Word: inge
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Apparently under Chiang Ch'ing's influence, Mao had proclaimed that all plays portraying "ghosts" or "emperors and princes, generals and ministers, gifted scholars and beauties" should be banned. Instead, there should be idealization of the proletariat. Thus Chiang Ch'ing had started during the Cultural Revolution to build a new "proletarian " art from scratch. One of her successes was the showy Red Detachment of Women-performed for President Nixon in Peking in 1972. She recounts the difficulties she had in staging this theatrical extravaganza...
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...
Chiang Ch'ing kept an eye on her favorite ballet and theater troupes, issuing the most detailed instructions. One performer recalled that when a play called for her to burst into tears, she would sit down and cover her face with her hands. Chiang Ch'ing protested: "Working class people don't sit down or bury their heads when they cry. They cry standing...
...herself, Chiang Ch'ing made no secret of her love for more bourgeois drama. She asked Witke...
...evening after a late dinner in Canton and a gracious promenade around a hall in her villa, Chiang Ch'ing revealed that she had a treat in store: Garbo's Queen Christina. Her face was glowing with anticipation. That Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film of 1933 was an old favorite of hers. She had ordered it flown down from Peking for the evening's entertainment...