The Maoist Chinese propaganda ballet, famously performed for Richard Nixon, will come to Melbourne in 2017.

The Chinese ballet The Red Detachment of Women will make its Australian debut at Arts Centre Melbourne next year as part of the inaugural Asia-Pacific Triennial of Performing Arts (Asia TOPA). Famously performed for US President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger on their historic visit to China in 1972, the ballet is one of the National Ballet of China’s most popular works and has been hailed as the first full Chinese classical ballet.

^{The Red Detachment of Women}

The narrative work tells the story of a downtrodden peasant girl on China’s tropical Hainan Island, who, following kidnap and abuse by a powerful landowner, becomes a guerrilla and revolutionary, joining an all-female company of the communist Red Army and learning discipline through hardship. The ballet was based on a film directed by Xie Ji (which was based on a 1958 historical novel by Liang Xin) and was selected to be one of the “Eight Model Theatre Works” of the Cultural Revolution, one of the few officially sanctioned forms of culture between 1966 and 1976. The...