Feature: Nixon in China via Vancouver

by Al Campbell

Vancouverites are set to get a history lesson in Sino-U.S. relations this week when the opera Nixon in China plays for four performances as one of the highlights of the Cultural Olympics, running parallel to the Canadian city's recent hosting of the Winter Olympics and the upcoming Paralympics.

Chronicling U.S. President Richard Nixon's historic 1972 visit to China for an audience with Chairman Mao Zedong and Premier Zhou Enlai, the two-act play is updated adaptation of U.S. composer John Adams' minimalist opera that originally debuted in 1987.

Unlike the original production staged in Houston, Texas, producer Michael Cavanagh's version, which is playing at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre starting March 13, features impressive sets of a gigantic proportion and heavy multimedia use.

Through using actual footage of the trip that was secured through the Nixon Library and the archives of both China and the United States, the production also features an on-stage camera crew documenting the live action. All the image are instantly mixed together to make the point about the unblinking eye and how the TV camera records everything for posterity, effectively giving it the power to reduce people's lives to one or two statements.

Cavanagh insists the production is new in the sets, costumes and his "treatment of it." He says he hasn't tinkered with Adams' original idea, just the "visual treatment, the way it hits your eyes and ears is a little different."

With a hope to actually stage Nixon in China in China, he is quick to point out the Canadian debut of the opera is neither a documentary nor a history lesson, but more of a poetic examination, with liberal artistic license, of what happened.

"This opera is what it all meant to these people and even their psychological impressions of these events," says the 48- year-old Winnipeg who remembers hearing about the historical summit as a young boy growing up in the Canadian prairies. "Sure I remember this trip as a child, it was big deal."

The opera, which features libretto by Alice Goodman and original conductor John DeMain returning to the production after an absence of more than 20 years, explores the relationships between the elderly Mao, Zhou, Nixon and Henry Kissinger, the former U.S. Secretary of State who traveled to China six times before the summit to make the trip happen. Also central to the story is Nixon's wife Pat, Jiang Qing (Madam Mao) and Nancy T' ang (Mao's secretary).

The production opens with a scale reproduction of the "Spirit of '76", Nixon's aircraft, landing at the Beijing airport. It the follows the action of the weeklong trip, taking in awkward introduction meeting between the two leaders, a lavish banquet in the Great Hall of the People, and Pat Nixon's Beijing tour of a pig farm, a school, a factory and the Summer Palace and the Ming Tombs.

It then recreates an impressive yet condensed version of a performance of the ballet The Red Detachment of Women, where the American visitors partake in the performance, something that did not happen in the real visit, before the final night of the trip in Beijing. It closes with Zhou, alone on stage, pondering whether the trip was worth it and his resolve to look to the future and carry on.

With Beijing resident Yuan Chenye playing the part of Zhou, the only Chinese with a major lead in the opera, Cavanagh makes no apologies for a westerner (Alan Woodrow) being cast in the central role as Mao, saying such peculiarities are the nature of opera.

"When we were casting the show, we went looking (for a Chinese) . But opera is famous for that as an art form. It has always been a color-blind art form, Caucasians playing African-Americans and vice versa all the way through its history.

"It seems to be less of an issue in opera than other art forms. It's got nothing to do with one culture versus another. It has everything to do with the human voice. We cast first and foremost form the voice," Cavanagh says.

"The Mao Zedong we have is terrific. He's a Canadian, a terrific singer and once he gets the wardrobe on he will certainly look the part as well."

With a cast and orchestra of more than 100 people and about 200 people in the overall production, Cavanagh is quick to credit the many Chinese on his crew that have contributed to his vision. One is Vancouver-based choreographer Wang Wenwai, a former Beijinger who witnessed Nixon's motorcade driving through the capital as a six-year-old boy.

"He's helped me with some of the other stylized movement we have in the show. Movement is a language all of its own and has a vocabulary that is specific to what's going on."

Calling his production "fantasia," Cavanagh likens Nixon in China to a "big long dream sequence" and a "highly impressionistic version of what actually happened in 1972."

"Nixon's trip to China was a lot about the Soviet Union at that time. The three of them (China, America and Russia) were playing with the very future of the planet, the three big parties, not just those individual people but the nations.

"That's why Zhou Enlai is so important in this as well because Mao is starting slow down and Zhou was really, very much, steering the ship. The fact that they could shake hands in friendship and begin to share ideas after having no contact between the countries since 1949 it is just enormous.

"We don't really understand that it was subtle shifts in communication and connections between the countries that weren't obvious at the time. There were speeches and banquets and they went to a ballet, but it was such a huge event in terms of human history that at the time they didn't fully understand what it all meant and I don't think that we still do. We still need a little more distance in history and that's the point this opera is making."

Source:Xinhua