Wang Quanxing lands smiling in Barcelona after a twenty-hour trip with a stopover in Doha. China is not around the corner, much less Suzhou, the city of 13 million inhabitants that is integrated with Shanghai in the Yangtze Delta metropolitan area. La Vanguardia is faced with a sexagenarian artist trained in the Beijing of the cultural revolution, in the seventies. In the capital he studied Western classical ballet, Chinese dances and, mind you, also Spanish. “And they interested me a lot, especially flamenco,” he says in Mandarin and with his heart in his hand.
The one who for two decades was a dancer in the National Ballet of China and then deputy director of the company and secretary of the Party arrives in Barcelona as head of the Suzhou Ballet Theater since 2021, a company that has now been in its 50th year and was founded with the aim of combine the classics of the Western repertoire (The Nutcracker, Swan Lake…) with Chinese pieces based on the classic literature of their culture or even on silk, a theme linked to Suzhou.
This is what he himself tells it on the occasion of this Spanish debut, this weekend – only two performances – at the Victòria theatre, with a program dotted with “Chinese essences” that appeal to the running of water between the fingers or autumnal longing, and with some nod to Ástor Piazzola’s tango (danced flamenco style and with ballet pointe) and a finale with Stravinsky and his Rite of Spring. But it will not be the very personal version of Pina Bausch, whom Wang dared to take to Beijing years before her death, and he still remembers her as a prisoner of shyness and chaining cigarettes. Here they will dance the Consecration of the American choreographer Glen Tetley, the author of the famous Pierrot Lunaire (1962).
Forty dancers – there are 50 in the company, compared to the 150 that form the Peking Ballet – will fulfill the task of presenting traditional and contemporary Chinese performing arts, as they do all over the world, as this is what the company pursues. Image China cultural exchange initiative of China Arts and Entertainment Group Ltd.
“This being the first time we come to Spain representing my country, I have preferred to choose topics that we are passionate about, in an eclectic way, without a common thread of the program itself. The objective is to give our best taking into account the dimensions of Victòria,” adds the director.
But the trees of propaganda should not prevent us from seeing the forest of Chinese dance, a territory to be discovered in the West. “In China, ballet began to be introduced in the opening years, the 1950s and 1960s,” says Wang. The companies traveled to Russia, there was an exchange…, until after the eighties they stopped, probably due to budget cuts for culture in Russia.”
Indeed, the main classical teaching came to Chinese artists from teachers in the Soviet Union. Although over time traditional elements, such as martial arts, have been incorporated into companies, “a cultural component that makes it more eclectic.” Thus, everything that is regulated and linear that is classical ballet is fused with the art of the southern area of ??China, “which is exactly the opposite, the wrapping, the lack of form, the mountain, the water… searching, more than rigidity, curves, what is floating in our society.”
A desire? Create a ballet of The Red Lantern, says Wang. The story of the young woman turned concubine in China in the 1920s that Zhang Yimou already brought to the cinema and also to the ballet.
