You may have seen the opera, now see the ballet. Opera lovers who are acquainted with John Adams’s Nixon in China (and may well have seen Victorian Opera’s excellent production some years ago) will recall that in the course of their ground-breaking visit to China in 1972 the Nixons and the visiting American delegation were given a performance of a revolutionary ballet. That ballet was The Red Detachment of Women.

First produced in 1964 in the lead-up to the Cultural Revolution, the ballet tells the tale (set on Hainan Island in the 1930s) of Quinghua, a slave girl who escapes from the clutches of Nan Batian, a wealthy landowner, who is cast in the role of an evil despot. Quinghua joins the Red Army, through which she is able to exact her revenge on her former oppressor and the system he represents.

^{The Red Detachment of Women. All photos by Mark Gambino}

Requiring a full corps de ballet, a large orchestra and even a vocal group, The Red Detachment has all the trappings of traditional Western ballet and is the headline show in Arts Centre Melbourne’s Asia TOPA festival running until April....