Guandong Acrobatic Group of China

Before the presentation, I will enclose an article written by Peter Foster about the amazing Chinese group Pas de Deux: By Peter Foster: 7:00AM BST 25 Jul 2011 It was the moment that launched a million YouTube hits: a ballerina, pretty as a snowflake, dancing a pas de deux from Swan Lake on her partner’s head. There are hundreds of bootleg video clips of this extraordinary feat, performed by two Chinese dancers, Wu Zhengdan and Wei Baohua, but all of them share a collective gasp of astonishment as Wu steadies herself, en pointe, atop her partner’s head and then performs a pirouette, her legs in vertical splits, torso arched backwards in a gravity-defying arabesque. For one fleeting moment the hubbub of the auditorium is silenced. Wu holds the swanlike pose, picked out in a centre-stage spotlight, luminous and still as an ice-sculpture. And then, even before the dismount, comes the thunderous applause. But that was last night. This morning, stripped of their glitter and the greasepaint, Wu and Wei look just like any other commuters sharing a lift into work under the perpetually grey-washed skies of the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou. They are in the middle of preparations for an international revival of their acrobatic rendering of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, but the early dress performances are not up to standard. In the auditorium of the rehearsal theatre Li Yaping, the director of the Guangdong Acrobatic Troupe of China, of which Wu and Wei are the lead dancers, is giving the rank and file performers a piece of her mind. Her message is plain: shape up, and fast. The star pair (they are a couple in life as well as on stage) are exempted from the dressing-down, arriving at the theatre in the Pajero four-wheel drive that is a symbol of their status. Even offstage, they move like cats: at 31, Wu is a Siamese, light-boned and angular; Wei, at 41, is the alpha male, all mane and musculature. Their physical opposition – he weighs 12 stone, she a shade under seven – at least explains the biomechanics of how it is possible for one person to dance on the head of another. How ‘the move’ that made their names was created is a rather longer story. It began in Shenyang, an industrial city in China’s frigid north-east, where both were born to reasonably well-off families and attended the local sports and gymnastics school. Their stars crossed briefly but it wasn’t until the 1990s that they got to know each other, on the provincial and then national and international gymnastics circuit where they were frequently paired together. ‘I suppose at the start I didn’t look at her that way, she was like a younger sister to me,’ Wei recalls. ‘But over time we fell in love. As we started to work together more and more, we gradually became perfectly physically and mentally attuned to each other.’ Related Articles Swan Lake, Guangdong Troupe, Coliseum, 11 Aug 2011 Covent Garden and Salisbury Playhouse: Tense geometry and cubist zebras 30 May 2011 By 1997 it had become apparent that neither was going to make it to the highest levels of gymnastics, where Wu specialised in floor dancing. After a decade of gruelling training and intensive competition, at age 16 she was ready to quit. ‘After my last major competition in Shenzhen in 1997, I had had enough. We were approached by the coach of the acrobats, but I told my parents I didn’t want to perform any more. In the end they begged me to give it a try, not to waste my training, so I agreed out of respect for them.’ It was a further five uncertain years before it was clear that the gamble had paid off. In 2002 Wu and Wei won a gold medal at the Monte Carlo International Circus Festival for what was prosaically titled ‘Oriental Swan-Ballet on Top of Head’, and which would become the centrepiece of an acrobatic rendering of Tchaikovsky’s lyrical ballet (initially directed by the choreographer Zhao Ming). The show, which was the troupe’s first foray into the classical canon, combining its usual repertoire of tricks into an artistic production, has stunned audiences around the world ever since 2005. When the show first toured Britain three years ago the purists did their best to sniff – ‘mind-bogglingly silly’, ‘goofy’, ‘garish’, ‘cheesy’, they said before admitting, with unusual unanimity, that this hybrid performance of ballet and acrobatics was ‘extraordinary, brilliant, breathtaking’ and simply ‘great fun’. Above all, no one could stop talking about the ‘move’. It is a sultry afternoon when we see where it all began in the Guangdong troupe’s headquarters in Guangzhou. The pictures on the walls show the sweep of history. First comes the avuncular figure of Chairman Mao Tse-tung inspecting the troupe in Beijing on National Day in 1959; then the diminutive figure of Deng Xiaoping visiting Guangzhou in 1984, and our lead couple, dressed in their medal-spattered People’s Liberation Army (PLA) uniforms meeting China’s current president Hu Jintao. Last is a glittering shot of Wu and Wei performing on the international stage. The fact that one of the top five Chinese state acrobatic troupes is performing Swan Lake is a testament to changing times, Gao Junsheng, the group’s artistic director, says. He joined the troupe at the age of 15 in 1970, and was intimately involved in creating the move that helped turn the Guang­dong troupe into a global touring company. He still visibly thrills at the memory of performing for Deng Xiaoping in 1973, when the troupe went to Zhongnanhai, the high-walled enclosure in Beijing that is the nerve-centre of political power in China. ‘It was so exciting because we knew that it was one chance in a lifetime, to perform for the leaders of China. I remember everyone shouting, “Hail to the leaders! Hail to the leaders!”’ In those politically straitened times, the scope of the acrobats’ performance was strictly limited. ‘Originally, Chinese acrobats were just about spinning plates and a guy on a chair up a pole,’ he says. ‘But these days we have to try harder to attract a wider audience. This is why we created this revolution in Chinese acrobatics, combining them with modern and Western music.’ Founded in 1951, two years after Mao’s Com­mun­ists came to power, the 200-strong troupe is officially a unit of China’s PLA, although there is nothing military about the bearing of the gaggle of teenage dancers and performers who come slouching into an after-lunch rehearsal. During its 60-year history the troupe has been sent by the state to perform in more than 55 countries, but Swan Lake represents a more commercial side to it. The performers are recruited from all over the country – some as young as 12 – coming to the Guangzhou barracks to live and practise, working 12-hour days to perfect their skills. In the evenings the school-age acrobats do two hours of schoolwork, which is dropped while on tour with either Swan Lake or the troupe’s traditional Hundred Plays show that toured America this year and reworks the kind of acrobatic tricks and tableaux that can still be seen being performed across China today. The reassuringly normal teenage slovenliness evaporates when the group is called to order, forming three neat ranks in a clatter of clamshell phones that disappear into Hello Kitty handbags and Nike Air Jordan sports bags. The dancers line up, listening to the coach issuing orders. If they still wear the faintly bored air of teenagers who have heard it all before, that’s because they have. In the world of acrobatics, practice does make perfect, and each will have performed thousands upon thousands of repetitions of their particular skills before they are allowed to perform in public at all, let alone at the great opera houses of London, Vienna and New York. The group breaks up into smaller rehearsals-within-rehearsals; the space suddenly filled with vignettes of physical impossibility: here a dancer walks backwards on her hands; there a male performer flings himself backwards off a 30ft-high pole, arcing into space and then catching the pole again with his legs; and over there a girl holds a one-arm handstand on a small balance beam while keeping track of the time on a stopwatch on her other arm. If she looked up, she’d see a man passing by on stilts. Hopping. The performers who make it on to the books of the Guangdong troupe are the absolute elite of a trade that has been entertaining Chinese for centuries, from the poorest village greens to the gardens and courtyards of the Imperial elite. The discipline is tough – a combination of English boarding school and army barracks. In the rehearsal one 15-year-old girl stands out, performing her routine to music that blares from a tinny cassette recorder. She is so flexible it makes you queasy to watch, throwing a handstand and then curling back on herself to finish with her bottom touching her forehead. (It is possible!) As a finale, she performs a one-armed handstand while spinning silver discs on her two feet and one free hand. You have to look very closely to see her muscles shivering, the physical effort masked by an angelic smile. This girl, Tang Xiaoyu, is a rising star who one day hopes to emulate the fame and feats of principal dancers such as Wu and Wei, but if there was any temptation to be complacent, her coach is quick to stamp it out. ‘She’s overweight,’ says coach Zhao, a sixtysomething acrobat of old. ‘She put it on while touring in America during last Chinese New Year. I don’t need to weigh her; I can see it in her face. She’s about 600g over.’ The admonition is delivered as a statement of fact, as is the remedy. ‘She must eat less and practise more,’ Zhao says with a smile. Tang herself accepts the rebuke, which will not be her last telling-off of the day. ‘Performing is my job,’ she says. ‘I can’t do my routine if I eat too much.’ Then the music starts again and she performs the routine for a third time and is still upside down spinning discs when her dormitory supervisor comes over. A routine inspection has revealed that Tang has been keeping a mouse in a shoebox under her bunk. This is against regulations. She must get rid of it. Is she sad to lose her pet? ‘It’s OK,’ she says. ‘I can give it to a friend.’ If the young performers are pushed hard, that is because they aspire to a tradition and a standard that has no equal, director Li says. As we cross to her office, a group of teenage girls are taking a break from training, but they are still practising, playing roller skate tag around the base’s car-park. One of the girls has a Ripstik caster-board on which she emerges, shooting out at speed from between a pair of tightly parked PLA saloons. How long did it take her to master the Ripstik so completely? ‘Five minutes,’ she says, without a trace of boastfulness, and is gone. Li admits in private she is happy to see the kids enjoying themselves. When she joined the troupe in 1986 China was a very different place, she says, lighting up the first of several pungent cigarettes. Her charges, who have more opportunities and also more distractions than she ever dreamt of as a young girl, need to be constantly reminded to focus, she says. If she seems hard, then Li reckons she is a puppy-dog compared with the directors of her youth. ‘Today’s teenagers are more independent-minded. They don’t want to work hard, they are lazy and I have to remind them that success will come only if they work hard,’ she says. ‘When I was young the director only ever had to tell us to do something once, and we did it. There were no second reminders. These days, everything is more democratic. The children have “human rights”, which is a good thing, because they need to understand about modern society. It is a positive thing, because it makes them more ambitious.’ Ambition is a trait visible even in the youngest members of the Guangdong troupe. Yan Hongru is 13, but already she has the slightly stunted, Hobbit-like physique that comes with doing so many hours of physical strength work at such a young age. Last October Little Yan, a girl with intense, darting eyes, who has been dancing and performing since she can remember, was selected to perform in a routine in Swan Lake that requires performers in ascending order of size to dance on their hands. She is the smallest and youngest of that group, but already the best, performing her movements with the precision of a clockwork doll. Does she think that one day she can become a star, like Wu Zhengdan? She nods vigorously, replying, ‘Yes, I can,’ before quickly adding with the modesty required of all good Chinese children, ‘At least, I’ll definitely do my best.’ Little Yan accepts the long days and the repetitiveness of training with an unthinking dedication. Some of the older athletes admit it can be hard to retain focus day in, day out, but not Yan, who joined the troupe after being spotted at school in Shenyang in north-eastern China. Her mother accompanied her on the 1,850-mile train trip for the audition. She passed and never looked back. Girls like Yan start off in the troupe’s small dorms, each with two or three bunk beds. She is looked after by older girls, whom she calls jiejie or ‘older sister’. The rooms are spartan, with the girls’ belongings all neatly squared away, but not totally without comfort. The girls have their own duvet covers (Yan’s has big cartoon characters), mobile phones and laptops connected to the internet via a cable that snakes through a gap in the dormitory window. The atmosphere on the base is pleasant, but institutional. In a break, a group of late-teenage and twentysomething girls crowd around a laptop, giggling at themselves striking silly poses while on a recent tour of America. As you move up the ranks, so the conditions improve. The more senior performers, like the four male dancers in their mid-twenties who perform Swan Lake’s signature female swan quartet as hilarious hand-balancing frogs, live two to a room. Currently ranked as lieutenants, in time they aspire to the well-furnished private apartments enjoyed by the likes of Wu and Wei, who live on base with their 22-month-old son. One of the four ‘frogs’, 27-year-old Hua Wei, is unabashed about his desire to reach the top. ‘This is the best troupe in China and my ambition is to create a unique programme like Swan Lake that others will copy one day in the future,’ he says. ‘I want very much to become a famous actor in my field.’ As the son of a construction worker whose talent was spotted as a six-year-old by a friend of the family, Hua says he is living out his ambition. The other ‘frogs’, all friends together, nod in agreement. All share Hua’s desire to succeed. ‘I love performing, being near to the audience and being an artist who excites people,’ adds Shang Guanzhi, 24, the son of a television producer from the southern city of Chongqing. ‘In gymnastics the audience [a panel of judges] is too far away, too small.’ The afternoon before the final dress rehearsal, Wu welcomes me and the photographer to her apartment filled with the medals and mementos of her career. ‘We wanted to do something different, to be more than ordinary acrobats or dancers, but we really didn’t know how to do it. It was by trial and error that we developed the move,’ she says. ‘I started by dancing on Wei’s back, but it was too painful. So then we put a thin layer of plywood, which worked for the pain, but the performance was ugly. So that’s when we moved to the shoulders, which took six months of practising 10 hours a day, then on to the head, which took another three months.’ Even now, Wu says, the metamorphosis of the move from ungainly four-legged beast to supreme, Swan-like elegance happened by accident. She explains that she couldn’t perform the arabesque and the pirouette on a fixed point, but only in concert with her partner. Seeking to help her explain, Wei dashes to the kitchen and emerges with a mop balanced vertically on the pad of his index finger, demonstrating the micro-corrections required to keep it from falling. ‘It wouldn’t balance on its own because the point of contact is too narrow,’ he says, ‘but moving together we can make it stay up. It was the first time anyone in China, anyone in the world, had tried this kind of move. We didn’t know what was possible, we were just feeling and striving for something better.’ Four hours later, at that all-important dress rehearsal, Wei is back on stage proving his point, balancing not a mop on his finger, but a woman on his head. The packed house includes a representative of the impresario Lilian Hochhauser, who has negotiated the show’s return to Britain. Wu and Wei have performed for presidents and prime ministers all over the world, but in the wings before the curtain goes up the tension among the cast is palpable. If there are rough edges and mistakes they are forgotten as Wei is propelled skywards. Even for those who have seen it before many times, the move brings the silencing gasp – a moment of pleasure and tension, wonder and fear – and then, with the dismount, the great waves of relief and applause