THE CONCEPT BEHIND the ballet, if not the ballet itself, dates from the year that the Soviets decreed to be the centennial of the founding of the Bolshoi Theater. Developing a new repertoire for the Bolshoi became a priority. A contest was held for a new ballet to be staged in celebration. Among the entries was The Daughter of the Port (Doch’ porta). The overarching concept, desire for personal and national independence, was unproblematic. Yet setting it in eighteenth-century Spain proved a nonstarter. It was deemed insufficiently “dynamic,” too dull, too archaic, to stage.78
Just then the Bolshoi designer Mikhaíl Kurilko supposedly retrieved from his pocket a copy of the newspaper Pravda with a story about Port Arthur (Hankou) in China, which had links to tsarist Russia. The Soviet steamer Lenin had been detained at the port by the English imperialist exploiters of Chinese workers, preventing food from reaching them. Kurilko pitched the idea of a ballet on the subject. It had everything a Soviet spectacle needed: exotica, politics, clear heroes and Western villains. Kurilko was a charismatic intellectual who wore an eye patch (he lost his left eye as a student) and tucked his well-pressed trousers into black lacquer boots—a look that would find its way into the ballet. Geltser had a eureka moment and helped Kurilko fashion the libretto, conceiving the lead role so idiosyncratically that no understudy would think to learn it. Reinhold Glière earned the commission as reward for his improvements to the scores of nineteenth-century ballets, including Esmeralda. He studied Chinese folk music, he claimed, in an eastern communist college, but if so, he did not learn much. The cutesy pentatonic tunes in the score, floating atop otherwise conventional chords, are so generically oriental as to make a mockery of themselves. Glière’s music for the imperial overlords is likewise formulaic but somewhat more varied, involving chromaticism, whole-tone clusters, and flaccid Western “jazz.” The audience-pleasing sailors’ dance, titled “Little Apple” (Yablochko), derives, according to the official record, from a limerick sung by sailors in the Russian Black Sea fleet. Geltser’s husband, Tikhomirov, created the dances for the second act, a mixed-up orientalist version of a traditional vision/dream scene, and his student Lev Lashchilin, a gifted pantomimist, set the framing acts. The Bolshoi Theater administration second-guessed the political content of the ballet, but because tickets had been distributed in advance to workers, it reached the stage and became an official sensation, receiving 100 performances in its first year.
In truth, Kurilko came up with the idea for the new project based on two unrelated articles in Pravda that happened to be published in the same page and column on January 9, 1926. The first article told of a “new phase in the struggle in China,” a struggle that pitted Soviet-armed Chinese nationalists against Japanese-backed warlords; the second, much shorter article reported the detention of the Soviet steamer Ilyich (Lenin’s middle name) in England. Police searched the vessel for “communist literature” yet found nothing.79 Kurilko must have merged the details, placing the boat and the English police in China at the start of the civil war, and pitched the concoction to the Bolshoi Theater as a possible subject for a ballet. Enough interest was shown for the idea to be handed to the scenarist of The Daughter of the Port for fleshing out, since both he and Glière were under contract with the Bolshoi.
Glière wrote the music in isolation while everyone else involved in the ballet quarreled, in person or by telegram, over the scenario. (The composer was not one to argue, having played it safe throughout his career, never resorting to extremes, and maintaining, in his stout middle age, “the glossy air of a well-nourished cat.”)80 The scenarist, Mikhaíl Galperin, mishandled the new project, centering the action less on the ship than on a secret trade deal meant to ensure the eternal exploitation of Chinese laborers. A Soviet steamer arrived at port to support nationalist forces only at the very end; even worse, the heroine was French, a hopelessly démodé ballerina in the Petipa style, as opposed to a Soviet Madame Butterfly. Glière passed on Galperin’s scenario, which left the project back in the hands of Kurilko, who would receive official credit as the author of the script. He was tasked with designing a ballet that would capture the political moment: Stalin’s support of Chinese nationalists in their struggle against foreign-backed warlords, and his fantasy of an eventual alliance between Chinese nationalists and Chinese communists. Soviet involvement in China was covert, but the anti-imperialist rhetoric in Pravda extreme, leading the charge of international revolution.
Kurilko did not work alone on the script, nor did he work in peace. Other cooks came into the kitchen, including, at the start of the rehearsals, the Moscow Jewish Theater actor and director Alexei Dikiy, who would be feted for playing the role of Stalin in Soviet films; before then, he spent four years in prison, branded a traitor for his political satires. He animated the scenario, filling it with fisticuffs, but fell out with the ballet master Tikhomirov over the second act. Dikiy wanted the act simplified; Tikhomirov insisted on complicating it. Dikiy was removed from the project and his name scrubbed from the playbill. Thereafter The Red Poppy fell under the control of the husband-and-wife team of Tikhomirov and Geltser, with the pantomime specialist Lashchilin heeding their whims. The solo dancing was conceived in the summer of 1926 in Kislovodsk, the realistic plot discarded in the second act to allow Geltser to dwell in an unrealistic, astral plane.
Before and after it reached the Bolshoi stage, The Red Poppy was tested, presented to audiences of workers to ensure it made its point. Kurilko mentioned going with Geltser, Tikhomirov, Lashchilin, and Glière to factories for show-and-tell sessions. The composer played selections from the first act at the piano, including the Boston waltz that ended up in act 3. Geltser demonstrated some of the pantomime, seeking to show that the ballet’s heroine is “Chinese on the outside, but with a spirit common to all humankind. Neither her feelings nor moods are foreign.”81 The workers enjoyed the sailors’ dance but suggested changes elsewhere. Once the creative team complied, the factories “bought [tickets to] a series of performances.”82
Glière knew that he would have to make changes and wrote his music accordingly. His relationship with the other participants in the ballet was not one of “trust,” as he claimed, but the opposite: he worked from the vaguest of outlines, a sense of the beginnings and endings of scenes but no knowledge of their middles.83 During the rehearsals, the exotic-rustic dances were shifted around, reversed, fast-forwarded, interrupted, and augmented. The second act was to have included distorted American dances (the Boston waltz, plus a foxtrot and a Charleston) followed by a Chinese opera episode, but these ended up being abbreviated and repositioned in favor of an elaboration of the vision scene.
All in all, The Red Poppy is a pageant, a spectacle for the senses requiring no sustained engagement. The political message is obvious, fixed in place before the curtain rises. It is the opposite, in short, of an abstract, “symphonic” ballet, and the sailors’ dance, though popular with metal- and steelworkers, met with fierce resistance from Bolshoi Theater musicians, who found it demeaning to play, an insult to their training. In time it became a concert favorite, thanks less to the composer Glière than to its other creators. Glière had wanted to end the first act with a rousing folk dance, “Uzh tï Van’ka nachis’ / uzhe tï Vanyushka prichnis’.”84 He was voted down and had to write, or rather arrange, music that Kurilko and his comrades demanded of him. The sailors’ dance lacks the infectiousness of “Uzh tï Van’ka,” especially since the choreographer slowed it down to the point of sabotaging its likelihood of success. But the music has endured.
Rehearsals continued into the spring of 1927, at which point Lunacharsky unexpectedly bumped The Red Poppy from the stage in favor of an opera by Sergey Prokofiev, The Love for Three Oranges. Prokofiev, a modernist wunderkind born near present-day Donetsk, Ukraine, had left Russia in 1918 for the United States and Europe. Lunacharsky wanted him back. Staging The Love for Three Oranges, which had found limited success abroad, was part of the courtship, and Lunacharsky instructed the Bolshoi to make ro
om for it in the season. Geltser had other ideas, however, and insisted that rehearsals for The Red Poppy continue in the ballet school. She found support for her cause thanks to political developments that no one at the Bolshoi could have anticipated: crowds attacking the Soviet embassy in Beijing on April 6, 1927, and metropolitan police rummaging through the offices in search of proof of Soviet meddling in Chinese affairs. Meantime in Shanghai, the nationalists organized the slaughter of communists. Stalin worsened the crisis by instructing the Red Chinese to mobilize against both the nationalists and the imperialists, and the Comintern to “concentrate on providing support” to Red Chinese fighters.85 The Red Poppy had found its moment. The ballet was an innocent affair, light in style from start to finish, but it resonated with the current political situation and thus received approval for performance.
The plot changed before and after reaching the stage. Geltser took the part of an exotic dancer named Táo-Huā, a combination of orientalist clichés at constant risk of sexual assault. Her name translates as “peach blossom” in this spelling, but it has other transliterations from the Mandarin, and the creators of the ballet rendered it as “red poppy.” Flowers are symbols of beauty, splendor, and youth; red is the color of love, also of revolution and communism. Thus both the title of the ballet and the name of the heroine are positive. Somewhere lost in translation is the negative association of poppies with narcotics, specifically the enslavement and exploitation of Chinese laborers in the international opium trade. As scholar Edward Tyerman has written, one of the greatest tragedies in Chinese history became, on the Soviet stage, a parable about “solidarity and liberation,” even as it hinted that the Soviets might be just like the tsars, just like Western imperialists when it came to China. They were colonizers.86
The audience attending the June 14, 1927, premiere first heard the music of repression: A listless theme wanders aimlessly in the low strings, punctuated by gongs. Glière marked the passage “lifeless China” in his manuscript. A soaring, searching Russian tune follows, associated with the appearance of the Soviet ship as a symbol of new ideas and attitudes.87 The curtain rises to show the ship being unloaded and Táo-Huā entertaining Englishmen in a restaurant near the dock. The unskilled southern Chinese laborers lift crates onto their backs and trudge barefoot down the gangplank three steps apart, the thud of the loads being dropped represented by accents in the score. They are the heroes of the ballet, but they are given the racist name “coolies” in the scenario. The oldest one collapses, having been worked to death by the evil dock master, the Englishman Sir Hips. The Soviet captain puts a stop to the constant beating of the laborers and joins his crew in completing the unloading. TáoHuā, moved by his kindness, flutters her fan at the captain and gives him a poppy. Her master, Li Shan-Fu, menaces her, yanking her to her knees from a fragile position (one leg en pointe, another in demi-attitude). The captain intercedes once more, allowing the scene to conclude in casual merriment, with the laborers joining the Soviets and the crews from other boats: Australian, Japanese, Malaysian, Negro, and (not to be confused with Negro) American. The next scene unfolds in an opium den (or, depending on the staging, a teahouse), where the captain has been invited as a guest. Sir Hips plots his murder, but just as the knives are drawn on the captain by his henchmen, the captain whistles for his sailors. Undeterred, Sir Hips comes up with a plan to poison the Soviet captain.
Distressed, Táo-Huā falls asleep in a cloud of opium. Her vision scene features fantastic geometrical shapes that shimmer behind a scrim, followed by fairy-tale fish and birds. All manner of generic ballet fictions appear: the temple dancer, the pharaoh’s daughter, even the children of Gorsky’s Ever-Fresh Flowers. The Golden Buddha makes an appearance, along with a procession in the shape of a dragon and a quartet of bare-chested saber-rattlers. “Here flowers, butterflies, and birds come to life to dance,” according to one of the scenarios. “Moving among them in her dreamscape, TáoHuā seeks the [ideological] truth.”88 Táo-Huā sees herself in flight only to wake up back in the port, back in the grip of Li Shan-Fu. The stage becomes a casino. Chinese guest workers look on as the English perform a Charleston. A banker is entertained by a striptease in the form of a tango; the dancer disrobes atop a giant platter carried on the shoulders of Chinese lackeys. Táo-Huā performs her umbrella dance. The showcase ribbon dance ensues, the invention of the acrobatic Asaf Messerer, who remembered pitching the idea of the dance to the creative team on the eve of the dress rehearsal. He imagined a battle of the gendered props, “female” umbrella against “male” ribbon. Inspiration, he said, came from childhood recollections of “traveling Chinese magicians,” but the hoop dance in The Nutcracker must have influenced the ribbon dance as well. Messerer remembered taking several “turns and pirouettes in a tight circle while manipulating the ribbon, which wrapped around me like a ring, then coiled around me like the body of a snake, and then transformed into an enormous hairband, through which I jumped. Lashchilin suggested something for it; then I did. Kurilko watched while we made it up and liked it. And so, in an hour or an hour and a half we came up with the dance.”89 The costume came from gold silk cloth, a pink leotard, and flower decals. Later a snake was stenciled onto the leotard.
Next came the Boston waltz, staged with forty-eight dancers, the women in black gowns, black jewels, and black heels, the men all in white. Li Shan-Fu orders Táo-Huā to perform for the Soviet captain and serve him a cup of poisoned tea. She instead declares her love for him in stilted, “semiliterate” pantomime: “Come, hero from land of happiness, I have to tell you something big important. Little Táo-Huā want to protect you. Táo-Huā love you; you are her one and only in the world; take Táo-Huā with you. If you leave Táo-Huā die a cruel death because of you.” But the captain serves a cause higher than mere human love, and he struggles to explain that the same cause must be hers. “Fight for the red banner; it is the happiness of China and all humankind,” he benevolently gestures.90 Li Shan-Fu trains his revolver on the captain but misses. His next bullet reaches the kneeling Táo-Huā. In the paradisiacal apotheosis, the fantastic imagining of act 2 comes true. Táo-Huā is draped with a red banner by children. Poppies rain down on the Chinese workers, now liberated by Soviet partisans. The cast breaks out of the muteness of ballet into song, the inevitable “Marseillaise,” with organ and orchestra accompaniment.
Reviews were poor. The act 2 vision scene predictably flopped with the critics, those writing for both political and non-political publications. Pravda, the most political publication of all, disputed the references to ancient religious symbols in the “naïve” second act. Geltser earned praise for her evocation of the heroine’s search for freedom, but she problematically recalled, in her dress and demeanor, “the fairy-tale princesses beloved in the far east.”91
Even critics writing for theater journals found that the formula—Marxist-Leninist agitprop on the outside, a mash-up of decadent imperial vignettes in the middle—did not work. Sergey Gorodetsky loathed the “marmalade” of effects in the vision scene, finding it altogether inappropriate “in 1927! In Moscow!” for the dancers of the Bolshoi to be dressed as flowers.92 An even harsher verdict came from Vladimir Blyum, who was both a critic and a censor, writing in the evenings for Zhizn’ iskusstva and toiling by day at Glavrepertkom. He savaged The Red Poppy as the product of the Bolshoi’s imperial-era hangers-on, its “ruling class.” He overheard a patron calling Tikhomirov a “pregnant cherub” onstage, and described Geltser’s acting as “all ‘on one note’: a frozen expression that tells us she feels lost, and a tedious ‘shivering’ gesture—look, it’s our old friend ‘the dying swan,’ stretched out over several hours and this time representing revolutionary China!”93
Even so, owing to the currency of its subject matter and the endorsement from the Kremlin, The Red Poppy racked up more than two hundred performances at the Bolshoi in its first years, and some three thousand throughout the USSR—an astonishing success that silenced the naysayers.94 It faded from the Bol
shoi stage in the 1930s, but reappeared in the 1940s, in celebration of the Chinese communist revolution. In the 1950s, the ballet was revived again at the Bolshoi, as The Red Flower (Krasnïy tsvetok). The new title made clear, in belated response to complaints from Chinese diplomats, that the ballet was not about the opium trade. The poet Emi Xiao, a former classmate of Chinese Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong, had in 1951 expressed his unhappiness with the ballet to an employee of the Soviet cultural-exchange organization VOKS, noting that he and other visitors from China had avoided seeing the ballet at the Bolshoi because of its “essential inadequacies.” The title needed to be changed, to something like The Red Rose, in recognition of the “Chinese hatred of poppies, the substance from which opium is made.” Other problems included having one of the male characters wear a pigtail, a look banned in China back in 1912, and portraying the heroine as a dancer, a profession associated with prostitution. “Even the dancer’s death does not eliminate our negative attitude to the fact that the main character in the ballet is presented as a prostitute,” Xiao remarked.95 So the name was changed, the pigtail cut, and the heroine recast as a freedom fighter. When Chairman Mao began to denounce the Soviet government of Nikita Khrushchev, however, the original title was restored.
AS THE WAY FORWARD to the imagined communist utopia detoured and narrowed, growing more prescriptive, so too did the route of Soviet ballet. But the art mattered, in a way that, arguably, ballet has never mattered anywhere else. Choosing suitable subject matter was a high-stakes game—even when games were actually the topic, case in point being a modest “first attempt” by the Bolshoi to stage a ballet on the theme of sports to include a pas de deux between a soccer player and a sweeper.96 Brilliant Soviet composers would be censored, their careers threatened along with their lives, in their efforts to create the right kind of music for the right kind of dance as determined by thugs at the helm of the ship of state. Many ballets from the years after the 1927 premiere of The Red Poppy never saw the light of day, and some that did ended up suffocated by didacticism. For the sake of the people, whose wants and needs the elite claimed to know, folk dance and music were stuffed into ballets, shoving aside any joy. As the censors turned the screws, the performers tightened up.
Bolshoi Confidential Page 27