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ABSTRACT: Existing scholarship on the Chinese revolutionary ballet The Red Detachment of Women (1964) typically adopts a Sinocentric perspective, overlooking the ballet's significance as part of international Cold War cultural politics rather than an isolated ideological project of Maoist China. To address this shortcoming, this essay argues that the historical production of The Red Detachment was in dialogic relations with other foreign performing works produced in different yet overlapping cultural-political contexts. That is, the meaning of the ballet is not just located within the performing "text" itself or its immediate context, but also in the dialogic space between "texts." To demonstrate this, the essay examines the "intertextuality" between The Red Detachment and a French satirical comedy The Chinese in Paris (Les Chinois á Paris, 1974) in relation to French Maoism in the early to mid-1970s.
KEYWORDS: The Red Detachment of Women, Cold War, Cultural Revolution, Les Chinois á Paris, French Maoism, Tel quel.
The ballet The Red Detachment of Women (Hongse niangzi jun IIÉ^ť Щ, 1964; hereafter, The Red Detachment), one of the eight model plays (yangban xi of the Cultural Revolution, remains arguably the most famous and influential Chinese dance work today. It tells a melodramatic story of how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) frees a peasant-slave girl, Wu Qinghua ⅞⅜⅜, from the abuse of a pro-Nationalist landlord, nicknamed Nanbatian (⅞⅞⅝ Tyrant of the southern skies), and further enlightens and transforms her into a Red Army soldier who not only avenges herself by killing the evil Nanbatian but also devotes herself to the greater cause of liberating the entire proletarian class. Although the ballet bears a conspicuous mark of Party-controlled artistic production at its acme, its popularity has outlived the revolutionary ideology that gave rise to its creation. It has remained in the core repertoire of the National Ballet of China and has been performed frequently both at home and abroad.
Due to its peculiar status as a revolutionary classic widely popular in the post-Cold War era, the ballet has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention both in and outside of China. China-based dance scholars' attitudes towards this dance drama tend to be equivocal. On the one hand, they typically acknowledge the significance of its ground-breaking formal innovations in both choreographic vocabulary...