BALLETIC SAGA: AN OPEN DOOR FOR CHINESE CLASSICISM

The short, intense history of ballet in China is a saga of fortuitous circumstances (among them the proximity of Russia and an influx from its dance community after the Russian Revolution), familiar hardships, unusual setbacks and a growing relationship with the international ballet world.

Through much of this tumultuous period Dai Ailian has been a major influence in Chinese ballet--someone whose background and taste helped shape the style of classical dance for an entire nation.

Dai spent the 1930s in London and there crossed paths with the dancers and choreographers who were establishing the British ballet tradition. The knowledge, experience and contacts she brought with her to China in 1940 were put to use when the Chinese government decided, in 1954, to support a ballet school. The establishment of the Peking Dance Academy, of which Dai was founder-director, eventually led to the founding of a ballet company (the Peking Ballet) in 1959.

Known since 1980 as Central Ballet of China, the troupe is currently on its first U.S. tour and performs in Pasadena Civic Auditorium Saturday and next Sunday.

Having served as artistic director of the Central Ballet from 1977 to 1980, Dai now holds the title of artistic adviser. In New York during the troupe’s recent engagement at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, this petite and dynamic woman recalled--in excellent English accented with a lilt that reflects her upbringing in Trinidad--the beginnings of ballet in China during the 1950s, a period of poverty and isolation.

“China was very shut out from the rest of the world,” she says. “The only contact was with the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries. Everything came from Russia--technical training such as engineering--and the foreign language taught in the schools was Russian. Since the ballet had a wonderful tradition in Russia, that is how we started.

“We designed our own studios, and although it was difficult to obtain things like flooring and mirrors, we got them. From the beginning, we had our own shoemaker. All the students lived in dormitories, and the teachers had apartments. We had good Russian teachers who trained the dancers in partnering and character dancing as well as classical technique.”

Most important among the Russians who taught at the Academy was Pyotr Gusev, a former dancer turned teacher and ballet master who had held directorships in the Bolshoi and Kirov companies. During his brief, influential stay in Peking (1957--1960), he began staging classical works such as “Swan Lake” and “Giselle” and also initiated a training program in choreography.

One of Gusev’s proteges was Li Chengxiang, who until recently was Central Ballet’s artistic director and was part of the choreographic triumvirate responsible for “The Maid of the Sea,” a three-act 1979 ballet that will be performed in excerpted form on all of the programs in Pasadena.

A policy initiated in 1964 emphasizing the development of ballets reflecting traditional and contemporary Chinese themes, turned ugly with the onset of the Cultural Revolution in 1966.

During the ensuing decade, cruel and extremist policies wreaked havoc on the arts. The only dances permitted to be performed were the ideological and didactic “revolutionary” ballets, “The Red Detachment of Women” and “The White-Haired Girl.” Dancers were, at best, artistically stifled. Some, including Dai, were sent to the countryside and forced to perform strenuous farm labor.

For many dancers, important years of training and artistic development were lost, and when the cultural atmosphere began to normalize in the late 1970s, they were faced with having to start over and resurrect interrupted careers.

“Most of the dancers we have brought on this tour are of the younger generation,” Dai notes. In their early and mid-20s, they are the ones who began studying at the Peking Dance Academy just as the Cultural Revolution was coming to an end. They have taken part in the new surge in international contact and exchange made possible by the Open Door Policy initiated in 1979.

“The past six or seven years have been wonderful--not just for dance but for all of China,” Dai states. “We have had more contact with the outside. Dancers can see videotapes and travel to other countries, while foreign companies can come into China.”

Recent visitors to China have included the Bolshoi, Royal Danish, Boston and Washington ballet companies and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.

Dai’s old friend and teacher, Anton Dolin, visited to teach and staged two of his most enduring ballets, “Pas de Quatre” and “Variations for Four.” (The latter, a showpiece for male virtuosi, will be danced Saturday in Pasadena.) Former Paris Opera ballerina Lycette Darsonval staged the complete “Sylvia,” and Rudolf Nureyev recently mounted his version of “Don Quixote.”

Ben Stevenson, the British choreographer who directs the Houston Ballet, has been a frequent visitor to Peking and some Chinese male dancers have studied and guested with the Houston company. (Each of the Pasadena programs opens with Stevenson’s “Three Preludes.”)

The Chinese dancers have begun to participate in international ballet competitions. Three dancers featured on the current tour--ballerina Tang Min and danseurs Zhao Minhua and Zhang Weiqinang--won medals in Moscow last year.

Dai is simultaneously enthusiastic about the accomplishments of the Chinese dancers, many of whom she has observed and nurtured since their earliest student days, and pragmatic about technical and choreographic standards in China.

“We did things very quickly,” she observes, noting the need to catch up to nations where the ballet tradition had more time to develop. “It is a historical question; the dancers didn’t have time to grow up to become choreographers. Now we have ballet-trained dancers who are beginning to choreograph. We need new young choreographers who know the ballet vocabulary. It will take some time.”

The company’s Russian influences are readily evident in the classical stagings such as “Swan Lake,” Act II and the last-act pas de deux from “Giselle” (to be danced Sunday night in Pasadena), as well as in home-grown works which at times adapt familiar material from the classics.

In addition, the training the dancers have received from Dai Ailian and a number of visiting British ballet luminaries has softened the Soviet-style attack with a strong Cecchetti influence.

“All the little influences helped make the style we have today,” Dai acknowledges. “But I don’t think that our style is really settled yet. Who knows what it will be in the future--it’s very difficult to say. But it will certainly have a Chinese flavor.”