Fly fly butterfly
Zan Jifang

THE Musical Butterflies was a big hit during its 10-day premiere run in Beijing in September and the show now hopes to continue wowing audiences across China as it embarks on a nationwide tour. With an investment of 50 million yuan, or $6.7 million, the highest for a musical in China to date, it has been 10 years in the making. The show is based on one of the best-known folk tales in China, about the beautiful but tragic love story of Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai, a young couple who were eventually separated by an arranged marriage for Zhu. Liang missed Zhu so much and he died of a broken heart. On the day of her arranged wedding, the distraught girl committed suicide. It is said that the couple met again in the spirit world and changed into two free butterflies.
The mythology has been adapted in various art forms, and now it has entered the realms of the musical. However, maintaining the romantic nature of the love story, Butterflies has audacious creations in its plot. Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai appear in the play as members of a group of butterfly-people, who long to break a curse that deprives them of their human form. The musical is set in the World Terminus. Young maiden Zhu Yingtai has to sacrifice herself to help these butterfly-people realize their dream of becoming human. And so she is forced to marry a man she doesn’t even know. Then an uninvited guest intrudes. He claims to be Liang Shanbo and wants to take Zhu away. Suddenly everything becomes chaotic-someone gets drunk, someone goes crazy, someone gets cursed and someone dies. On the eve of Zhu’s wedding, everything happens on one terrible night.
An ancient tale with a modern twist, graceful and fluent musical melody, poetic and psychedelic stage language, the musical is full of post-modern feeling, which is a fresh experience for Chinese theatergoers. Quality production
The high-profile spectacle has an elite creation team that includes hailed Chinese musician San Bao and well-known Chinese playwright Guan Shan. It also has a shining overseas production team that comprises General Director Gilles Maheau, Director Wayne Fowkes, Lighting Director Alain Lortie and Choreographer Dazza Charles, who previously won acclaim together for their work on the world renowned musical Notre Dame Cathedral. It is the first time that an original Chinese musical has used a foreign production team. What’s more, the musical has, for the first time, hired world-class “script doctors” to polish its script, which has totally broken away from the traditional style of script writing. Creation and modification were done in a sophisticated way with accurate industrialized production. The creative move is bound to have a far-reaching effect on the development of China’s young musical industry.
In order to ensure the quality, experts from all over the world were invited to train the actors and actresses, who were selected from thousands of hopefuls and had undergone two years of intensive training. All these young performers come from a professional musical troupe specially founded by the investor of the musical, the first of its kind in China. Most of the members of the troupe are prizewinners at various music and dancing competitions both at home and abroad. They are thought to be the hope of the musical industry of China.
“I never expected that we would have such good musical performers in China. They are wonderful both at singing and dancing,” said a Chinese audience member who watched the premiere.
East-West collision
Although the joint efforts of domestic and foreign experts have greatly elevated the quality of the work, it has also brought about the conflict between two different cultures. For Chinese artists, the theme of the story and music is the most important, rather than the commercial effect. “To be frank, I care more about what kind of content and thought my music wants to express in the musical. I hope audiences can feel and experience something that is closely associated with our real life,” said San Bao, Musical Director of the play.
But, to his foreign partners, these sentiments have little to do with market demand as their concern is more about how long the show will run. “I think the music is more fit for an opera, and the lines of the actors are not simple enough for a mass audience,” said General Director Maheau. “For me, a musical should have more popular songs and dances, and the plot should be very simple,” he added. He sees his Chinese colleagues, however, as making things too complicated.
According to Director Fowkes, the stage design is visually stunning. “The stage keeps changing and it is three-dimensional to the audience,” he said. But he is quick to add that the smooth and romantic music might be more suitable to Chinese audiences. “I think it would be better if the music has more speed change in its rhythm.” However, San Bao wants to bring more depth in his music and has applied some traditional elements to the modern musical. “It contains many classical music elements. I prefer a combination of classical music and pop music,” he said.
Pioneering work
No matter how the creative team thinks, to Guo Jianxiong, Executive President of the Songlei Group, the investor of Butterflies, the foremost thing in his mind is how to first recoup the capital outlay and then make a profit. “We would like to be the pioneers of the musical industry in China,” he added.
Butterflies is one of the trailblazers in the development of the made-in-China musical, said Producer Li Dun, adding that all the signs are there to begin developing China’s own musicals. “Broadway musicals entertain audiences. West London’s are more dramatic. Chinese musicals will find their own footing in the international arena, somewhere in between,” Li explained. He is very confident about the market potential of Butterflies and feels audiences from different cultural backgrounds will have no difficulty in understanding it.
“I have no doubt that audiences will like this musical. I believe they can be touched in a way that they haven’t been for a long time,” Li said. “Actually love is a universal feeling. Foreign audiences will also be moved because music has no boundaries.” Li also hopes that the musical could create a domino effect: spawning a chain of merchandise such as clothing, souvenirs and even drink products. But Li is under no illusion that to recover the huge investment, Butterflies needs more performances either at home or abroad, while the latter would evidently further add to the cost.
General Director Maheau also expresses his concern about the market prospect of Butterflies. “Is there a market for musicals in China? I don’t know. But what I know is that Notre Dame Cathedral has only been performed in Beijing and Shanghai,” he said. Maheau said that the investor of Butterflies has a long-term plan focusing on producing musicals. “Maybe Butterflies will go big, maybe not. But there will be a second and third musical, and anyway the maturity of the market needs a starting point,” he said.
One thing is agreed on by both domestic and foreign artists. If a musical is to have legs and be around a long time, both the script and the music have to be excellent. And for audiences, there couldn’t be a better starting point than that.

(The Daily Mail-Beijing Review Articles Exchange Item)


Hammered and sickled
Barkha Dutt

THIS Time the violence has unfolded behind a veil of intrigue and secrecy. Unlike in March, when an entire country watched horrified as police guns pummelled unarmed villagers with bullets and bulldozed their way through Nandigram, this week Marxist foot soldiers made sure that blockades and threats and the stealth of the night would keep them protected from public gaze. But, as horror stories managed to break through the shroud of silence — bone chilling stories of rape, plunder and murder — the West Bengal chief minister gave away the game himself. With the transparent aggression that marks a man with a guilty conscience, he flared up in rare anger and told journalists that the protestors in Nandigram been “paid back in their own coin”.
And so, just like that, the mask was off. There wasn’t even a feeble attempt to deny that CPM cadres had been permitted by the party to storm their way back into Nandigram. If they had to shoot, kill and rape to make their way back in, so be it. No explanations were provided for why central paramilitary forces were sent in only after the Left’s militia was firmly back at home base. No apologies were offered for why a state government in democratic India should need to wage an extra-constitutional war. Other than contempt and criticism, there was no response at all to the high-minded public lament by Governor Gopalkrishna Gandhi. As far as the chief minister was concerned, his party’s private army had “retaliated in desperation”.
Twenty-four hours later, after a storm of protests over his remarks, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee had another opportunity to take back his words, or make a retraction that is standard for politicians. He didn’t bother. Instead, he took it all one step further by declaring that he stood by his comments because he could not forget his “political identity” and he was “not above the party”. But what happened to not being above the law? No explanations were provided for why central paramilitary forces were sent in only after the Left’s militia was firmly back at home base.
Nandigram may well be a complex cocktail of contradictory ingredients distilled into oversimplification by a liberal media. Its faultlines run through several layers of debate. Economics marked out the original battle-lines between different models of development. Politics catapulted the always-dramatic Mamata Bannerjee into the role of a lifetime. Religious politics and a sizeable Muslim population created an opportunity for the reactionary Jamiat-Ulema-e-Hind to play to stereotype and oppose “imperialism”. And a contentious land acquisition policy (made worse by a blundering administration) set the stage for a violent face-off between the Marxists and the Maoists.
So, the Left may even have a point when it argues that it’s not just hapless farmers lining the trenches in the Nandigram war. But, no matter how many varied (and vested) interests make up the opposition in Nandigram, how can any government possibly justify this kind of illegal storm-trooping? How can a state’s police force and an entire administration look the other way while vigilante armies set foot on the path of ‘justice’? It wasn’t the BJP, but Left-leaning historian Sumit Sarkar who first compared the anarchy in Nandigram to the riots in Gujarat. The rest of us may baulk at the analogy and argue passionately against such dangerous generalisations.
But, if you stop and think more about it for a moment, here’s what you may come up against. The anti-Muslim violence in Gujarat in 2002 was made possible by a state government that refused to intervene and stop it. The motivation of the principal players in Bengal may be entirely different from the communal poison that fuelled the riots. But once democratic governments start arguing that in certain circumstances it is permissible for the administration to lapse into deliberate paralysis, you are entering a terribly dangerous territory. Who gets to determine when it’s justified for law-makers to temporarily terminate the rules of governance?
The Marxists don’t do themselves justice either by arguing against a debate on Nandigram in Parliament because it is a “state subject”. Its comments may be driven by political opportunity, but the BJP is perfectly placed to ask why it was valid to treat the violence in Gujarat as a matter of national concern, but not the contentious state action and inaction in Bengal. Nandigram is already under national scrutiny — not least because of the UPA’s own indefensible hands-off attitude to the violence (conspiracy theorists shouldn’t be blamed for seeing a quid pro quo take shape on the nuclear deal). The desire to keep it out of Parliament smacks of dogma and defensiveness. And finally, there’s an interesting leitmotif running through Corporate India’s response to eruptions of such social turbulence. No less a man than Ratan Tata was willing to stand shoulder to shoulder with Narendra Modi and laud the investment-friendly environment of a “vibrant Gujarat”. The other social indices seem irrelevant to India’s billionaires.—Khaleej Times


Rice raised hopes, and then dashed them
Rupert Cornwell

HOW Dazzled we once were. There stood Condoleezza Rice, newly installed secretary of state, early in George W. Bush’s second term, clad in a stunning all-black outfit, complete with knee-high boots, as she addressed a gathering of US troops in Germany. The fashion-writers had a field day, and so did the diplomatic scribes. This was the new dominatrix who would reinvigorate America’s foreign policy, win back allies estranged over Iraq — and who knows what else? The apogee came a few months later, in October 2005, when she took then British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw on a visit to Birmingham, Alabama, the city that was emblem of the segregated South and where she had spent her childhood. It was billed as an informal bonding session with an important professional colleague. But when she stopped at her old school to tell pupils how anything in life was possible — even that a black woman could become secretary of state — it felt like a warm-up for a presidential run.
When pressed, the lady smilingly demurred, but did not reject the possibility outright. We duly fantasized about an all-female Condi vs. Hillary match-up in 2008. And fantasy it was. Some still believe that Rice could be picked as running mate by whoever does win the Republican nomination. Three years on, America remains as unpopular in the world as ever. Its foreign policy is a mess, and at least measured by those early hopes, Condoleezza Rice has been a massive disappointment. Her close relationship with Bush, we assumed, would return the State Department to center stage, after the pummeling Colin Powell took from Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. Normally, a strong bond with the president has been the hallmark of successful Secretaries of State: take Henry Kissinger under Nixon, or James Baker under Bush senior. Alas, proximity to Bush junior has been at the root of Rice’s problems. “We are completely in sync,” the president has told foreign visitors; “When she speaks, you know she is speaking for me.” Fine, except that her boss remains the most internationally disliked president in living memory.
After three years in the job, the score sheet for Rice is not pretty. US relations with Russia, the field in which she built her reputation as an adviser to the elder Bush, are sliding back toward a Cold War freeze. True, of late the security situation inside Iraq has started to improve, but the poison the invasion spread throughout the region is no less toxic. Desperately, the US and its allies try to cope with the immense strategic victory that the toppling of Saddam Hussein handed Iran, without the mullahs having to lift a finger. In Pakistan, Washington is reaping the bitter fruits of its embrace of Pervez Musharraf. Parallels are being drawn with that earlier bad bet placed by the US, on the Shah of Iran in the 1970s — except that the stakes with nuclear-armed Pakistan are even higher. Belatedly, Rice has come to understand that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a sideshow, but the very core of tensions in the region. Not, however, before she had initially given Israel the green light to continue its 2006 war against Hezbollah in Lebanon — which ended in moral defeat for the Jewish state — on the grounds that we were witnessing “the birth pangs of the new Middle East”.—Arab News