Letter from China

Letter from China Shanghai, China May 30, 1980 My Dear Mark Amitin: Thank you very much for sending me the Performing Arts Journal 12. I greatly appreciate your article "Chinese Theatre Today." On behalf of the 300,000 professionals (yes three hundred thousand theatre workers in the nation, thirty thousand troupes and three hundred modern drama troupes) and numerous amateurs, I wish to express our thankfulness to you for the friendly attitude you hold towards our work. It's a great surprise to me to find that you have been able to gather so much data in so short a sojourn! I had a three week stay in West Germany, but I doubt if I've gathered as much! In your paper I find a few places on which you must have been misinformed. For instance , the dates for the Long March (p. 12) should be 1934-35; 1945-49 were the years of the War of Liberation. Regarding admission fees, the prices are 40-60 cents JMP. I'm not good at arithmetic but I don't see how you could come to the calculation of 15Y =$2.50 JMP. At the time you saw Galileo the top price was 1Yuan J.M.P. while foreigners were charged 4 J.M.P. This, however, has been changed. This practice has been deemed unreasonable. No differentiation should be made. Foreigner or no foreigner. Regarding the Torch race on July 1, you are right that it started in Shanghai and ended up In Beijing, but the significance lies in the Itinerary. The entire relay race followed the route of the Long March, covering the 11 provinces across which the Long Marchers traversed. Regarding the paragraph on "The Opera," I presume the play you referred to must be "Mong-Li-Chun," and not "Mong-Li-Ju." Regarding Shoshin Opera (p. 15): "But now integrated with men in the male roles." Regarding Stanislavsky, he was repudiated as a bourgeois reactionary, not as a revisionist . The complete washout of his system had taken place in 1968, not 1960. True, there was a repudiation of the theory of germs, but that was on a very small scale, not a nation-wide affair. Regarding the so-called eight model works during the Cultural Revolution, they were not taken from old operas but adapted or pirated (snatched) from films, modern "spoken" dramas or local operas, claiming to be Kiang Ching's own "arduous creations...!" However, these are minor points. The most important points are your comment on the Cultural Revolution and the 4R's (i.e., Revolutionary Realism and Revolutionary Romanticism), but since they are controversial topics, I don't propose to go into them this time. It would take weeks and weeks to make them more or less intelligible to those who have not undergone the ordeal! So, here I stop. Thanking you once more for your sincerity and good will, Yours, Tsolin Huang (Huang Zhoulin) Editors' Note: Huang Zhoulin is the Artistic Director of the Shanghai Peoples Art Theatre, and director of the production of Galileo presented at the Chinese Youth Art Theatre in Beijing. 136 ...