Chinese Ballet Tiptoeing Around Politics : Dance: Choreographer Norman Walker’s project is the first U.S.-China cultural exchange since the brutal crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators.

BEIJING —  Seated in the front row of the Capital Theater, beneath the giant red star of communism that dominates the Stalinist-era auditorium in downtown Beijing, Norman Walker clearly was nervous.

It wasn’t so much that Walker, an internationally known choreographer from New York City, was about to view the fruits of his month’s labor with 22 of the finest ballet dancers in the People’s Republic.

Nor was it the simple fact that Walker’s project here represents the first cultural exchange between America and China since last June’s brutal crackdown on the pro-democracy demonstrators of nearby Tian An Men Square, an event that provoked U.S. government sanctions against China and isolated its hard-line leadership from the outside world.

No, Walker was far more worried about how he’d react to one of the stranger Chinese customs. In China, it seems, no one applauds.

“It affects me terribly,” the Adelphi University, N.Y., dance professor said just before the purple curtain went up on Wednesday night’s preview performance. “I sit in the audience, and I die. But that’s just the way audiences are in China.”

And that’s just one of the lessons that Norman Walker learned since he agreed to be the guinea pig of the international cultural world, the first Western expert to participate directly here since horrified television audiences the world over watched China’s army kill hundreds, perhaps thousands, of the demonstrators in the streets of Beijing seven months ago and then saw China slide into cultural isolation.

Surprisingly, though, none of those lessons has been political for Walker, who has worked with other dance companies in more than a half-dozen countries during the last 17 years.

“The thing about classical ballet is it’s immune to any kind of political influences,” Walker said. “Classical ballet has existed under so many different kinds of governments--under Czarist Russia, Marxist Russia, Communist China, capitalist America and royal Britain.

“The only thing people will not be able to do is look at my work here and turn it into some kind of manifesto. I’m not making a political statement with my piece at all.”

Rather, Walker sees his four weeks of intensive work with the Central Ballet of China, which officially opened a three-night performance of his new ballet, “In the Mountain Forest” on Thursday, as far more significant in artistic terms.

The ballet’s music is a piano concerto written in 1980 by Chinese composer Liu Dunnan. The choreography, Walker said, is not merely a melding of classical and contemporary ballet. It is a blend of Western and Chinese dance, as well--a mixture that Walker considers more of a “recombination” than a ground-breaking feat.

Walker, who has been in Adelphi’s performing arts department in Garden City, Long Island, for nearly two decades, theorizes that the pioneers of modern American dance adopted many styles from traditional Chinese folk dance during extended forays to the Far East in the mid-1920s.

Specifically, Walker noted that Martha Graham, the 95-year-old institution who is considered the greatest choreographer of modern American dance, “has said on many occasions that she stole liberally from China and the East” while developing the basic techniques of modern dance in the West.

Asked whether he believes that, in the last month, he actually has been putting back into China what was borrowed more than a half-century ago, Walker smiled and said, “No, that’s too big, too enormous.

“In some sense, though, I’m re-acquainting them with what we learned from them. The thing that they (Chinese ballet masters) haven’t been able to accomplish yet is they haven’t been able to meld these two styles together themselves.”

Wu Jingshu agreed. Wu, or Madame Wu as she is known here, is one of China’s first ballerinas, a graduate of the first class of dancers to attend the Beijing Dancing School established by Soviet experts in 1954. Now, she is director of the cultural exchange program of the Central Ballet of China, which also was established by Russian advisers in 1959, five years after the dance school opened.

“The problem was, our Soviet ballet masters were much too rigid in their teaching,” Wu said. “And, at that time, there was only one window opening on the world for us.”

But as the revolution that had brought communism to China in 1949 deepened, the windows of creativity closed altogether. When Communist Party Chairman Mao Tse-tung began his Cultural Revolution in 1966, Chinese ballet was hardly immune. The dance company was allowed to perform only two compositions, one of them the heavily propagandizing “Red Detachment of Women.” And star performers such as Wu were sent to the countryside for “cultural re-education.”

“I was made to spend three years working in the orchards and the fields,” Wu recalled. “I never ate so much fruit in my life. And when I returned to the ballet company, my bones were so damaged, I could only perform character roles.”

When the Cultural Revolution ended, though, the ballet company’s artistic windows gradually reopened, Wu said--first to Western Europe in the early 1980s, and finally to America, where two patrons had actively begun to coax the ballet troupe out from behind its nation’s ideological curtain.

Chinese-born American dance aficionado Mary Kantor and her husband, Sidney, first saw the Beijing ballet company perform in 1981 and spent the next five years trying to persuade Chinese authorities to allow it to tour America.

“They couldn’t understand why I wanted to bring them out,” Mary Kantor said of the Chinese leadership. “I said, ‘Because it’s a beautiful company.’ And they said, ‘We don’t want you to lose money. Who’s going to pay for tickets to see Chinese on Western ballet shoes?’ ”

Unlike the internationally acclaimed Peking Opera, ballet has long been viewed as a purely Western art form, and Chinese authorities were deeply suspicious of Kantor’s motives at first.

But she refused to give up, and, finally, in the spring of 1986, with the Kantors’ sponsorship, the Central Ballet of China gave 47 performances in 62 days in 11 cities throughout America, among them a three-day, sell-out show in Pasadena that Wu said was the troupe’s most memorable.

For most members of the company, the U.S. tour was a watershed. For some, it was a temptation as well.

“Some dancers wanted to learn more of these things in the West--especially more jazz and modern dance,” Wu said. “Some thought also it would be nice if they could dance outside (China) all the time. But, for most, they knew that in China they are prima ballerinas who make their parents proud. And they live well here. Their basic salary is only 170 yuan a month (about $35), but their rents are just a few yuan a month and all of the girls have VCRs in their rooms.”

Still, some of the dancers were more than merely tempted to leave after the bloody turmoil of last June. Reliable sources said that at least five of the company’s top dancers, including two of its best ballerinas, were outside China when the crackdown took place around Tian An Men Square, and none of them has returned.

For Mary Kantor, who is also sponsoring Norman Walker’s private mission here, politics has no place in dance.

“There is no race nor politics in the eyes of art,” the New York City patron declared in a Jan. 8 speech announcing Walker’s visit. “The function of art in any form today, and dance is no exception, is to create a bridge between cultures.”

Indeed, China’s hard-line leadership, which has condemned America for its sanctions countless times since the Tian An Men killings, has been supportive of Walker’s mission. The Communist Party’s propaganda chief, Li Ruihan, said last week that China’s doors must remain open to Western ideas, provided they are integrated into “Chinese characteristics.”

Walker bristled at the suggestion that he is allowing himself to be used politically.

“No, because I’m helping the people,” he said. “I’m not helping the government. All I’m trying to do is teach people who do not want to be closed off, who do not want to be isolated from the outside world.”

Alluding to the many years that he worked on contract with Ballet Philippines, whose principal patron was Imelda Marcos, the wife of the late dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos, Walker added, “I was not a fan of the Marcoses in any way, shape or form, but does that mean that I’m going to turn my back on the Filipino people?

“Nor am I not going to turn my back on these people, these dancers, simply because of things that happened in the country. Quite frankly, in the ‘40s and ‘50s, should the rest of the world have turned its back on America because of the way we were treating the blacks?

“Look, I’m not being naive. You’d have to live in a cave if you were afraid of being used. A lot of people are going to interpret what I’m doing one way or another. And I understand the significance of the situation . . . But it is politically significant only because of the timing, not because of content or purpose.”

Walker has, however, made some observations about the creative situation during his month here that reflect an understanding of the political realities.

He had high praise for several of the Chinese dancers performing his 21-minute piece, which depicts adolescence, love and marriage. But, when asked whether the ballet company as a whole will ever gain international acclaim as a world-class dance troupe, he shook his head.

“It won’t happen until they can fire somebody,” said Walker. “Under the system here, the common-rice-bowl theory, they have a job no matter what, no matter how they perform.”