Word: ballets
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STAGING A BALLET...
Chiang Ch'ing explained to me how, when she undertook this ballet in the early 1960s, there was absolutely no precedent for using ballet to show military history, and almost no one would support her intent to establish it. In search of approval from among the leaders, she invited Premier Chou to attend a rehearsal of an early version, which he did. The weak spots that he pointed out they changed. To educate her dancers in the ways of the military, she decided to send them down to live with a PLA unit for some months...
...Nevertheless] she continued the revisions and finally accompanied the ballet on tour in the major cities. Back in Peking, she went with Premier Chou to another performance, which had been much revised. His calling it "real revolution" gratified her. After the final curtain she and the Premier went backstage to congratulate the dancers and musicians who had remained loyal to her throughout the battles of creation...
...lyrical than majestic, the group soundedvery fine. The soft chimes of the triangle in "Tuileries" played nicely against the winds, harp, horns and strings, and the tuba burst forth with round tones most of the time in the sad "Bydlo" describing a cart driver trudging along with his oxen. "Ballet of the Hatching Chicks" fared better than "Limoges" and "Catacombae," in which the brass were not as sharp as required...
...dancers, jockeys and sultry bathers sculpted over and over, ultimately sum up lives of hard work, frustration and all-too-frequent boredom. They suggest a sense of physical inadequacy to do justice to abstract ideals of ballet, horse-racing or even bourgeois femininity. Degas expressed this despair with regard to his artistic ambitions, when, in old age, he told the painter De Valernes: "I felt myself so badly made, so badly equipped, so weak, whereas it seemed to me that my calculations on art were so right. I brooded against the whole world and against myself." But if Degas sulked...