Shanghai the Arts New Vegas

Amid the cacophony of Shanghai's honking horns and the vertigo-inducing sci-fi skyscrapers, the rehearsal studio of the Grand Theatre was a picture of tranquillity.

As the pianist played the first few bars of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, it was business as usual for the 60-plus dancers of the Australian Ballet as they prepared for the opening tonight of Graeme Murphy's production.

With just two days to get ready for the three-performance season, the dancers saw more of the studio than the city that looks like Vegas on stilts. But on the way to the Grand Theatre, in the centre of a cultural precinct within People's Square, they could catch glimpses of a city in which colonial remnants squat within a jumble of metallic 21st-century towers.

The first time the Australian Ballet came to Shanghai, in 1980, most buildings were a few storeys high.

This is the Australian Ballet's fifth tour to Shanghai but the only time it has brought a work by an Australian choreographer. On its first tour, in 1980, it brought Rudolf Nureyev's production of Don Quixote.

In a city that worships at the altar of commerce, there is a healthy appetite for culture, with Shanghai hosting its sixth biennale at the Shanghai Art Museum. Visiting performing arts companies include international ballet and contemporary dance troupes, among them the Sydney Dance Company, which first came here 21 years ago and is soon to open a season of its work, Grand.

Murphy has been travelling to the city since 1982 when, as one of Australia's "national living treasures", he was part of a cultural exchange between the Australian and Chinese governments. "Shanghai was extraordinary. It really felt like another world," he says.

In those days, audiences would talk through performances. After one Sydney Dance Company show, in 1985, they refused to leave the theatre, walking forwards to stand by the stage for hours after the performance ended.

Two decades later, Murphy's work, Mulan, premiered at the 2005 Shanghai International Arts Festival. Since the 1970s, Shanghai has had its own ballet company, with dancers trained in the Russian technique of its pioneers, and the city has its own contemporary dance troupe.

The centre of the Shanghai performing arts scene is the futuristic Grand Theatre, which is run by the entrepreneurial Qian Shi Jin, who invited the Australian Ballet to the venue.

Murphy explained at a press conference how he had retained much of the original Petipa/Ivanov Swan Lake in his production, but had taken inspiration from the menage a trois of Charles, Diana and Camilla.

The Australian Ballet's touring party of 107 includes five character dancers, the conductor and concertmaster, pianists and a medical team.

Executive director Richard Evans says the budget for the tour was $600,000 to $700,000, with the fee paid by the Grand Theatre: "probably less than 10 per cent of the budget."

For the tour, the company received $50,000 from the Major Performing Arts Board, $30,000 from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and is using part of a $100,000 international touring grant from the Victorian Government. "It's a profile for Victoria," Evans says. "They have trade offices here and consuls, and it provides opportunities for high-level entertaining" as it does for tour sponsors Telstra, BHP and K Line.

Evans says he would like to bring Australian triple bills here next time, possibly Rites, choreographed by Bangarra Dance Theatre's Stephen Page. His work for Bangarra has been performed in Las Vegas. So why not the Vegas of the Orient?  (Source: The Age 
By Valerie Lawson)