BEIJING
The 60th anniversary of the end of World War II has been marked in China
by a host of cultural events commemorating the suffering of the Chinese
people under the Japanese occupation and celebrating the Japanese defeat.
Among the most unusual of these is an emotionally wrenching dance drama
called "Nanjing 1937," which was staged in Beijing's Poly Theater on Sept.
7 and 8 after opening in Nanjing in August. It will travel later this
autumn to Henan and Anhui.
Performed by the China
National Chinese Opera and Dance Drama Company, "Nanjing 1937" begins with
a woman in white wandering alone in the shadowy realms of the hereafter.
Her dance, beseeching and innocent, is interrupted when she pushes against
a gray wall that slides away at her touch. Behind it stands a mysterious
figure veiled in pure white who thrusts out her hand and gestures "Stop!"
But the dancer - Ye Bo in the
role of Iris Chang, the best-selling American author of "The Rape of
Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II" who last year took her
own life at 36 - cannot stop.
Instead, she opens a book that
transports her to the days before the Japanese occupation of Nanjing -
portrayed by dancers in period costume as a time of laughter and innocence
- and then inexorably pulls her into the all-consuming weeks of death and
despair in which Japanese soldiers raped and murdered upward of 250,000
civilians.
The only ray of light is the
figure of the American missionary Minnie Vautrin - danced by the
Beijing-based American Aly Rose - who heroically faces down the Japanese
even as she recoils at their atrocities. As the dance-drama unfurls,
alternating between the hereafter, the Nanjing of 1937 and the city today,
we understand that the veiled figure who eludes Iris Chang in heaven is
Minnie Vautrin and that the book she doesn't want Iris to read is her own
diary - which records her experiences during the Nanjing massacre and ends
with her own suicide in 1941.
It is an unlikely enough
choice to commemorate the highly sensitive subject of the rape of Nanjing
with a dance-drama, but to do so from the perspective of two American
women - one who rescued people and another who rescued history - is
particularly unorthodox. But the director and choreographer Tong Ruirui,
who also conceived and wrote the story, was determined to bring her vision
to the stage.
"I want to shock people," she
explained. "I went to Nanjing several times and visited the memorial.
Nanjing has a very long history. Six dynasties were based there. When you
go there and you see the old city walls that have been shot at by guns and
cannon, you see the photos of victims - you just cannot accept this. How
could people behave like this? You can't believe that people could be this
cruel. You feel that if you are a Chinese you should put this on stage,
make it into art, and allow more people to understand it."
Tong has succeeded in her goal
of re-kindling awareness of the Nanjing massacre, at least among those
young people who comprise the bulk of the audience for dance. Her
production unstintingly reflects the horrors of the Japanese occupation.
Audience response has been
strong, with tears a common reaction, and the show has received
considerable press. Tong has also created a compelling artistic link
between the lives - and deaths - of Iris Chang and Minnie Vautrin and done
much to revive the memory of the latter woman.
"I feel Minnie Vautrin is
really worthy of admiration," she said. "And I think that she and Iris
Chang are both in heaven, even though they committed suicide. So I
thought, when Chang meets Vautrin in heaven, what would she say? She would
have so much to say - or maybe nothing."
Chang was well known in China
for bringing renewed attention to the Japanese atrocities in Nanjing, and
her death shocked and saddened many here. Vautrin, on the other hand, is a
largely overlooked figure whose heroic efforts during the Nanjing massacre
certainly compare to those of the much better known German, John Rabe, who
is sometimes called "China's Schindler." Vautrin is credited with
protecting 10,000 women and girls from marauding Japanese soldiers by
sheltering them on the campus of the Ginling Women's College.
Because Japan was not yet at
war with any Western nations, its soldiers - who bayoneted babies,
gang-raped women and girls and competed to see who could kill the most
civilians - were loath to commit their crimes in front of Westerners.
Vautrin thus personally confronted innumerable Japanese soldiers who
breached the campus walls intent on raping the women she sheltered -
breaches that were so frequent that she was sometimes summoned several
times an hour. The soldiers abused her, and if she didn't run fast enough,
the women under her protection got raped. On one such occasion, when she
arrived too late, she wrote of the soldiers, "In my wrath I wished I had
the power to smite them for their dastardly work. How ashamed the women of
Japan would be if they knew these tales of horror."
The challenges of relating a
historic event as grizzly, complex and sensitive as this one are many, and
it is perhaps for this reason that "Nanjing 1937" sometimes emphasizes
drama at the expense of dance.
The story is supported by
detailed written explanations, and the production is nearly two hours
long. Tong describes her dance vocabulary as including "everything from
traditional to modern," an accurate characterization. Much of the
production is taken up with set pieces of ensemble dancing - a lyrical
scene of carefree students prancing around Vautrin, Japanese soldiers
bathed in black light drilling together in menacing formation, innocent
Nanjing civilians somersaulting and tumbling across the stage as they flee
from the advancing troops. The dance vocabulary is largely descriptive -
Chang's character even dances at a desk as she writes her best-selling
book - and the dancers sometimes feel harnessed by the story. Indeed, some
of the most moving scenes occur when the stage is cleared of most of the
65 dancers and Ye and Rose are freed to tell the story through dance
alone. The score, by Zuo Long, supports the story well.
"Nanjing 1937" concludes where
it started, in the hereafter, where Chang's character finally unveils the
elusive figure in white and discovers that it is Vautrin. The two dance
together in a moving pas de deux; then Vautrin puts her arm around Chang
and shepherds her up a vanishing staircase.
"The Nanjing massacre is not
over," Tong said. "It continues today. Anyone who enters its history has
to realize this."
