Reviews
Time OutUnnerving, unwholesome and unexpected: welcome to Shanghai. In 2004, Border Crossings won critical acclaim with ‘Orientations’, which fused traditional elements of Indian performance with Western theatre. Now, in the second part of the work-in-progress trilogy, they introduce Zhang Ruihong, a leading exponent of Chinese Yue Opera, and a city that’s dangerously isolating. The narrative of the opera entwines itself around the story of a British talent scout, Julian Lucas, who is in Shanghai searching for his teenage daughter Alex, who went missing a year ago. Along with the uptight Lucas - who Tony Guilfoyle brilliantly characterises, and never caricatures - we’re set adrift in this bewildering city, where the refined serenity of Ruihong’s stylised performance gives way to blaring nightclubs. In that seedy, garish world, Moretti, an American detective who Lucas has hired, trades for tips and Lucas gets his own taste of Shanghai Vice. | The company’s signature inventiveness creates a gloriously chaotic aesthetic. Furniture flies across the set on castors; the bank-robber anonymity of the world’s most populous country is captured in the stockinged faces of the people who come and go. There’s an uncompromising stance on language, too - nothing that is performed in the opera, nor the Mandarin dialogue between the characters, is translated. On the whole, it’s as disorientating a place as director Michael Walling could have hoped to create. The cast is splendid too - the humorous set pieces, like the linguaphone lesson, are brilliantly executed. A culture shock worth experiencing. Emma John
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Rogues and Vagabonds
Border Crossings describe this as a ‘multi-cultural, multimedia collision of East and West’ but don’t let that put you off: director and conceiver Michael Walling knows what he is doing. I have little time for technology-heavy shows that displace the actor but Billy Hiscoke’s video is an essential contribution to Seema Iqbal’s silver and red design, and Mark Doubleday’s lighting seamlessly gives it prominence when needed. It thrusts us into the hectic neon-walled streets of Shanghai and into its pulsing discos, even as we watch the gentle unfolding of a Chinese Opera classic, and it uses one freeze-frame to great dramatic effect.
The clash of East and West is that now taking place in Asia’s fastest growing city, which in this Year of the Dog 2006 has already passed 17 million. The words multi-cultural have been so debased by politician-speak that they no longer hold much promise, but this company has always made a point of working across national and cultural boundaries. Research in China led to a collaboration with the Shanghai Yue Opera Company. This all-female company performs one of the newer forms of Chinese Opera, but one that is very popular. The Yue style developed from folk- singing in Shaoxing, near Shanghai, early in the twentieth-century. From the late 1920s it became increasingly an all-female form with women playing both genders. Two performers from the Shanghai company, Ma Haili and their nationally famous star Zhang Ruihong, appear with a Chinese actor from Macao and British actors in this international cast. Within the play they perform parts of the opera The Butterfly Lovers, often in counterpoint to other action.
Newly-arrived in Shanghai’s maelstrom mix of multi-national big business and Taoist traditions - McDonalds alongside ancient culture - is an Englishman looking for his daughter. She has done a bunk, taking his credit cards and cash, and he thinks this is where she has gone to ground. He hires an American private-eye to find her. On the one hand the play follows that search, in bars and clubs and among the prostitutes who don’t officially exist, until contact is made with a female opera singer who has known her. At the same time we are discovering the back story: a broken marriage, an unhappy daughter and a broken heart.
For uninformed Westerners, the women-as-men casting of Yue Opera is given added confusion by their costumes. In long gowns and elaborate headwear these male characters look like women. The play itself also explores sexual confusion, though not all its personalities are confused. Rent- boy Sammy, who accompanies the missing girl’s father back to his hotel room, certainly knows exactly what he is doing - even though the Englishman Julian may not. Opera singer Huang Song (Ma Haili), who has spent her life on stage as a man romancing women, finds loving a woman in real life difficult to handle but Amanda Boxer’s Marie delivers a poetic recollection of 120 different ways of lesbian loving and Julian (Tony Guilfoyle) and Sammy (Ku Ieng Un, who also gives us a frightening Madame Mao) make their romantically lit encounter seem an idyll. Given official Chinese reaction to gay elements in some recent Chinese movies I was surprised to see such frank presentation and discussion of sexual choice in an Anglo-Chinese co-production. I hope this will not affect it being seen in China, for I understand that Border Crossings hope to take it to Shanghai.
Yue Opera has none of the acrobatics and martial arts of some kinds of Chinese Opera. It is a much more gentle form of gliding, tai-chi-like movements and its music is gentler and more melodic to western ears. This production also has a gentleness that makes it very touching. It begins and ends with Taoist calmness with Zhang Ruihong (who plays Huang Song’s mother) gracefully dancing. Her opera scenes with Ma Haili, their story echoing rather than actually paralleling the action, reinforce this gentle mood. Despite some very funny sequences - especially one based on language learning in which voices are mismatched to gender - and some violence, the Taoist mood prevails, but we are also given a few hard statistics, some sharp observation of the effects of Westernisation and even a thumbnail history of the Cultural Revolution. Thirty years since the death of Chairman Mao and fifteen years since the suicide of Madame Mao, former actress Lán Píng, their shadows still fall over modern China and over this play. Her harsh presence made me want to know what she thought about Yue Opera and what she allowed in its performance. However, this is not a political piece. Despite its satiric glimpses of modern Shanghai life, its impact is that of a work in which mood and image, rather than argument or information, dominate a somewhat sad celebration of the varieties of love.
Howard Loxton
Dim Sum
Dis-Orientations' Swan Song not to be missed
Dis-Orientations closes this Sunday 1st October - Chinese National Day - seeing the return of renowned opera performer Zhang Ruihong to her native China. Until then, there remains the opportunity to see a unique production which marries Chinese and Western performing art, history, and contemporary life in a moving and thought-provoking way. Conceived and directed by Michael Walling, responsible for the recent revival of Nixon in China at the London Coliseum earlier this year, the play draws us into this dizzying cultural melee through a British father's search for his missing daughter in modern-day Shanghai. His quest, the unfolding story of his daughter, echoes from China's past, and the relationships the characters form resonate with the classic Chinese love story, the Butterfly Lovers, beautifully performed by Zhang Ruihong and Ma Haili.
As East meets West and the modern meets the traditional, the performances begin to merge and interact; the movements in the piece have a wonderful sense of flow and coordination. But as proves inevitable, differences also throw up conflict and disorientation. Walling, talking to Dimsum after the performance, described the play as being representative of the 21st century: its confusion and change, its smaller more connected world and the questions of identity and gender exposed by the retreat of traditional cultural forms. How you put together the pieces is very much dependent on your viewpoint, and who you are; young or old, East or West, or somewhere between the two.
The mix of these many different elements came about through the collaborative nature in which the piece was conceived. Zhang explained to Dimsum, that in contrast to traditional Chinese Yue Opera, there was no fixed script to start with, but only an idea of the scene. This therefore required each performer to proactively create the performance through interaction with, and learning from the other cast. However, Zhang sees the underlying unity in the piece, symbolised in the choice to perform Butterfly Lovers: "I believe that people's emotions, their feelings to life are the same, no matter whether in ancient time or modern time, or in East or West. The story in Dis-Orientations to me is a story of love for your lover, for your family. The butterfly symbolises a beautiful wish. After all those struggles, at the end of Butterfly Lover, Liang and Zhu become butterflies after death, in which they eventually overcome all the social biases and obstacles, and finally they can be together, happily, and forever." Globalisation, however, brings about a different type of unity, a simple uniformity that loses difference rather than reaffirms our human nature; and the play presents this in a hilarious scene in which the plays diverse characters act out banal language lesson conversations in the same American accent. Seeing a red guard inviting an elderly mother to have a pizza and orange juice, the mother responding in a male voice that she would love to, demonstrates how globalised communication obliterates the rich and diverse nature of characters, their cultures and their histories.
Artistic director Michael Walling explained that the reason he chose Yue Opera out of many other influential Chinese Operas was because it is the only one with pure female performers (although there has been a recent emergence of male performers). The delicate depiction of emotion and beautiful body movements fitted his desire to focus on femininity in this, his second piece in a trilogy exploring identity, gender and performance. When asked about her opinion of the future of Yue Opera in China, Zhang gave Dimsum a positive picture. She said, as the second biggest form of Chinese Opera, Yue opera has existed for 100 years, which makes it still relatively new. However, it evolves over time, is distinctive and is gaining respect, as evidenced through her receipt of the prestigious Plum Flower Award, the highest national award in China for artists in all artistic realms. Zhang's presence alone is ample reason to see this performance before it closes. That her collaboration with Walling is so effective and has resulted in such a timely, beautiful and relevant artwork makes it unmissable.
The Stage
For Michael Walling’s second of three forays to the Orient, East again meets West in a state of sexual and dancerly confusion.
Two years ago in Orientations at the Oval House, a British-born Hindu dance student discovered his ‘inner woman’ in Bangalore, becoming a transsexual against a backdrop of busy video images. This time around Tori Hart, as a teenage ballerina, runs away from her class to look for her estranged mother but finds love and death in Shanghai in the arms of a Chinese singer-danseuse, an ingenue from an all-woman opera company.
Meanwhile her daddy, played with impassive nastiness by Tony Guilfoyle, arrives in search of his long-lost daughter, guided by a chain-smoking American private eye through a world of clubs and cross-dressed performers. But he ends up a snarling tourist, indulging in a night of muscular sex with a rent boy and raping a Shanghai transvestite in a ladies’ loo.
We also watch appalled as Ku Ieng Un caricatures a shrieking Madame Mao, pursuing her Cultural Revolution, little red book in hand, while images of the victims of the Gang of Four are flagged up on a screen, otherwise filled with scenes of teeming Shanghai nightlife.
TDespite this mostly unpleasant foreground action, the evening is totally redeemed by the marvellous talents of Ma Haili as a superbly expressive dancer, and the Chinese national treasure Zhang Ruihong, a mezzo-soprano from the Yue Opera Company, whose open-throated arias are among the most glorious musical sounds ever heard at Riverside, on no account to be missed by lovers of vocal artistry.
John Thaxter