Freedoms and constraints

WHO’D have guessed that the most important ballet stage in Southern California would become a platform for chronicling the reforms in Communist censorship policies?

Just six weeks ago, the Orange County Performing Arts Center presented the Bolshoi Ballet in a newly choreographed version of “The Bright Stream,” a ballet originally banned in Russia partly because it dared take lightly some of the imperatives of socialist realism.

Now the same venue is presenting the National Ballet of China in a newly choreographed adaptation of “Raise the Red Lantern,” a motion picture banned in China when it was released in 1991, apparently because it dared depict some of the nastiest consequences of traditional Sino-sexism.

In their countries of origin, the mere existence of these projects dramatizes the freedoms currently granted to artists: how far they’ve come from the bad old days, etc. For a foreign audience, however, these ballets’ status as footnotes to history -- and their unusually lavish sets and costumes -- can’t begin to bring their characters to life or make their choreographies look freshly minted.

Certainly, “Raise the Red Lantern,” which opened at OCPAC on Tuesday, teems with spectacular effects: domestic violence staged as a violent shadow play, an enormous crimson canopy hurled over the heroine at the moment she is raped, hordes of men in black suddenly materializing to perform evil acts and a delicate snowfall drifting over broken bodies at the close. There are red lanterns everywhere, of course -- though lighted en masse, never selectively, as in Zhang Yimou’s film.

Some of the effects seem distinctly familiar -- for example, a mah-jongg orgy looks an awful lot like the card game in Boris Eifman’s “Tchaikovsky” ballet, but without Eifman’s knack for making effects superbly integral.

Choreographed in 2001 by Wang Xingpeng and then revised two years later by Wang Yuanyuan, the two-part ballet summarizes the events of Zhang’s film, showing the dire fate of a young woman forced into life as a concubine during the pre-Communist era.

Zhang is listed as director, artistic director and lighting designer, but as the plot plods predictably along, you wait in vain for the sort of inventive cinematic storytelling that Matthew Bourne offered in “Play Without Words” (another recent dance-drama based on a film). Only in the final execution sequence -- when men wielding giant truncheons stain the walls with blood while their three victims flinch and sprawl -- does “Raise the Red Lantern” become potent movement theater.

Nearly every role is one-dimensional. The master of the house (Huang Zhen) is as irredeemably bad-bad-bad as the Tyrant of the South in the propaganda ballet “The Red Detachment of Women.”

The heroine (Zhu Yan) is a weepy victim from first to last. Even her love scenes with a Peking Opera actor (Sun Jie) misfire, largely because she’s so relentlessly swept up in lifts that the character never has a chance to make an independent move or express an independent feeling. The choreography oppresses her as much as the master.

Only a jealous concubine (Meng Ningning) gets something resembling an emotional range, though the staging makes her a joke by having her lurk and spy so openly that any fool would notice her -- this on a set rich in places to hide.

That set, by Zeng Li, represents an intimidating great wall of medallions, with screen-panels, large and small, softening its formalist style and creating alcoves for simultaneous actions -- a love scene and a Peking Opera duel, for example.

The costumes, by Jerome Kaplan, preserve the look of sumptuous antique apparel but allow maximum flexibility, and there’s even a scene in which lovers share sleeves of the same robe, a la Maurice Bejart’s Orientalist ballet, “Kabuki.”

MIXING Stravinskian orchestral assaults with Chinese instrumental textures and percussion, Chen Qigang’s score is reportedly played live in China but in Costa Mesa is heard on tape, except for four onstage musicians in the Peking Opera scenes. Boldly assertive, it seems to promise a more contemporary work than we see.

The company -- previously known to local audiences as the Central Ballet of China -- is large, versatile and disciplined. But so much of this choreography is prop-dancing -- with fans, sleeves, poles, cudgels, portable panels, tables and those damn lanterns -- that the noble line of the dancers’ bodies confirms their classical authority more than anything they do.

At well under two hours, “Raise the Red Lantern” offers a brisk, superficial gloss on a far more involving and original film experience. It’s nice that Chinese authorities now allow and even promote it as an emblem of their millennial culture, but political progress just isn’t the same thing as artistic distinction.

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National Ballet of China

Where: Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa

When: 8 p.m. today and Friday, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday

Price: $25 to $80

Info: (714) 556-2787 or www.ocpac.org