WHEN IT OPENED in 1933, the Paramount ballroom was the belle of Shanghai’s decadent, war-scarred nightlife. Designed by Yang Xiliu, the illuminated Art Deco palace loomed over Bubbling Well Road, drawing starlets, businessmen, gangsters and officers for taxi dances and shows. Its sprung wooden dance floor—and a smaller, underlit crystal one upstairs—enticed clientele including Xu Zhimo (a poet), Zhang Xueliang (a warlord) and Charlie Chaplin. In 1940, while the city was occupied by the Japanese, Chen Manli, a dance star, was shot to death at the Paramount; some say she was an undercover Kuomintang agent and assassinated by the collaborationist regime.
Chen’s ghost is said to haunt the building, where the parties went quiet after the Communist victory of 1949. From 1956 it was taken over by the government and subdivided into shops and a cinema showing propaganda films, before closing altogether during the Cultural Revolution. In the 1980s the cinema reopened and the worn dance floors were occasionally retrod; in the 2000s new managers gutted the interior to install a garish, short-lived discotheque. Now, after a restoration costing 130m yuan ($20m), the Paramount is poised for a revival, overseen by a modern-day dance diva who would make Chen proud.
In 2015 the Paramount’s lease was taken over by Zheng Honghe, a businessman from Hong Kong. He remodelled the building, maintaining the spirit if not the details of the original decor—the dance floors are back, even if the Deco is more drippingly opulent than streamlined moderne. But Mr Zheng’s relaunch was a damp squib. So last year he enlisted Jin Xing (pictured), a trailblazing celebrity, to help.
Now 53, Ms Jin began her career as a male military dancer; after a spell in New York she came home for gender-reassignment surgery, launching a pioneering contemporary-dance troupe in 1999. She has since become a superstar as a television host often compared to Oprah Winfrey.
The pandemic has disrupted but not slimmed Ms Jin’s schedule, which normally involves shuttling between China and Italy, where her husband and children live. She is filming several TV shows, including a matchmaking series that begins airing next month. She is also directing and starring in a revival of “Sunrise”, Cao Yu’s play about lost souls in Shanghai in the 1930s. Now as then, Ms Jin says, some Chinese are “getting super rich” while others are “super poor”. But they “don’t give up, they are still waiting for the sun to continue rising, it is still a beautiful day.”
Notwithstanding these commitments, her long-standing affection for the ballroom persuaded her to take on oversight of its programme. When she first moved to Shanghai in 2000, she remembers, the exterior of the Paramount—known as “Bailemen” in Chinese, or “the door to a hundred joys”—was a powerful symbol of the city’s past. Back in the 1930s, “all the young girls were dreaming that their boyfriends would bring them to the Paramount to dance”, though in those days it was for “the rich people, the famous people”. The interior, however, disabused her of the romance: it had become a strobe-lit den frequented by teenagers playing dice. She recalls a visit in 2013 as “very depressing”, the neglected building resembling a warehouse.
Yet, at dusk, the choreography on parks and pavements across the country confirms the enduring appeal of ballroom dancing, especially among older Chinese, notes Andrew Field of Duke Kunshan University near Shanghai. For the past two decades the city’s swing and salsa scenes have attracted lots of locals and expats. So pent-up enthusiasm awaits the glamorous re-opening of the Paramount which, covid-permitting, Ms Jin plans for May.
Reached via a glitzy lobby and a spiral staircase, the first-floor grand hall will be a nightclub and music venue, “a place for young people chatting, dancing”. The second floor will offer dinner theatre and ballroom dancing. The Paramount has been asleep for decades, Ms Jin laments, but now she sees it becoming the Moulin Rouge of Shanghai—an emblem, especially in dour times, of the city’s “history, imagination and fantasy”. ■