2010/03/01 by Ken Harris · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · #Visual Culture and Art Theory #Musicology and Musical Analysis #Theatre and Performance Studies #Admiration #Musical #Art #Politics #Drama #Literature #Proletariat #Dance #Art history #History #Law #Political science
paper · doi:10.1093/oq/kbq015
openalex publication_date 2010/03/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
In February 1972, as Richard Nixon watched the revolutionary ballet The Red Detachment of Women (Hongse niangzi jun) alongside his host, Madame Mao, he famously declared his admiration for the “musical,” as he styled it, and requested the names of the writer, composer, and director. Good question, Mr. President. By this time, of course, Comrade Jiang Qing had so publicly insinuated herself into The Red Detachment of Women that hers was the name most linked to its production. But this time for Nixon, she gave the pure socialist response: it was, she informed him, “created by the masses.”1 The Cultural Revolution's accent on the collective, “mass” quality of the “model works” produced for stage and screen in 1960s and 1970s mainland China readily suggests that they were forms of “proletarian mythmaking,” or even quasi-religious enactments of political ritual, intensively reproduced and refined, often at great cost to the numerous artists involved.2 Yet the brief dialogue between Nixon and Madame Mao crystallizes for us crucial questions about the genre, medium, and authorship of these works. The “revolutionary dance-drama” Red Detachment was most emphatically standardized as a script “revised collectively by the China Ballet Troupe” in May 1970 and adapted for film just a few months later, as part of the broader drive toward popularizing the model works and expanding their role as everyday guides for political morality. But just as certainly, the Red Detachment that Nixon saw was also an important episode along a far longer continuum of works evolving through a variety of different media over the past fifty years—starting with an early reportage account and a local opera, a popular film melodrama and comic book, the celebrated ballet, and a Peking opera version. (The model ballet performance hosted by Madame Mao for the visiting American president even entered the international opera lexicon as a focal point of act 2 in the 1987 John Adams/Alice Goodman opera Nixon in China.)3Red Detachment fell out of circulation in China after the 1976 demise of Jiang Qing and the Gang of Four, but it has gradually reemerged, reconfigured into a television series, stage revivals, DVDs, documentary photojournalism, and even a theme park.