Climb the steps to the White Dagoba, an ancient temple overlooking Beihai Park in central Beijing, and look east. You’ll see a pagoda in glorious isolation on a hill-top, like a symbol of China’s cultural past. Turn 60 degrees to the west – towards Chang’an Avenue, Beijing’s buzzing central thoroughfare – and you can’t miss a shimmering oval mound, rising like a bubble from a lake. Could this be China’s future?
The mound, half sunk below ground level, is the new National Centre for the Performing Arts – a vast theatre complex located next to the Great Hall of the People, a stone’s throw from Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. Encasing three auditoriums within a titanium-and-glass shell-roof, it sums up the dynamic, image-conscious “new” China. The theatre began a series of try-out performances last month and will be formally inaugurated on December 25, with a guest-list headed by President Hu Jintao.
Cultural showpieces don’t come more spectacular than this. The theatre, designed by French architect Paul Andreu, lies at the centre of an artificial lake, surrounded by an urban park. You enter below ground through a transparent underpass before emerging into a space as high as an aircraft hangar and as open as a giant conservatory. Light floods through the glass roof by day and spills out into the dark at night. Forget the performances – the building is a performance in itself.
As the 2008 Olympics draw near, the message radiating from the theatre is that China has facilities to match the best in the west. It says there’s more to life than economic boom, that prosperity fuels cultural enlightenment. It’s as if the Communist party elite is telling the country’s burgeoning middle classes they don’t need western-style participatory democracy – they already have the good life.
But there’s another message lurking beneath the sophisticated veneer, a message betokened by the number of security guards at every corner of the building, sometimes marching in platoon-like formation. This is still a one-party state. It cannot afford to lose face by having something go wrong under the world’s media spotlight. The opening period is being strictly stage-managed, with nothing left to chance.
Nevertheless, as an architectural statement, the $400m theatre speaks volumes about China’s ambition. With a surface area of 150,000 square metres, its sheer scale exceeds that of any cultural palace in the west. As for its location next to the seat of power, you have to go back to Europe’s imperial past to find an era that accorded such symbolic importance to the arts.
Like any project this size, it has not been without problems. First approved 10 years ago by Hu’s predecessor Jiang Zemin, construction was delayed by site-clearing difficulties and then halted when another of Andreu’s buildings – Terminal 2E at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, similarly glass-clad with no internal roof-supports – collapsed in 2003. Checks were made and construction restarted. Parts of the building are still unfinished.
The theatre is almost too grand for its own good. It covers an area so large that floors backstage have been colour-coded to help artists find their way to the right auditorium. The public spaces are equally disorienting: visitors must go through metal detectors before negotiating dazzling light-sculptures and myriad escalators. “It feels a bit like an airport,” says composer Chou Wen-chung, 84-year-old dean of the US-based school of Chinese composers, who now makes regular return-visits to Beijing. “When you go in, you’re at a loss as to where you should be.”
The biggest disappointment is that none of the auditoriums – a 2,400-seat opera house, a 2,020-seat concert hall and a 1,040-seat theatre – has a design to match the building’s shell. These are functional performance spaces, handsomely equipped and furnished (the concert hall has an organ by Klais of Bonn), but you could be anywhere.
It’s not as if Beijing’s performing arts life is desperate for the space. Like the palatial hotels and apartment towers springing up in the city, the theatre resembles a building waiting to be grown into – a world-class venue in a country with few world-class ensembles, where the market for high culture is immature. Dance does well, especially where the far-travelled National Ballet of China is concerned. But if it’s western opera we’re talking about, there is no Chinese tradition: Beijing’s Central Opera is virtually defunct, and the city’s annual music festival favours expensive western imports.
The contrast with Japan is stark. Japanese enthusiasm for western culture, fuelled by decades of political freedom and economic prosperity, has almost eclipsed native traditions in the performing arts. It’s to China’s credit that, after the ravages of the cultural revolution, its ancient traditions are being revived, renewed and, in some cases, exported – by Peking Opera ensembles and regional song-and-dance troupes, some of which will feature in Beijing’s new temple of culture.
But there’s no sense of a “season”. Even taking into account the need for a snagging period, Andreu’s theatre is in danger of turning into an expensive garage. Plans for the first year of operation run to 300 events – a third imported from abroad, starting with St Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theatre.
Does a market really exist for these performances? And will the Chinese authorities continue to pay for them? Beijing’s performing arts life operates at extremes. At one end, you find pricey imported events, sponsored by business corporations; at the other are the officially supported Chinese ensembles, modestly priced but often playing to half-empty houses. Theatres in Beijing favour no one: they are state-controlled holding companies, hiring their facilities to all and sundry.
That’s why some local luminaries see the National Centre for the Performing Arts as a wasted opportunity. “People forget that a hall is only a place where things happen,” says Yu Long, one of China’s leading conductor-impresarios. “It needs a beating heart. It’s not enough for politicians to say, ‘Here’s your hall, pay your money, come in and be entertained’ – and just hope it runs itself. There’s a better way of doing these things – not a western or a Chinese way, but a professional way.”
Yu, a western-educated dynamo with strong political connections, is optimistic the new theatre will eventually come good, even if he has little faith in its current management. The chief executive is a former administrative head of one of Beijing’s biggest municipal districts. There are no fewer than three artistic directors, all with busy careers elsewhere. One of them is Zhao Ruheng, the internationally renowned head of the National Ballet of China. Who will decide the programme? “It will be the [overall] director,” she says. “We just give advice. We have a saying, ‘You can throw a stone and it will come back as jade.’ If the theatre makes a strong impact, people will get interested.”
Zhao admits marketing will have to be improved if a new theatre-going public is to be encouraged. Despite Beijing’s size, there’s a limited number of people with the time and money, let alone the inclination, to go to performances. You only have to attend one – as I did this month in the new theatre’s drama auditorium – to see that many Chinese are still feeling their way into the modern theatre experience.
Throughout The Peony Pavilion, a 17th-century Chinese love story in words and music (in a production that will visit Sadler’s Wells, London, next June), people came and went and talked on mobile phones. After the interval, there were empty seats. Apparently, a large part of the audience were state employees who had been given free tickets.
And yet, looking round China’s cultural landscape, there are plenty of green shoots. Chinese who fled abroad in the 1970s and 1980s, whether for political or economic reasons, are coming home – fuelling demand for a more sophisticated cultural life. They include western-trained musicians, eager to raise performance standards and to shift the educational emphasis from soloistic technical skill to musicality and ensemble.
In a country with a population of 1.3bn, there is no shortage of talent – even if there are not enough jobs to soak up the graduates pouring out of Chinese conservatoires. An estimated 30m Chinese study piano at home: if just 10 per cent pick up the concert-going habit, music’s future is secure. And there is plenty of new Chinese classical music worth championing – as the independent Beijing New Music Ensemble recently proved at an event combining musical performance and Chinese calligraphy.
That’s an example of Chinese aesthetics being enriched by a modern context. So is The Peony Pavilion, a show that marries China’s musical heritage with up-to-date standards of presentation. Another performance I attended (and reviewed in the FT last Friday) – Guo Wenjing’s new opera Poet Li Bai – found a way of blurring the divide between western compositional techniques and Chinese musical colours.
In that context, the pagoda I espied from the White Dagoba Temple may not symbolise China’s past, any more than Andreu’s shimmering oval mound represents its future. Both are surely essential components of a culturally fertile present.
