-foot-high city wall; his queen
sings a lament as she wipes imaginary blood from her hands; and the
courtiers enact their coup in Han dynasty dress. It is no typical
production of Shakespeare's "Macbeth" that Spoleto Festival U.S.A.
is presenting on Thursday and Friday in Charleston, S.C.

Renamed "The Kingdom of Desire," it is a creation of the
Contemporary Legend Theater of Taiwan, which has fused
Shakespeare's plot with the mise-en-scène of Beijing opera. The
verses are in Mandarin (with English titles), and the words are
accentuated by the actors' flowing patterns of movement. While
plotting the king's murder, Wei Hai-Ming, as Lady Macbeth,
elegantly twirls the long sleeves of her dress. Wu Hsing-Kuo,
meanwhile, as Macbeth, twists his body in snakelike fashion and
flutters his hands in circles. His movements intensify as his
strong tones resonate throughout the auditorium.

In Beijing opera, a 200-year-old dramatic medium and long the most
popular form of entertainment in China, actors, clothed in ornate
silk costumes, perform stylized movements on a more or less bare
stage. Traditional string, wind and percussion instruments
accompany the performers through sequences of acting, song, dance
and acrobatics. Like Broadway players, the actors excel in these
different skills and often perform them simultaneously.

The Contemporary Legend Theater was established in 1986 by its lead
actor and artistic director, Mr. Wu, in an attempt to usher Beijing
opera into the 21st century. The company made its debut with "The
Kingdom of Desire," which it has since performed widely, notably at
the Royal National Theater in London in 1990 and at the Avignon
Festival in France in 1998.

Over the last two decades, the company has produced a series of
plays interpreting canonical Western dramas - "Hamlet," "Medea,"
"Oresteia," "The Tempest" - through the Beijing opera lens. In
2001, Mr. Wu performed "King Lear" as a one-man show, alternately
playing Lear, Cordelia and the other principal roles.
(Cross-dressing is a longstanding tradition in Beijing opera.)

Purists of a certain stripe might see these adaptations as further
evidence of the East's capitulation to Western culture, whether
popular or classical. Mr. Wu, however, sees them as a way to help
preserve Beijing opera tradition.

"As I grew up learning Beijing opera, I realized that every day the
audiences grew smaller and smaller," he said in an interview. "The
times were changing quickly. So I asked myself how I could make
Beijing opera flourish again."

But when he set about to fuse Eastern and Western drama, he and his
collaborators found that it was no easy task. Ms. Wei, the Lady
Macbeth, explains: "Beijing opera portrays beauty. Western drama
depicts life."

Aesthetic qualities of a rarefied sort are paramount in Beijing
opera. Actors train intensively from childhood to achieve a perfect
fluidity of movement. Stage scenes are organized to produce the most
exquisite impression. Sometimes, during a martial sequence, a gong
will suddenly sound, and the performers freeze their bodies into a
beautiful sculpture adorned in silk.

Onstage, there is no ugliness. Actors' faces reveal little emotion,
even through death and war; grief is expressed through stylized
gestures. Nor does anything interrupt the smooth choreography.
Everything is done to please the eye.

This ideal is very different from Western drama, which, beginning
with Greek tragedy, does not hesitate to plunge into the depths of
human suffering in a wrenching, realistic manner. The goal of
involving the audience emotionally often supersedes that of giving
visual pleasure.

These differences in representation reflect the differences in
subject matter. "Beijing opera only portrays virtue, illustrates
high ideals," Mr. Wu said. "Shakespeare's plays and the Greek
tragedies talk about human weakness caused by love and hatred."
Indeed, Chinese opera heroes and heroines, like the charitable Bai
Su Zhen in "Madam White Snake" or the naïve Du Liniang in "The
Peony Pavilion," are paradigms of innocence. The leads in "Macbeth"
are murderers tortured by ambition and then by guilt.

But in a few important regards, Shakespeare is well suited to the
Chinese stage. "Shakespeare wrote most of his plays in verse, like
Beijing opera," Mr. Wu said. "His stage is also relatively sparse.
The actors are responsible for conjuring up the setting."

He added, "We want to use well-known masterpieces because everyone
understands them already." That is how traditional opera is
generally presented in China, where operas may last up to 20 hours
but are typically shown in isolated excerpts, requiring the
audience to be familiar with the larger context of a given scene.

Mr. Wu began intensive training in Beijing opera at 10, in Taiwan.
Eight years later, he entered the Chinese Culture University and
started studying Shakespeare. After graduation he performed leading
roles for the Cloud Gate Dance Theater and the Lu Kuang Chinese
Opera School. In 1983, eager to revive the form, he and a group of
friends began discussing the possibility of a Beijing opera
interpretation of "Macbeth."

This was the genesis of the company. The challenges were immense. It
had no script, no sets, no costumes, no rehearsal space and no
financing.

"We had trouble finding someone to adapt the script to Beijing
opera, because a lot of people opposed our use of Beijing opera as
a means to present a Western drama," said Lin Hsiu-Wei, the
producer of "The Kingdom of Desire" and Mr. Wu's wife. "Finally, a
college student accepted, and turned the verse into Beijing opera
style poetry in one year. At the end, it was too long to use, so we
had to edit it extensively." The text was set to traditional
melodies from Beijing opera.

The sets and costumes were produced by volunteers. "The people
making the sets put up their own money," Ms. Lin said, adding that
the costume designers did the same.

As for the role of Lady Macbeth, the company looked outside its own
ranks. "At the time," Ms. Lin explained, "in the Beijing opera
world, the two best accomplished artists were Wu Hsing-Kuo and Wei
Hai-Ming," a star of the Hai Kuang Chinese Opera Company in Taiwan.
"They were therefore the perfect match onstage." Mr. Wu called Ms.
Wei and offered her the role of Lady Macbeth - but without salary.
(The company is now fully professional.)

Beijing opera is highly codified. Movements function as symbols that
can represent either the physical situation or the thoughts of a
character. A thrust of the leg and the character is suddenly
swimming in a river. A dismissive wave of the hand, the character
is angry.

The code is made more complex by traditional opera's character
categories. Like Western opera, which categorizes its roles
according to vocal range (sopranos and tenors as heroes and
heroines, mezzos and basses as heavies), Beijing opera divides its
characters according to sex, age, rank and function.

The term "wusheng," for example, designates all the male military
roles. "Qingyi" describes the virtuous lady, whether a dutiful
daughter or a devoted wife and mother. Each category has its own
repertory of stage movements from which the characters choose to
express their particular situations.

Because of the difficulty of the movements, a Beijing opera
performer will generally master only one or two role types. As Ms.
Wei, who began training when she was 10, explains, "I was raised as
qingyi, which means that all my movements had to be very tender,
very soft." So when Mr. Wu called, she assumed that her role in
"The Kingdom of Desire" would fall within that category, too. "I
accepted the offer without having read the script," she said. She
added with a laugh, "I hadn't suspected his plan."

But Lady Macbeth does not fall into any of the traditional character
categories. Ms. Wei had to discard her qingyi movements and create a
new body language to depict Lady Macbeth's devious personality - a
process that exemplifies the modernization of Beijing opera in the
production.

"I created new movements, like this one, where my palms are facing
toward the sky and my hands are at different levels," she said.
"The palms facing upward indicate that Lady Macbeth wishes to
elevate her status and the status of her husband. But you would
never see a movement like this in traditional Beijing opera."

She demonstrated other movements she had created for her role. "When
I walk, I move my dress so that it is like the tail of a snake," she
said. "When I plot the king's murder with Macbeth, I emphasize the
vicious words with the lashing movements of my dress."

And unusually, the Beijing opera performers are required to depict
suffering realistically, to contort their made-up features into
scowls and frowns, to produce tears.

Yet in "The Kingdom of Desire," the performance loses none of its
beauty. The grimaces, the stabbing and the contracted limbs, all
that is normally ugly and cathartic in Western drama, is infused
with gracefulness, a constant hallmark of the form. And emotions
are externalized with a new intensity through the performers'
graceful use of their entire bodies to express their feelings. (Ms.
Wei and Mr. Wu will give a lecture-demonstration on "The Kingdom of
Desire" on June 8 at the New York Library for the Performing Arts.)

As Mr. Wu had hoped, "Macbeth" has given Beijing opera new
expressive possibilities and a new opportunity to flourish. Maybe
Beijing opera will do the same for "Macbeth."

New York City Opera’s “Haroun and the Sea of Stories”, based on a Salman Rushdie short, is a daring combination of atonal music, tongue twister lyrics and film. In the fairytale’s ‘once upon a time’, an adulterous wife leaves her son, Haroun (portrayed by soprano Heather Buck) and his story-telling father, Rashid (Peter Strummer).  Distraught, the husband loses his “gift of gab” and Haroun's attention span shrinks to 11 minutes. The tyrant Snooty Buttoo (Joel Sorensen) hires Rashid as a propagandist and hosts the pair on the one-thousand-plus-oneth Arabian night.  Haroun’s dreams fly him to the Sea of Stories. The sea supplies story-tellers, by a “Process Too Complicated to Explain” (P2C2E), with their tales, but it has been polluted by the prince of silence, Khattam-shud. The boy saves the sea, cures his father’s teller block and brings his mother home.

The delightful libretto could stand alone as a play. Jokes and witty puns infuse the lyrics. Moreover despite the story’s glibness, it dramatizes significant modern issues. Reminiscent of today’s propagandistic media, Buttoo orders the story-teller to praise him before the people. The repeated line “what’s the use of stories that aren’t even true?” questions the age-long human fascination with fiction. Moreover, the performers’ flawless diction enables the audience to appreciate the work as a play without needing to read the supertitles.

Riccardo Hernandez’s minimalist sets add to the plot’s creativity, forcing the audience to imagine most of the setting.  Haroun drinks from an invisible Sea of Stories.  He and his father sail upon a bottomless boat or lose themselves in a treeless forest. Peter Nigrini’s film projections supply other elements of the setting. In a memorable scene, Haroun and his father are sitting (or more accurately, shuffling) in an invisible bus crossing a dangerous mountain area.  As they melodiously cry out in fear, background animation reveals the tortuous path, flanked with humorous signposts.

Along with the sets, Candice Donnelly’s costumes are a treat for the eye.  As Arabian-night inspired figures prance in and across the stage, each dress vies with the previous in colorfulness and creativity.  Buttoo’s beaded necklaces jingle over an ornate golden caftan.  Other characters wear enormous bright silk fish on their heads.  Some costumes even challenge their character’s bizarreness.  The gardener of stories dresses like a green punk, his tight leather and spandex suit atop his over-compensated heels.  As Haroun, Buck wears a simpler striped nightgown under a tomboy haircut. 

The music’s relationship with the lyrics is original. It is “music built to match the metric scan and theatrical intention of the poetry” explained Charles Wuorinen, the composer. Flutes merrily chirp, as Haroun jokingly details the P2C2E. The score paints each character musically. The evil Khattam-shud hisses over a chromatic scale which reflects his crookedness. The singing itself never settles into a definable song. It flows freely like the dialogue, driving the plot forward in an endless recitative.

Unfortunately, the score’s sporadic pitch variations strain the performer’s ranges.  Tenors literally sing mezzo soprano parts. At times, voices broke or dangerously wavered off tune. Joel Sorensen struggled to sustain the final pitch of Buttoo’s mantra “vote for me.” Other tenors adopted a different technique, becoming overly nasal in the heights. Only the soprano and baritones were spared. 

In particular, Peter Strummer provided his soulful interpretation with a full voice. Heather Buck’s vocalization of Haroun was near flawless. She mastered the complex pitch variations and, with effortless grace, carried her voice throughout the higher register. Her acting, although a little simplistic in its mannerisms and boyish frowns, was endearing.

It’s a pity the audience didn’t appreciate such a daring production.  The atonal music discomfited the unfamiliar listeners.  By the end, a portion of the seats had emptied, and although the performers received an ovation, it was modest, and seated.