Page 25 - Studio International - January February 1975

10. Young acrobat in a commune "machine" began working before she
near Shanghai
even reached it. Thus a sequence,
11. Ping Pong on concrete tables
in a Peking courtyard though remaining beautifully executed,
became ridiculous. Ritualized, it lost
12. Finale of a harvest dance,
May 7 Cadre School near Peking its original meaning, losing at the same
time the humanity of the amateurs'
13. Schoolgirl skipping over a
chain of interlocked rubber-bands, performance, which had movingly and
a popular game in Peking. Her
feet alternately touch and release inspiringly shown the girl workers'
the elastic strands mastery of their machines.
14. Tai Chi, early morning Realistic detail had been submerged in
Shanghai
Photo Patricia Seymour "show", incomprehensible to the
majority of the spectators."
`We do not fear machines', one of the
dancers told Roger Howard, a girl in her
twenties who controls one of the
automatic cleansing processes. 'They
belong to us, the working class, the
country. They are the means through
which we serve the people. We control
them to produce the peoples' wealth. We
have a positive attitude towards them."
If the sharp edge was taken off the
weavers' performance in the process of
winning official approval, it must mean
that academic, compartmentalizing
attitudes to art still exist. The process of
demystification is not yet finished.
In Shanghai I visited a Children's
Palace where children between about 7
and 14 go after normal school hours. An
incredible variety of activities was going
on, the building buzzing with the sounds
of diesel engines, musical instruments,
electronic equipment. In the electronics
room children were working with
sophisticated equipment, oscilloscopes,
TV and so on. Nevertheless the
activities different children were engaged
in fell into rigid categories. One stepped
across from a room where children were
building their own radios to one where
`art' was being taught in a kind of junior
life class. If my impressions were correct,
no sense was being given that art and
radios, art and science, had any
connection. In the 'collage room' all the
children were cutting out and copying the
same stereotype. All this would tend to
perpetuate an idea, essentially Confucian,
that art is a matter of certain forms. It
would separate art from technical work,
imagination from production.
`Science and art', according to Brecht,
`meet on this ground, that both are there
to make men's life easier, the one setting
out to maintain, the other to entertain us.
In the age to come art will create
entertainment from that new productivity
which can so greatly improve our
maintenance and in itself, if only it is left
unshackled, may prove to be the greatest
pleasure of them all."
Brecht's words are a good description
of the direction the 'amateur' artists of
Dance and acrobatics reflect back on as it was later, he felt, spoiled by being China are taking. Socially their art is
everyday life, heightening its movements, groomed for the official opening linked with their production. Artistically,
making it seem effortless, lighthearted, ceremony of the Asian, African, Latin- it can become more and more so if the
like a game. True observation, closeness American Ping Pong Tournament: attitude to the art of the past is to search
to life and work in all its particularities is `In the original the dancers, who were for its essence rather than be bound by its
essential to make this convincing. I saw a themselves weavers, had stood in a line forms. •
farming dance performed by the students representing their machines, while one
of a May 7 Cadre School near Peking dancer had swirled down the line
which filled the audience with "switching" each one on. Once
enthusiasm. The students danced with switched on, each "machine" mimed,
real tools in their hands. The English delicately and gracefully, the quick
theatre critic Roger Howard here intricate movements of the yarn passing ' Ambit International Theatre Review, vol. 6,
describes an industrial dance invented by through the works and the motions of 19741.
No. 24. June
the Peking Vinylon Factory Amateur the arms and spools of the machine. In 2 New Society, 8 February 1973.
Propaganda Troupe in 1972. He the new performance, the dancer swept 3 A Short Organum for the Theatre, 1949,
describes it both in its original form and down the line impressively but the para. 20.
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