领域：文学艺术 · 传记

From the Red Detachment to the Women: A Postscript

Life and Dance
Most Chinese urban independent theatre and performance makers have been connected in some way to the Beijing-based Caochangdi Workstation (Caochangdi Gongzuozhan1 ) and the Living Dance Studio  (Shenghuo Wudao Gongzuoshi). They attended the body workshops conducted by choreographer Wen Hui and borrowed the Workstation stage to rehearse their own projects. Some presented their earliest pieces at the festivals held at either the Workstation or the Young Choreographers’ Project. I was probably the last one to enjoy the opportunity to work as an artist at Caochangdi and did so mainly in the summer of 2014, right before its demolition.  That was also my first collaboration with Wen Hui. Without a lived experience of working with the Living Dance Studio, I could not understand this kind of creative process, which bears all the marks of inspiration, rapture, and everyday triviality.

Caochangdi Workstation, a significant incubation site for innovations in unconventional theatre and performance in urban China, lives on in spirit. However, in the middle of our first round of rehearsals for RED (HONG), its physical body ceased to exist. When I returned to Beijing in summer 2015 for the second round of rehearsals, the cast had changed, and the rehearsal space was Wen Hui’s living room. New to the team were two women of the post-’80s generation: Jiang Fan and Li Xinmin.  Both have laughed and cried along with the ups and downs of China’s market-oriented, commercialized system. But they know little, if anything, of the Cultural Revolution that dominated the mid-1960s to mid-1970s.

Wen Hui suggested: “Let’s start all over again.” That remark sparked my epiphany. Our living condition, the moment we found ourselves in, would determine the direction of the dance.

From the Red Detachment of Women
The inspiration to create RED came from three sources. The first was a trove of documentary materials related to The Red Detachment of Women (Hongse Niangzi Jun)—audiovisual clips, publications, memorabilia from the original revolutionary model ballet, interview footage. These were incorporated to evoke a special territory of memory and reactivate a living and lived archive within specific bodies: those of the performers and those of people who experienced the Cultural Revolution.

The second combined the desire to understand the complex feelings of people who experienced the politicized art and aestheticized politics that held sway during the Cultural Revolution, along with the desire to explore the in/congruity between the state’s discourse and the everyday cultural lives of the people.

The third was the idea to use the dancers’ bodies as a departure point. Varied connections with the original model ballet, in content and movement and staging, would allow RED to anatomize the original choreography and explore here-and-now experiences as dancers and survivors, together, revisit that turbulent decade. Tasks both new and stimulating befell me with the arrival of the two new members. With its all-women ensemble, RED could and should add another layer to the complexity of women’s reality in China today. It should function as a way to reflect on how the socialist imagination prescribed gender equality and women’s liberation, which were embedded in Maoist state feminism and disseminated through the revolutionary model opera . Accordingly, we played the collected documentary materials to the younger performers, pausing whenever they felt inclined to share their thoughts or express themselves through movement. I also created a tabular list of the known past experiences and current realities of the two generations of female performers, including each of their distinct experiences with and understandings of The Red Detachment of Women.

Then we heard, quite by accident, that United Heart Home of Hope (Tongxin Xiwang Jiayuan), an NGO founded in 2003 with the goal of supporting women and children in the migrant communities on the outskirts of Beijing, was singing Marching Forward (Xiang Qianjin), the theme song from the 1961 film The Red Detachment of Women, at all of their meetings. 7 We immediately decided to interview Ma Xiaoduo, the organization’s founder. Ma freely admitted that she did not remember much of the model ballet from seeing it in elementary school. But she recounted being exceptionally moved by a single occurrence in the plot: The female protagonist’s change of fortune after she joined the Red Army-led women’s detachment. To Ma, The Red Detachment of Women is about how women should transform themselves to free themselves from oppression and misery. United Heart Home of Hope was formed with exactly the same vision of self-salvation.

The development of the script of RED in 2015 was strongly directed at and dedicated to women in general and the four female performers specifically. However, in addition to using the original model ballet to engage with the decade-long social and cultural chaos initiated by the Cultural Revolution and examining the cultural products praised by the revolutionary discourse of class struggle, I wonder how RED can reflect the ways that women in today’s China face ideological orientations that are official, if different, and engage in new forms of political, social, and gender-specific struggle.

Looking Back
Act Three, “Looking Back”, aims to both show the past generation’s reminiscences onscreen and to demonstrate, through four performers’ current stories, their vibrant and tenacious presence onstage. My deepest regret is that this part could not be developed as planned due to inadequate initiatives, opportunity, budget, and rehearsal time. Since “the author is dead” and the performance text refuses further development, can only replace some of these current stories from the original script into a postscript.

Liu Zhuying could not care less if any connection exists between revolutionary model opera and guangchang wu (public square dancing). To her, the latter is neither a mobilization of mass culture in an era of depoliticization nor a cultural form of reconstruction of Maoist collectivism. She only complains that the middle-aged female dancers are not professional enough, in either spirit or technique. As a local official in charge of cultural activities, her main purpose in organizing large-scale public square-dancing activities is to maintain stability in sensitive times. This goal is best accomplished if public spaces are filled with energetic, if amateur, dancers.

Jiang Fan resigned her position as a choreographer and dancer at the Shanghai Opera House Dance Troupe in 2015 and moderately enjoys her freedom from the state-owned performing arts institutions and their suffocating leitmotif projects. She makes a living by choreographing musicals and has collaborated with Shanghai International Dance Center as an independent artist. During the creation of RED, she recognized the continuity between the revolutionary model opera of 50 years ago and today’s leitmotif works that eulogize the Party’s revolutionary history. The more artistically independent she becomes, the more she must think about how to balance the market, audience interests, and the degree to which the present can be transmitted through individualized artistic references.

Like Wu Qinghua, the female protagonist in the model ballet, Li Xinmin desperately fled her hometown (Huamulin, in rural Yunnan Province) to Kunming and then to Beijing. Since the demise of Caochangdi Workstation, when she lost her dwelling in the city, she continued to make documentary films, worked in an NGO for migrant domestic workers, sold fruit with friends, and, with her longtime artistic partner, created an autobiographical documentary theatre piece, Timeline (Fanhui de Lu). However, unlike Wu Qinghua, she made peace with her past and decided to go back to Huamulin, where she is about to get married and is expecting her first child. She still thinks The Red Detachment of Women has little to do with her life and regrets spending so much energy on RED.

We see very little of Wen Hui’s personal memories and narratives in RED. She keeps creating new pieces and touring old ones around Europe, the site of her “independence,” and conducting workshops on the body as an archive in universities all over the world. In December 2018, she commemorated the twentieth anniversary of the independent theatre and performance movement in urban China with Paper Tiger Studio Beijing (Beijing Zhilaohu Xiju Gongzuoshi) and Niao Collective at the Beijing Inside-Out Art Museum. This work functions as a physical manifesto that echoes independent artists’ ongoing rewriting of theatre and performance history in modern China. Nonetheless, even as she works with all forms of activity around the phenomenon of memorization, she chooses not to mention in public two losses of her own: That of Caochangdi Workstation and that of Wu Wenguang, her artistic and life partner.

A Nightmare
When RED was staged at the Asia Society in New York in November 2018, I moderated a pre-performance dialogue. 10 Some interview footage that was not included in the final documentary performance was shown to the audience. From this footage, I selected Ma Xiaoduo’s recollection of her nightmare:

For years, I have had the same nightmare: I am in the middle of the bridge and cannot cross it. The bridge starts crumbling, and I have to hold tight. That kind of nightmare is a reflection of repression. Sometimes I feel like I am going to screw it. I need to bring it down. I want to be freed. I feel I am being repressed. It’s like when the red light is on, you are stopped there and cannot move. Just because you are a rural woman, just because you are a woman, everyone can keep walking, but not you. I was blocked all the time. Anyone could do things, but not you. So this is a kind of battle. Whenever I listen to Marching Forward, I feel the power.

翻译考点：
考点1：the Red Detachment to the Women 推荐翻译为：《红色娘子军》
考点2：Beijing Inside-Out Art Museum 必须翻译为：北京中间美术馆，不可错译为“北京798艺术空间”
考点3：Marching Forward (Xiang Qianjin) 推荐翻译为：《向前进》
考点4：Jiang Fan 推荐翻译为：江帆
考点5：ceased to exist 推荐翻译为：实体已不存在 / 已被拆除，不要直译为“停止存在”
考点6：archive 推荐翻译为：（身体性的）档案，在剧场语境中强调“身体作为档案”，不要机械译为“档案馆”或“资料”
考点7：“a living and lived archive”不可直译为“一个鲜活的档案”，推荐译为“鲜活的、亲历的记忆档案”。
考点8：“presence”不可直译为“存在”，过于抽象和字面化，可译为“形象”、“风采”或“坚韧鲜活的生命力”
考点9：“...due to inadequate initiatives...”的“initiatives”推荐译为“（创作上的）新想法、动议”，不可译为“主动性”
考点10："Screw it”推荐译为“去他的吧！”或“我受够了！”