Chinese Banned Erotic Classic
One of China's most famous ballet directors is testing the very limits of the country's strait-laced attitudes by adapting a notoriously pornographic book for the stage.
The Jin Ping Mei, or 'The Plum in the Golden Vase,' is a classic of Chinese literature from the Ming dynasty that has been banned ever since the 17th century because of its explicit sexual content.
Its first English translator, Clement Egerton, found himself so embarrassed by the 70 or so sex scenes in the book, which run the full gamut of perversion, that he rendered them in Latin.
However, a dance production of the book premiered on Friday to a sell-out crowd in Hong Kong, after Wang Yuanyuan took on the work.
Mrs Wang is a former principal ballerina at the National Ballet of China, and choreographed both the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games and a dance performance at the celebrations to mark the handover of Hong Kong in 1997. She is known as one of the "three queens" of Chinese dance.
However, Mrs Wang admitted that there was little chance of staging her production of the Jin Ping Mei on the Chinese mainland. Instead, she said her work as director of the Beijing Dance Theatre was squarely aimed at foreigners.
"We have not applied for a performance permit in mainland China for a simple reason: I do not like chasing after trouble. Besides, 80 per cent of our shows are now staged abroad. We do not rely on any government sponsorship, so we are not limited," she said.
After its run at the Hong Kong Arts Festival, Mrs Wang hinted that the production could travel to the UK in October, after an invitation from the Sadler's Wells Theatre in London to perform.
"We have not yet decided whether we will stage this work or another one," she said.
Mrs Wang said ballet was perfectly suited to express the richness of the Jin Ping Mei, including its sex scenes, but that the production was in no way pornographic.
"This is art," she said. "The audience will see no striptease or nudity, but we did translate it all into dance. This work is different because it is not a love story, but it is about passion and ambition, plotting, scheming and desire."
One challenge, however, was overcoming the shyness of her performers.
"Our company has dancers aged from 18 to 28. Some of these young girls and boys have not had much life experience, and they were evidently embarrassed playing out the sex scenes. They just had to deal with it," she said.
Despite its ban, the Jin Ping Mei is one of China's most popular works of literature, a sprawling tale of intrigue and murder that is widely regarded as one of the country's five greatest classics.
Source: Telegraph