Mao's Last Dancer - Li Cunxin [37]
One of the treats at the academy once a month was watching documentaries and occasionally a movie. All the foreign films were from other communist countries. A North Korean movie I remember particularly well was about a young man who had lost his ambitions for the communist cause, and a beautiful girl, a Communist Youth Party member, who helped him and fell in love with him. What I enjoyed most about this movie wasn’t the politics but the love story. For the next couple of weeks I started to behave differently toward the captain of the girls’ class, a pretty Qingdao girl with big, bright eyes. I imagined that if I performed badly enough in class, the political head might send this girl to help me, but the longed-for love never materialized.
Within the first month of our arrival in Beijing, we heard that the president of America, Richard Nixon, was to pay a historic visit to China. It was February 1972. People in Beijing were jubilant. The government’s propaganda machine went into full swing and the Chinese media boasted of nothing else. This visit by Nixon was confirmation that Mao’s communism had won the final battle against capitalism. I didn’t care about Nixon. I was too homesick. But I did notice that the attacks on America’s evil capitalist values by the Chinese propaganda machines eased considerably while President Nixon was there.
The first few weeks and months of our dance training I found impossibly hard. I had no idea what I was doing. I couldn’t do the exercises no matter how hard I tried. My torn hamstrings from Teacher Gao’s exercises were continually painful and I’d injured my back during the acrobatics classes. I knew I was destined to fail—it was just a matter of time before they sent me home.
One day we were given some exciting news: Madame Mao was coming to our university, in a few weeks’ time, and a small group of students would be selected to perform for her. I wasn’t included. I was heartbroken.
After Madame Mao watched the specially prepared performance, she said to the officials, “The dancing looked all right, but where are the guns and the grenades? Where are the political meanings?” She wanted us to combine traditional ballet steps with some Beijing Opera movements, so from that point our teachers made major changes to our training syllabus. In the middle of a classical plié we had to stiffen our hands into kung fu gestures and finish off with a deathlike stare called “brightening the presence.” We had to prepare these “model” ballets, a combination of Western and Chinese styles. Our university strictly followed Madame Mao’s instructions and policies. We became nothing more than Chairman Mao’s political puppets.
I knew that some of our teachers were incensed by this approach, but they had to bury their love for Western ballet in their hearts. If they didn’t, they would risk being labeled counterrevolutionaries, and be sent to jail or the pig farms. It could cost them their lives.
They knew Madame Mao’s approach could never work. In classical ballet training we had to turn our joints out, but with Beijing Opera movements we were required to do the opposite. Ballet steps needed fluidity and softness. Beijing Opera required sharp, strong gestures. But propaganda ensured we believed the Chinese model ballets were the world’s best. They