Recalling History in ‘Last Emperor’

In “The Last Emperor,” a cadre of capable, mismatched collaborators produces a woefully ineffectual ballet about a woefully ineffectual head of state: Pu Yi, who first sat on the imperial throne in Beijing in 1908 at age 3 and remained a puppet ruler for most of his life.

Like its subject, this historical dance drama is continually pulled this way and that, sometimes yielding to the demands of mime-based narrative (no dance) and elsewhere offering a series of exotic divertissements (no drama). And like its subject, Pu Yi remains a puppet character, despite the charismatic and inappropriately heroic dancing by Michael Wang of the Hong Kong Ballet.

Commissioned by that company in 1997 to mark Hong Kong’s handover from Britain to China, the ballet essentially represents wishful thinking about Anglo-Chinese relations.

As choreographed by former Royal Ballet principal Wayne Eagling to music by Chinese composer Su Cong, it weds British classical style to 20th century Chinese history, emphasizing the influence of a British tutor on Pu Yi’s values and world view.

Unfortunately, in the performance by Hong Kong Ballet on Friday at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, the artistic relationship between Britain and China fell apart very quickly.

Hopscotching through events and decades while reducing its central characters to choreographic pawns, the ballet often seemed something like two hours of disjointed excerpts from a grandiose six-hour epic performed on state occasions for a captive audience.

But no longer version exists--only an acclaimed 1987 Bernardo Bertolucci film about Pu Yi that integrated the personal and historical more persuasively.

Along with two other composers, Su Cong won an Academy Award for “Last Emperor,” but his ballet score stressed atmosphere and local color over the kind of dance rhythms and character motifs that might have helped Eagling get the story on its feet.

The most compelling movement expression turned up in the middle of Act 2, in scenes depicting Pu Yi’s troubled relationship with his two wives--although, curiously, Eagling proved less revealing here about Pu Yi’s sexuality than the souvenir program.

In his scenes of conspiracy and interrogation, Eagling borrowed ideas from the contemporary Royal Ballet ballet rhetoric of Kenneth MacMillan, and even added a dash of Fredrick Ashton to a scene in which Pu Yi says farewell to his tutor and they fall into the same traveling step.

Mostly, however, he became the slave of a linear action plan instead of reorienting the material more creatively. Moreover, his choreography for Pu Yi ricocheted from showpiece-style bravura (the end of Act 1, when the synopsis says the fleeing emperor is “feeling great anxiety”) to bland passivity and even fetal-position regression (the end of Act 2, when he is a simple gardener under communism and “finally free”). If this is freedom, give us anxiety.

With his technical brilliance, partnering prowess and intense presence, Wang made the most of every opportunity, and, as a whole, the 22-year-old company skillfully met the challenge of dancing everything from evocations of antique court ritual to approximations of modern communist propaganda-spectacle. Among some 15 soloists, artistic director Stephen Jefferies (another Royal Ballet alumnus) portrayed the tutor sympathetically, Liang Jing made a scary Interrogator and Ivy Chung exuded Black Swan glamour as the Japanese spy.

The panoramic set designs by Liu Yuan Sheng and the opulent costumes by Wang Lin Yu brought visual splendor to the production, and it would be interesting to see these artists work with Eagling and the Hong Kong dancers again on a subject more suited to classical ballet: the life of Mao, perhaps, or the teachings of Confucius, or the building of the Great Wall.

Just kidding, but you get the idea: Give to dance what dance does best--and maybe the collapse of dynasties just doesn’t qualify.