“House of the Flying
Daggers.” I hadn’t realized that this
was the translation of ‘Shi Mian Mai Fu’ when I went to see it last night. Friends invited us and we were blessed with
remarkably forgiving traffic on a wet evening.
We arrived with a few minutes to
spare.
I was told that this was a story I should be familiar
with. Things are set in the founding of
Han Dynasty. I tried my best to piece it
together. Fruitlessly, I’d poked around
on Baidu on my phone. “You know, Liu
Bang and Xiang Yu.” I wish someone had
said “四面楚歌“. Western history remains anchored differently.
We settled in, just in time, to a ceiling full of sharpened
silver and a woman off to the write using a scissor, as things go under way. Unable to anchor or trace the story, I
floated from one remarkable set to another. The ceiling full of dangling silver
scissors seemed alive, anchored in such a way that they swayed in unison,
menacingly.
The final battle, what I later discern must be the “Battle
of Gaixia” is set amidst a sand dune’s worth of red feathers that swirled and
fell like snowy blood down on to naked bodies.
Bare legs squirming slowly, up from all the red plumage, like some
horrid insect on its back. These bodies
moved at half time while our protagonists spun like drunken, angry
roosters. Yang Liping has directed something
visually arresting.
The next morning I looked on-line. I couldn’t find any mention of the
performance in English. I found
reference to a 2004 movie that Zhang Yimou had done with the same Chinese title. But when I read about it, he’d set it in the
Tang Dynasty. Finally my older daughter
found me the link I was looking for in Chinese to the performance itself.
The national theatre doesn’t register much of an impression
as one drives into it, but the building is lovely to walk around in, once the
show is done. The dome glistened on this
rainy evening. I remember I used to know
a young lady who’s family was moved to make room for this theatre. But that is all I remember.
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