The Last Dancer is an Australian film directed by Bruce Bearsford. The film is based on true events, and the original story version is Li Cunxin's defection in 1979. The protagonist of the film is a boy from the rural areas of northern China, and the real boy Li Cunxin's experience is like this...
Li Cunxin was born in 1961, and by the time he was in elementary school, the Cultural Revolution had already begun.
In 1970, in the late stage of the Cultural Revolution, the May Seventh Art School, which was formed by the former Beijing Art University, established a special working group to ensure the quality of students, and went down to the grass-roots level in advance to conduct auditions. That year, Li Cunxin had just turned eleven.
In 1971, it was a cold winter season. Several people in military uniforms entered the cold classroom, and all 44 children stood up and sang "East Red, The Sun Rises." Several people carefully examined each child's face, and soon they chose a beautiful girl.
As they were about to leave, the teacher on the side suddenly pulled up a little boy and said, "Wait a minute, comrade, how do you see this child?" ”
This is Li Cunxin's deepest memory as a child. Before that, he was originally the child of an ordinary peasant family in Qingdao, Shandong Province, with seven brothers in the family, and he was the sixth oldest. The family was very poor and ate dried sweet potatoes as a staple food every day.
When examining the body, they asked Li Cunxin to take off his clothes, measure every inch of his body, and finally do a "leg pull". The poor boy instinctively felt that his life might change, and did not cry out in pain. Through layers of selection, Li Cunxin became one of the "15 lucky ones in Shandong Province". Since then, fate has changed completely.
In Beijing, the soviet-style arduous basic training of ballet made Li Cunxin extremely uncomfortable, practicing basic skills every day, tying sandbags and pressing his legs, spinning his toes until his legs were numb and soaked with sweat, and learning music, culture, and endless political lessons. Encouraged by a teacher, he vowed to be the best dancer in the world. In order to improve his ability to bounce, Li Cunxin tied a sandbag on his leg, got up at 5 o'clock every morning, and began to jump the stairs. At night, while everyone was asleep, he lit a candle in the pitch-black classroom and swirled in the darkness...
Seven years later, Li Cunxin became one of the best students in the school. The Cultural Revolution also ended in a 7-year rotation. In 1979, when Li Cunxin was 18 years old, the May Seventh Art School stopped enrolling and disbanded, and the teaching of art schools was restored. At this time, the hand of fate took him to the United States on the other side of the ocean.
That year, an American cultural delegation visited China, and Ben Stevenson, artistic director of the Houston Ballet, was one of the members of the delegation. He admired Li Cunxin very much and invited Li Cunxin to the group to attend a 6-week summer training class. I can't imagine how much of a shock this trip to Houston had caused to Li Cunxin at that time. In the United States, Li Cunxin knew the difference between ballet and the individuality and free expression of art.
In November 1979, after more than a month of delay than originally planned, Li Cunxin left China for the second time, this time to represent the Beijing Dance Academy in the United States for a full year, and then returned to China to revitalize ballet education that had been stranded for many years.
However, everything changed drastically with the advent of a love affair, during which he fell in love with an American girl and registered his marriage with the girl 3 days before leaving the United States. For the first love of his life, in April 1981, Li Cunxin "defected" three days before returning to China.
At the time, it was undoubtedly a big event. Mr. Li was treated as a "defector" and remained in the Chinese consulate for 21 hours. Outside the Chinese consulate, crowded with a large number of reporters, the matter was reported to george Bush, the then vice president of the United States, who finally came forward to intercede with the Chinese high-level, and Li Cunxin was released.
Since then, Li Cunxin's ballet career has been smooth. During his more than a decade at the Houston Ballet, he became the irreplaceable prince of the troupe, winning one bronze medal and two silver medals at the World Ballet Competition, becoming one of the "World's Top Ten Ballet Dancers" by The New York Times.
In 1995, Li Cunxin quit the ballet. Before retiring from the military, he spent two and a half years in night school to earn a diploma in finance and is now one of Australia's largest equity firms.
Li Cunxin's first marriage, because of the cultural differences between the two, ended in failure. A few years later, the flower of love bloomed again, and he fell in love with his partner, Mary Li, who danced the princess, and had three children.
In 2003, as one of the last generation of dancers in the Mao era, he published his autobiography MAO's last dancer, which was a perennial bestseller, almost everyone in Australia, and its influence even reached more than 30 countries, including South Africa and Brazil. Later, the book was adapted from Australia into a film of the same name, which was a hit in the West.