The Chinese Hit Parade

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

The technique's the thing

A swirl of red ribbons fills the stage, the dancers commanding them moving delicately through the ever changing patterns they create with the long, scarlet strands of silk. Nine women glide serenely across the stage, costumed to represent lotus flowers, hoops just above their ankles, hiding their feet and representing the pads of the flowers. Magically, they create a lovely imitation of flowers floating in a gently flowing stream.

When artists of the Peking Opera take over, the pace speeds up. A pair of dancer-acrobat-mimes, on a fully lit stage, pantomime a sword fight as it might be conducted between opponents who cannot see each other in a pitch-black room. The movement is wondrously intricate, breathtakingly quick--and hugely comic. In another excerpt, called Monkey Makes Havoc in Heaven, the stage is filled with men, tumbling, bounding, flailing at one another in a skirmish between the forces of a Peer Gyntish Monkey King and a Jade Emperor whose court has been invaded by the delightfully wicked, white-faced simian. Martial art is transformed into high art as the lightning-fast conflict develops.

All these pieces--carefully selected samples of what they believe to be the best of their theatrical culture--are being offered by the Performing Arts Company of the People's Republic of China. A five-city U.S. tour began last week at New York's Metropolitan Opera House, and will play in Washington, D.C., Minneapolis, Berkeley and Los Angeles. The opening-night program left memories of sumptuous and exotic stage pictures that will linger in the mind's eye and a sense that one has enjoyed a handful of highly privileged theatrical moments.

These, however, are obtained at a heavy cost in tedium. It is not merely that the brilliant material from the Peking Opera--that highly stylized mixture of comedy, acrobatics, music and mime that really has no Western equivalent--and popular Chinese dances--they put one pleasantly in mind of Radio City Music Hall choreography --are embedded in an evening in which an earnest soprano hymns the joys of revolutionary struggle, and musicians tootle and plink away on strange-sounding instruments. Nor does the dull excerpt from a revolutionary ballet showing a young woman abused by the minions of a wicked landowner particularly offend, though a little of this kind of thing goes a long way. Rather it is the air of detachment, abstraction that hangs over the evening and accounts for the restlessness the evening engenders.

Except for a handful of items like the scene from the ballet, The Red Detachment of Women, the material presented is not heavy on ideology, though if the program notes are to be believed, some of the song lyrics contain clunkers like "When you drink tea from our Red base you will never forget our revolutionary tradition." But that sort of material cannot possibly offend anyone. Even if one could understand the language, the comical effect of the lines could easily be regarded as counterrevolutionary.

The problem is that one of the great driving forces of art, the desire to comment on the quality of contemporary life, on the state of mind of people caught up in the conflicts of a particular time and place, is subverted in a totalitarian state.

There the official line is that no dispute exists and everyone derives happiness from working together harmoniously to create the new order. This means the dis orders, the sorrows (and the private visions and fancies individuals indulge in as compensation) -- the raw materials of a vital art -- are banned as irrelevancies. Artists, if they are to continue to function publicly, must either embrace the gaseous platitudes of revolution or bury themselves in popular, native tradition. Chinese ballet, for instance, was hobbled when authorities decided to erase any Russian influences. Folk singing and dancing seem to be much safer areas to cultivate. So is something like the Peking Opera, which relies on timeless myths, harmless fairy tales, for its plots, and prizes acrobatics and mimetic movement.

(Even it, however, was suppressed at the height of the Cultural Revolution, and its artists sent to work the fields.) After an evening with the Chinese performing artists, one begins to see why the tumblers and jugglers, the virtuosos on exotic instruments, have been able to develop to uncanny heights. Their achievement lies in pure technique, impervious to ideological criticism. The best work being offered by this company, which has been gathered from all over China for this tour, has deftness and precision that can be awesome even to one who is not familiar with the traditions that inform the performers. At times their pure skill is sufficient to enchant the viewer and take the chill out of the air. But in the end, it is not enough.

Traditionally, an evening at a concert hall or theater in China goes on for hours and hours. Over the years, audiences develop to a high degree their capacity for what a spokesman for this troupe calls "selective inattention." The accomplishment of this organization is, ironically, to give Westerners an authentic taste of the boredom inherent in the Chinese performing-arts tradition. It is an opportunity to develop, in a matter of minutes and as a matter of survival, an ability to tune out large parts of the evening in order to attend with a degree of alertness the moments of great entertainment, like the Peking Opera, when excellence of form triumphs over embarrassing lack of substance.

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