Understanding China, step by step

By Chitralekha Basu (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-08-17 18:21

Dance director James Amar has a sense of how to work with people from different cultures.

James Amar has been coming to China almost every year since 2002 but is still testing the waters.

The acclaimed ballet performer and dance director, who has collaborated several times with Chinese ballet companies in the past seven years, prefers to take it easy when it comes to directing Chinese shows.

"I have to take my time to understand this culture before taking up Chinese themes," he says, disarmingly.

The Paris Opera Ballet School graduate who was hired at 18 as a soloist by the Ballet de Nantes, came to China first to lend his artistic inputs to Shanghai Ballet. But it is with Liaoning Ballet that he seems to have forged a more sustained link.

His first collaboration with them was Giselle, "a romantic ballet marked by dark forests and ghosts". The Chinese audience, long used to grandeur and opulence on stage, sat up and took note of something rather bizarre and understated. "We brought in the French style, based on control and purity," says Amar.

The simplicity and no-frills approach went down well and Liaoning Ballet kept renewing its invitation to Amar who returned in 2005 and 2006. This July, he signed a three-year contract with them to become the company's artistic director.

"The good thing about Liaoning Ballet is that they don't just make collaborations. They are eager to take features from other cultures and retain them," he says.

His immediate task is to make the current new production of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, which opened this weekend in Japan's Okinawa, look "as clean and professional as possible".

The production, which closely follows its most famous forerunner, the Bolshoi theater of Russia, stylistically, will have a French taskmaster to see that each turn, hand movement and every ripple of the dancer's facial muscle is precise. "We are very rigorous. The performers know now that we make them suffer for a reason," says Amar.

His advantage is that he has already worked all around the world, from Cairo, Egypt, to Montevideo, Uruguay. "By now I have a sense of how to work with people from different cultures."

Having practically lived out of suitcases, directing for dance companies in Macedonia, Slovenia, the Czech Republic and China in the same year, for years now, Amar is looking forward to settling down in China for a while.

Already at work on his next project, a series of items based on the works of French composer Lifar, Amar is looking at his China stint with guarded enthusiasm.

"I like the idea of a long-term contract and the space and time I would be able to give my work. As for what next, we will have to see where we have reached in three years' time."