A love that conquers all

Look closely at the production details and you’ll see why Jonathan Mills, director of the EIF, wanted to place it in the opening weekend of his programme. The over-arching theme of EIF 2011 is encapsulated in the phrase “looking to the Far West” – an adroit reminder that, even as Europeans tend to think of the Far East as a zone of different attitudes and art forms, a similar perspective is mirrored from the opposite direction.

There is an invigorating two-way traffic in ideas and influences, made all the more immediate by the communication networks of the 21st century, that Mills has resolved to highlight in this year’s festival. A work such as NBC’s The Peony Pavilion responds to the possibilities of crossing invisible barriers, not only the void between life and death but the differences between European and Chinese aesthetics and art forms, with a willingness and flair that clearly delighted Mills when he saw the work in Beijing.

Madam Zhao Ruheng, the former artistic director of NBC and now, in her late 60s, its indefatigable executive director and the producer of The Peony Pavilion, still takes great pleasure in Mills’s reaction. “Jonathan understood our ambitions,” she says. “He saw that we wanted to make something new. Still with the old Chinese traditions, but in a new way. We were using classical ballet from the West, and classical music – but our story was a very famous Chinese one by a writer who is like our Shakespeare.

“Jonathan understood that we wanted The Peony Pavilion to speak to our own audiences, and to show them ballet as an art form. But we also wanted audiences in Europe to enjoy this great love story, to see classical ballet with Chinese traditions in the choreography. So being invited to Edinburgh is a special opportunity to share, and to learn. It is, as Jonathan says, about bridges.”

These sentiments find an echo in comments made by choreographer Fei Bo. The NBC commission was his first full-length ballet. That alone would have been a challenge to test his confidence and talents.

But Fei, 33, was aware of Madam Zhao’s vision for a forward-looking repertoire: one with a strong component of new Chinese work to set alongside existing productions of 19th-century classics such as Swan Lake or the 20th-century tours de force of Balanchine. An earlier success for the company had been a version of Raise the Red Lantern staged by Yang Zhimou . What better next step than an adaptation of a timelessly popular, celebrated play from an acclaimed literary master? The obvious choice was Tang Xiansu’s epic equivalent of Romeo and Juliet.

Over a period of several months, the original play – traditionally performed in the Chinese Kun opera style – was pared back from a 20-hour stretch of 55 scenes and 200 arias to a two-act ballet that, with interval, runs to around two hours. Sub-plots, of which there were many, were put aside to concentrate on the love story at the heart of the matter. “Our ballet is about the Lady Du,” says Fei. “Hers is the leading role, and her feelings – her love, her journey, her determination – give the story we follow from beginning to end. We see her in the garden, and she’s dreaming of a young man she has never even met – but she falls in love with him. She dies but returns from Hell to marry him. In my ballet, all the love, desire, suffering, departure and death happens between the time when Du closes her eyes and awakens. Is it all just a dream?”

For modern audiences, that possibility allows the narrative – and the conceptual elements introduced into it – to bridge the myths of Chinese legend and the very real and recognisable heartache of a love that seems destined to be futile, unfulfilled. You can, as Fei points out, find those feelings in Chinese and European cultures and art forms – where there are differences, they lie in the way those feelings are expressed.

“You could say that Chinese people express certain passions in a more indirect way,” explains Fei. “So symbols become very important, and we have kept that tradition in our ballet. The falling flowers, for Lady Du, might be her own feelings that youth and beauty are leaving her.”

And the sequence where the ballerina –and then the corps de ballet maidens – dance with one pointe shoe on and one bare foot? “In ancient times,” he continues, “the woman’s foot was a very private part of her. It was very erotic, very sexy, for a man – and very intimate. Traditionally, in ancient China, only a lover might see a woman’s foot so this is an expression of desire. But in ballet, the foot is also very important. And the pointe shoe is a symbol of the art form, its technique, its aesthetics, a European concept that is still new, but exciting, for our audiences. When the two ideas come together, we can see the two sides to Lady Du: one side is free – expressing desires – but one side is still controlled, still with the discipline and movements of the pointe shoe”.

With one foot symbolically in the past, and the other in a future that Madam Zhao, Fei and NBC are exploring with an inspiring degree of flexibility, not only in their mindset, but in the training of their dancers and choreographers. When Lady Du dances, her body is the living bridge that connects past and present, East and West, even the very music that Fei and the composer Guo Wenjing wove into an original score. That music incorporates an on-stage singer whose high cadences in Kun mode – and gorgeously ornate apparel – are a reminder of its four centuries of performance history. Elsewhere, references to Debussy’s Daphnis and Chloe, Holst’s The Planets and Prokofiev’s Scythian Suite allow Fei to choreograph in the steps of European ballet with a truly discernible empathy for that music.

Madam Zhao says there is a need for China’s emerging choreographers to find ways of taking their cultural traditions forward into a new era. And she speaks of the workshops that invite European practitioners of all dance techniques, not just classical ballet, to teach and mentor the growing number of enthusiastic young people. “We have so much to learn,” she says. “But we are very willing, and want to build bridges.”

Let’s hope the message from EIF audiences to Madam Zhao and the NBC is warmly reciprocal: in the Far West we too have much to learn. The Peony Pavilion is a fabulous beginning to that process.

The Peony Pavilion, Edinburgh Playhouse from August 13 to 15, is sponsored by Baillie Gifford.

Picture: EIF