My Life Notes

Author: Xu Kun / Country: Mainland China
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-08-01
Features: May everyone find themselves in others' stories and reflect on their own lives through others' emotional entanglements. My Life Notes includes five parts: Savoring True Feelings, Creative Journey, Portraits of Friends, My View on Feminism, and Miscellaneous Life Reflections. It is a candid and deeply emotional revelation by the renowned female writer and PhD, Xu Kun, known as the "Queen of Satire," about her feelings of loss and sorrow. Growing up alongside The Red Detachment of Women, we now finally understand the specific origins of this persistent, unresolved issue in the history of art, yet it remains just as elusive as ever. In short, art is just like that—it's what you make of it, how you encounter it, with no set rules or predictable paths; forcing it is simply not possible. For example, some so-called modern dance and performance art today have such low imagination and creative standards, they're just imitating others' work—childish and clueless about what truly belongs to them. I once spent 200 yuan on a ticket to see a British modern dance troupe's performance hyped by the media at the Capital Theatre of the People's Art Theatre. After watching for half an hour, I was so restless, annoyed by the monotony, simplicity, absurdity, and boredom of the troupe's few performers and their simple instruments. I couldn't stand it, yet felt too embarrassed to leave. I thought, "If it weren't for your long journey, if it weren't for politeness, or if it weren't for this 200 yuan I spent, why would I still be here with you, being deceived?"
Our national ballet, on the other hand, is both original and sacrilegious—it hates, subverts, reinterprets, and reenacts the art of the aristocratic ruling class. This philosophy is fully embodied in actions like aiming guns, thrusting spears, throwing bombs, and shooting. The Western ballet art, which took nearly two centuries to perfect, is said to have been mastered by the Chinese in less than a decade, completing the transformation from aristocratic art to popularized and widespread dance. How many little girls, like me, with big, clumsy heads and messy hair, all had hearts pounding like rabbits, dreaming of becoming female company commanders in ballet? Thinking back, it’s truly miraculous! The Red Detachment of Women is a symbol of an era. With one era passing, the beliefs about beauty and struggle have been shattered, and the atmosphere it embodied can never be restored. Don’t believe me? Look at the performance of these young girls today—they’re completely 1990s Western techniques. Every gesture, every movement is like the dance of Parisian ladies in The Nutcracker or Giselle, or the spectral "Willis" from the graveyard—languid, soft, ethereal, graceful, full of coquettish charm, endless emotion, and unending displays of agility. Their bodies are so flexible that it seems as if a slight effort could snap their arms and legs off. The female lead, Wu Qinghua, still performs some upright and inverted kick movements, but how can we, the audience, who have already seen the ocean, find them convincing? No matter how we look, they’re not the Wu Qinghua we once admired and envied for her inverted kick. Her technical movements lack hatred or passion—only beauty, technical beauty, like a fashion model’s walk, just performance. Far from being perfect, it’s still one level away. After all, she’s too young, and the era has changed.
In Act II, Wu Qinghua follows Hong Changqing’s guidance to the base camp. After cutting her hair and putting on a military uniform, she performs a long lyrical duet with the beautiful female company commander. Now, the two female soldiers stand shoulder to shoulder, exuding a heroic and spirited aura. Their adjacent legs lightly touch the ground, while their other long legs are raised high into the sky—this scene, frozen in childhood picture books or movie stills, is utterly captivating. How many little girls dreamed of dancing so gracefully! Back then, I too fantasized about one day performing the female company commander’s dance, throwing my long, powerful legs into the air just like her. But now, the duet by these two young girls on stage is too soft, too technical, too devoid of the class solidarity—like sisters meeting for the first time, closer than blood parents and siblings—that once defined their performances. They dance softly, performing movements according to the script. For them, "class feeling" is an incomprehensible concept, almost an unreasonable demand. After all, the era is different. In an era of peace and prosperity, how can these 18- to 19-year-old girls grasp the hatred of class or the grievances of the nation? To them, what they call "classics" are just moves imitating their predecessors. Performing a red classic is no different from performing The Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, or Giselle—just mimicking the cat to paint the tiger.
To us, the audience in our 30s, the revolutionaries dancing on stage seem so small, so naive, so thin, so weak—hardly like heroes or revolutionaries! Perhaps it’s simply because we, the audience, have aged. Like the six- or seven-year-old children who once watched this play, we are now old!
P9-10