"Legend of the red lantern" an Opera from the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

"The Legend of the Red Lantern" in a poster from 1971. China.

"The Legend of the Red Lantern" performance in Beijing, China. July, 2009.

红灯记 "The Legend of the Red Lantern" is one of the 8 model pieces of China's Cultural Revolution, and perhaps one of the most famous; its songs are still sung in Chinese households and its images have traveled the world and remain as icons of the Maoist cultural revolution itself. (1)

As part of the events that commemorated in 2009 the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China, dozens of operas that had to do with the history of this last stage of Chinese government were staged, so the operas of the Cultural Revolution could not be absent. For me it was a real opportunity to compare this productions with those who I had seen the previous 4 years, the so-called traditional operas, as well as to increase my experience as a spectator to several films and ballets I have seen in relation to the 1960's and 1970 in China .

Regardless of the topic (the emergence of a common Chinese communist revolutionary as heir to the struggles of parents), the play is a clear example of the progress (or changes) that occurred in the structure of the iron tradition of Peking Opera until the moment of its creation.

Slideshow of "Legend of the Red Lantern"

In this post I would like to simply present briefly those changes and characteristic elements that the Chinese consider essential in "The Legend of the Red Lantern" and try to exemplify them with some scenes that I could record during the performance of July 11th 2009 at the Chang'An Theatre:


- The absorption of realism on stage and in the structure of the story. First, the use of a contemporary history of China in the 1960s, referring to the past (just 20 years ago), the time of the Japanese invasion in the 1940s, to explain the existence of the revolutionary and nationalist spirit of the sons of the new republic in China in the 1960s. Costumes, makeup, scenography, everything had to be transformed; that was a huge change in the eyes of the Chinese, as they had always seen their operas with an elaborate traditional coding in both makeup and costumes (2), while the scenography was almost nonexistent. A change that somehow had taken place in the cinema and that, when operas were transported to film, they suffered a "realist" transformation, but not yet in the case of a theatrical scene.

In the following video, the main character Li Yuhua enters a Restaurant where noodles are prepared; the guests act in a way similar to reality, there are no exchanges in declamation form among themselves, nor exagerated ways to communicate, all of them do their actions in a realistic style, listening, eating, or serving food and taking orders, as in the case of the woman. It reminds me common theatrical productions in Russian socialist realist theater.

Video: Realistic scene in "The Legend of the Red Lantern" Beijing, 2009

- Keeping the use of acrobatics as a theatrical way to express a battle on stage and the use of new weapons (rifles, pistols, etc) and uniforms (no large and heavy costumes, nor high heels) also prompted a transformation in acrobatic choreography: some had much more action and, in my opinion, in the case of this play, some of the best I've seen.

Video: Acrobatics scene in "The Legend of the Red Lantern" Beijing, 2009.

- The actor maintains his traditional choreography of movements, but it is adapted to the contemporary scene. A wonderful example is the scene where the hero Yuhua Li faces the Japanese villain and, at all times, his rage and his chanting feed on the traditional way of working in traditional opera.

Video: Facing the villain in "The Legend of the Red Lantern" Beijing, 2009.

- There is a change that is difficult to show: the use of contemporary music. Now using a large orchestra (in this performance the orchestral parts were prerecorded, while a smaller group also played, using traditional Chinese instruments and modern ones). The video I've published shows a small moment when the orchestra was playing in that performance of July 11th at the Chang'An Theatre; you will see that it is not the traditional classical Peking Opera orchestra, and on the other hand you will hear there is an instrumental music that they are not playing, because the parts of the large orchestra were pre-recorded. That would be unthinkable in any previous traditional opera.

Video: modern orchestra in "The Legend of the Red Lantern." Beijing, 2009.

- The use of different accessories in the costumes. For example, in the case of this opera, more than evolved, they were transformed. While in traditional opera heroes wear "water sleeves" (extensions of the sleeves on their costumes, which allow making figures, movements and other actions with them), in this case the main character, Li Yuhua, without that kind of sleeves due to his realistic costume, handles the chains that bind him in what I consider a very interesting transposition. (3)

Video: Use of chains as water sleeves, "The Legend of the Red Lantern" Beijing, 2009.

- The addition of music outside the musical libretto. In this and virtually all cases of the model plays of the Cultural Revolution, the inclusion of "L'Internationale", the communist anthem, in the moments of greatest dramatic power. In "The Red lantern..." the anthem comes when the characters stoically decide to go to their death.

Video: "L'Internationale" in "The Legend of the Red Lantern." Beijing, 2009.

- The end with a dance or ballet, as in many traditional operas, is maintained, but obviously all the modernization of the objects and set design gives the possibility of a huge new projection covered of Chinese communist nationalism and, ultimately, show the opera as what it was, a product of propaganda of the highest artistic level. That night after the final ballet, the ballet of the victory, the audience was in an apotheosis and full of strength and joy; watching at their faces I thought I could see the memory of years of famine, of international isolation, of political fear and of the only sustenance of life and strength that theatre gave them: communist revolutionary nationalism .

Video: Final Ballet of "The Legend of the Red Lantern" (Beijing, 2009)

红灯记 "The Legend of the Red Lantern" at times seems naive and of dubious quality in its acting style, but within the context of its creation and use during the years of the Chinese Cultural Revolution it is a real gem and, from my my point of view, one of the clearest examples of a successful attempt to break with a tradition that had turned a performing expression into an anthropological oddity.

(1) A Chinese opera, in contrast to Western opera, is never watched just for the singing or for the music (the score), but for the staging it entails. The stagings of a Peking opera vary little between, when you watch one today you are virtually watching the same production with which it premiered. Thus the iconic images of the model operas of the Cultural Revolution.

(2) Even with some attempts at realist modernism in the 1920's and 1930's, which were viewed as eccentric or snob actions.

(3) You can see an example of the movement of water sleeves on a video of the most famous Kunqu Opera, Mudanting: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bl6xjCXWsM

"El Gran Teatro del Mundo" in Beijing (First part). Forty years ago...

(Translation from Spanish by Tadeo Berjón)


Mao and the Cultural Revolution in China

Forty years ago, when China was suffering the obscurity of its Cultural Revolution and none of us knew anything about it except myths and, amongst those, the biggest of all, the myth of Mao Zedong...

Swimmers reading the red book during the cultural revolution times (photo by Li Zhenshen)

Around 1968 there were four events in my life which marked by my early infancy: the death of Federico, my elder brother; my tonsilectomy with a short but traumatizing hospital stay; the World Cup of 1970; and the Mexico Olympic Games of 1968.

Being part of a family intimately linked to sports (1) the myth of great sports events fed my imagination for many years.

Official logo of the Mexico 1968 Olympics

I was born during the preparations for those games, but I was not aware of them nor of the Olympics until years later, thanks to the continuous retellings of the event by both the media and my family: about the opening and closing ceremonies, the competitions where Mexico won medals, the story of Vera Cavlavska and her love for Mexico, the sad and unpleasant story of sergeant Pedraza and his huge effort to achieve an impossible gold medal.


But something that left a mark in my personal memories was the stories about the atmosphere; if there was something that became a myth in my mind, it was the way in which people expected and lived the Olympics. I spent years trying to relive all that, editing it in my mind and replaying it in my games; being a stage person as I’ve always been, I spent whole days staging a city preparing for the Olympics, I relived the ceremonies, I relived the roar of the crowds.

With the passing of the years, my child-like olympic dream and me, creator of the dream, organized more olympic games, thinking of the joy and the encounters, the shows and glories of winning and of hosting them. Munich passed unnoticed, regardless of Mark Spitz and that despicable terrorist attack that scandalised the world; but not Montreal and Nadia Comaneci (and no attention paid to the absence of African countries in protest to the inclusion of Southafrica); Moscow didn’t go unnoticed for me, either, nor the boycott, which offended me so that I followed closely the news on newspapers and media, collecting and recording hundreds of news pieces so that the world in the future could have a clear recollection of facts that made it understand that the boycott was due to something separate from sport, that political interests were attacking the spirit of the games. I was not a child anymore (almost), adolescence was beginning to wreak havoc in me, I’d follow the games in a more mature way, there would be no more stage recreations of my idea of the games.

Then, there would be years of sportive obscurity, as art and theatre made an overwhelming appearance in my life.

A case I remember with certain curiosity, amongst my “clairvoyant” games of creation and recreation of future olympic games, was the organising of one of them in Beijing, which I wrongly calculated would take place in 2010. Without an inkling of Chinese culture I designed the opening and closing ceremonies with the inclusion of just one Chinese song I found at home and dozens of other musical pieces from all over the world; robots and space ships took part in the ceremonies, and China lead the medal tally above the US, the USRR and Mexico (among the leading countries); yes, China was a sports power with a great number of medals, and Mexico a new sport power emerged. Now I laugh at the strange fact, and I remain pensive on what I see now

Gustavo Díaz Ordaz opens the Mexico 1968 Olympic Games

Many years had to pass by, many, beyond the age of myths, to find an imaginative link between those glorious olympics organised in Mexico, my family’s recollections, and the student movement of 1968 (2); even harder was to link the massacre of Tlaltelolco with the games themselves. I was not closed to the idea, it was just that the propaganda that had penetrated into my family managed to keep those things separate. Nobody was denying the existence of a massacre just ten days before the games, but nobody linked it to the happiness and glory of what was about to happen.

When I was an adolescent I asked my mother about the subject, and she would answer that the government didn’t want any problems and had the students killed, and therefore there were no problems. On her face I could read fear, the fear all ordinary people in Mexico had when talking about those turbulent years.

Images of the Tlaltelolco massacre of October 1968, Mexico

Mexico had shown the world a country with economic growth, friendly, well organised, and words and more words that praised something that, with time, the world would forget. Mexico was an iron dictatorship that was organised in such a way that made the country work; the games were militarised and people could not protest, the impressive budget was a scandal when you took into account the millions of impoverished mexicans, the government would expropriate whole areas of the city (that was common policy for any kind of public works) for the building of roads and olympic venues; what mattered was to show a harmonious, beautiful, proud country. Today, 40 years later, I’ve lived similar sentences in olympic Beijing.

The 1968 myth, like many other myths, vanished from my life when I met “the teachers” that opened my eyes to other realities, the myths died when I looked for individuality and for free thought and when I began the race against time to educate myself and to understand events and the secrets behind them.

Opening ceremony at the 1968 Olympic Games

(1) My father loved football and found his way into coaching juvenile teams; three of my brothers played football with the goal of become professional players, and one of my sisters would later become a high-level gymnast.
(2) In a similar way, the 1970 World Cup and the events of those years lead to a less famous, but no less despicable, massacre in 1971.

“Salesman in Beijing”, a book by Arthur Miller, 24 years later.

I hadn’t got to even the first half of “Salesman in Beijing”, the book Arthur Miller wrote after his second visit to China in 1984, when he was invited to stage his own “Death of a Salesman”, when my hands were already reaching for the keyboard to type about every sentence I had been reading.

Miller’s text is a whole document on an era of Beijing and on theatre in general, but at the same time it revealed the experiences I’ve had in Beijing after 3 years of living here. I didn’t come to do theatre, I came to China to live it, to explore it, and to write about it and its performing arts, to get to know it; I came to learn Taijiquan and to find myself in the strange idleness of the start of my maturity; I haven’t written nor done any theatre since I’ve been here, so I’ve become another spectator of Asian performing arts and, in this case, another reader of Miller’s book.

The first impression the text gave me was one of surprising freedom with which people back then would talk about the Cultural Revolution, which nowadays is a completely taboo subject in China; actors, writers, ordinary people shared their opinions on what had happened, who they’d lived through it, and what damage it had caused while, today, in 2008, starting a conversation on the subject would only provoke complete silence, and maybe deeply intellectual sentences that would try to steer the subject away.

Even though the subject is fascinating, especially during the time it was written, reading about it sounds somewhat outdated and only seems to be of value to those interested in the China that existed during the 80’s. That China doesn’t exist anymore, and is now living the results of its change; now it’s rich and powerful, tells the world what to do, economically invades Africa and Latin-america in search for resources for its expansion. There aren’t many studies that review this transition stage, and maybe that’s reveals the importance of the kind of comments from the heirs to the revolution, comments that Miller brings to us, a revolution that extinguished Chinese cultural life for a decade.

The description of a world outside the theatre and a world within the theatre of that China from the spring of 1984 is at times delicious, an enjoyable read and full of pleasant moments and simple but deep disquisitions. What he describes about life outside the theatre is so interesting (and unique) that I remembered the documentary Antonioni made during the cultural revolution: “Chun Kuo Cina”. Chinese style service, hygiene, the ordinary Chinese spectator, the twists of language, intellectuals and food. Miller is a professional narrator of ordinary life and a spokesperson for the bewilderment of Westerners confronted by Chinese customs.

As for what he describes about life within the theatre, it’s fascinating for someone who’s done theatre or who’s lived it. I consider it a theatrical document because in this text I see direct information on how a sincere representative of the empire of realism (1), in an honest and sincere way, tries to conquer a world that does not handle realism yet (even 100 years after its birth). It’s a document because of the way is presented, it’s a work diary and travel impressions; it’s a document because of its way of presenting the staging of the play, because of its reflections and its means to reach its goal. It’s not just a document about theatre in China, but about how Americans in the end of 20th Century viewed the requirements for their theatre through one of their most important representatives.

The play, which at the time was already almost 40 years old, was going to have its premiere in the recently opened up China. In the years where theatrical postmodernism teared realistic discourse apart in Western World, Miller was trying to “teach” a new way to Chinese actors. But the realism that was being destroyed, leaving behind new forms, inevitably remained (and remains still) with its imposing commercial presence in those post-modern Western cities.


Miller was at the same time a salesman, American theatrical realism with its own “need” for Stanislavski and the ‘interiorisation’ of the actor was being sold where their was no knowledge about it. And I remembered that tale (or real-life story) where a fridge salesman becomes rich in the North Pole selling fridges as boxes for keeping food. I have witnessed, by reading Arthur Miller’s book, how he sold his “Salesman” with the currency of personality, intellectuality, cultural exchange, and the values of non-fiction. At the end, it would seem he’s victorious, that he makes the sale, but, as it happens with the main character of his play, the former successful salesman, he fails.

More than 20 years after that text was written and after that experience, we know that the revolution in the acting of modern Chinese actors was not won by Miller’s realism, it was won by cinema and TV, the bastard or next-of-kin product of realism, realist melodrama (much more suitable to Chinese tradition). Theatre in 2008 is, in China, just a handful of stupid musicals, trite comedies with TV stars and remakes of Chinese classics from the 50’s. The ever present Chinese Opera has found its new place as an adaptation through “national pride” and gets its income from touristic interests; big directors make their modern versions of traditional opera, cause scandal in the country, go abroad and are applauded as innovators and modernisers of China’s new and burgeoning market economy. But the theatre Miller came to revolutionise, the theatre of the word, of characters, of real and deep characters, a theatre of ideas (even if he denies it), that theatre remains empty, it was killed by TV and cinema, it was killed by commerce, it was killed by Tian’anmen and Falungong.

In Beijing’s theatres I’ve seen Ibsen’s, Strindberg’s and Laoshe’s (China’s “modern” author par excellence) plays, and I don’t want to see more. Modern authors have not plays to stage or don’t want to write for theatre, the theatrical spaces (those allowed by the government) are few, the public does not exist, the government reviews (censors?) and adapts every text, foreign stars (who inherited the theatre of Miller and his co-revolutionaries) are not invited to come anymore. There’s something in our way of doing theatre that makes the managers of Chinese culture nervous, “something” about words and ideas, about “reality”. How I wish I could see one of Heiner Müller’s plays in Chinese! Müller is no realist, yet none of his plays are staged.

Then, maybe there’s nothing against realism, but against truth in one of its artistic expressions.



I found the book in London, in October 2007, but I didn’t read it until I came back to Beijing, with the required state of mind to enjoy it. I was never an unconditional fan of Miller, and I think I’ve made that clear, but I must accept that the adventure he narrates is marvelous and that his text is a true treasure.



(1) You can call it 'Realism" or 'Naturalism", it doesn't matter here.

Puppet Performance during the Chinese Cultural Revolution Age (1972)

"Chung Kuo Cina" (Puppet scene) Directed by M. Antonioni

In 1972 Micheangelo Antonioni was invited by the Chinese government (It is said it was Den Xiaoping among them) to make a film about the new China, that China immersed inside its Cultural Revolution. Antonioni filmed whatever his Chinese advisers wanted, whenever they wanted, wherever they wanted; everything was well prepared to make an ideological document of the Maoist era. When the final product was released the government was furious and banned the film (1) .

"Chung Kuo Cina" (Puppet scene) Directed by M. Antonioni

The documentary is simple but clear and even rebel, showing everything the Chinese government wanted to show but edited in the way the spectator was absolutely able to understand the difficult moment Chinese people were living in those years.

The scene I want to show from the documentary is a puppet performance at Chang'An theatre, a simple stage production with real size puppets imitating the playing of a musical orchestra.

"Chung Kuo Cina" (Public in the Puppet scene) Directed by M. Antonioni

Antonioni opened the camera to the public, showing their faces, their waiting for the performance, and the presence of the people stayed there with the sound of their laugh during the theatrical act. Then, the performance came as an example of the Socialist Realism in Cultural Revolution age, nothing engaged with the traditional way to do Puppet theatre: costume as in the real life, children or teenagers with healthy faces and bodies, showing security and happiness while they were playing.

"Chung Kuo Cina" (Puppet scene) Directed by M. Antonioni

The acting technique seems very professional and well worked, even if the performance is so simple some of the puppets expresses "life" in their actions; the best example is the girl playing the er-hu (that kind of violin or small cello), she seems (like a real girl) enjoying her performance.

(1) The documentary had its first view for the public inside China in 2005.