OH dear. CCDC has always seemed such a cool company. Yet the portrayal of African tribespeople in its latest show, San Mao, premiered in the Chinese Dance Festival last weekend, and presented in conjunction with the Shanghai Youth Dance Company, was offensive and embarrassing.
The natives of the Sahara were shown as lumpy child-like savages, sleeping piled up in one bed, stealing things, naively curious to the point of imbecility.
Their body-suit costumes showed them to be ungainly, the women with vast breasts, the men with large stomachs (and in one case what looked like elephantiasis although I'm sure that was unintentional).
Little Black Sambo recreated in Hong Kong decades after the characterisation was deemed politically very incorrect everywhere else. And a world away from the graceful, real inhabitants of the Sahara.
When I called choreographer Willy Tsao in Guangzhou he appeared genuinely surprised that anyone could have found the vignette racist. 'It was just a costume design, and the dancers improvised on that. It wasn't meant to be any kind of racist mockery,' he said.
The show is set to go to Shanghai and Beijing, but no plans to take the piece to Europe or America. Just as well: they'd probably be lynched.
GERMAN-Japanese violinist Mayumi Seiler will be better prepared for her two concerts in Hong Kong this weekend than she was for her debut with the Toronto Symphony in April. Seiler, who just happened to be in town on holiday, found herself substituting Gil Shaham (who played in Hong Kong to a packed house earlier this year) to play Mendelssohn's E minor concerto with only 21/2 hours' notice.
