Directed by
Zhang Yimou
Choreographed by
Wang Xinpeng
Music composed by
Chen Qigang
Designed by
Zeng Li
Costumes
Jerome Kaplan
Conducted by
Zhang Yi and Liu Ju
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Raise the Red Lantern
The National Ballet of China
Sadler's Wells
11 - 15 November 2003
As anyone who has seen films by Zhang Yimou would expect, in this ballet version of his Raise the Red Lantern he makes dramatic narrative and visual brilliance powerfully serve each other, yielding an absolutely clear and richly expressive story line. Chinese art of any form is almost always vitiated by sentimentality: here there is restraint right at the limits of that danger. Add the following ingredients, and the result is spectacular: dancing of exquisite grace and line, sumptuously clever stage and costume design, a brilliant infusion of some Peking Opera dance, song and fighting elements, and the poignancy of the simple story itself.
Raise the Red Lantern tells of a girl who reluctantly becomes the third wife of a powerful mandarin. His first wife is jealous; the new third wife is anyway in love with a handsome young opera performer. Her beauty makes her husband desire her greatly, to the extent that he forces her to submit when she shows reluctance. The scene is strikingly played in shadows against a screen, through which suddenly the dancers erupt, only for the last act of the drama of defloration to take place under an enormous sheet of blood red silk.
By chance the young opera star comes to perform at the mandarin's home, and he and the girl resume their mutual passion, expressed in elegant, beautifully poised dance, which is threaded among by-plays of life in the mandarin's domain, including opera acts and a cleverly contrived mah-jongg game. The jealous first wife catches them, and tells the mandarin. In his rage and pain he condemns all three of them to death. The scene of their execution, in which the mandarin's men slap huge execution swords against a background sheet, leaving long crimson marks, is powerful; in a characteristically Chinese touch the three principals are reconciled just before their shared deaths.
It is hard to praise too highly the exceptional quality of the dancing, and the large, handsome imagination of the whole. Chen Qigang's score, combining Chinese music with classical and popular Western genres, gives colour, rhythm and depth, and helps all the ingredients for eye and ear to blend. But above all it is the dancers who impress, and the way they tell their perfectly structured story. It is a dance theatre event which should not be missed.
AC Grayling
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