Written in 1945 by He Jingzhi, Ding Yi and others, the opera script of "The White-Haired Girl" was created based on the story of the "White-Haired Fairy Girl" circulating in the Jin-Cha-Ji Border Region in the 1940s, and was first performed in Yan'an in April of the same year as a gift to the Seventh National Congress of the Communist Party of China. The performance was very successful, and "The White-Haired Girl" quickly spread to all parts of the country and became a classic that swept the north and south of the river. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, in addition to being adapted into Peking opera, movies, comic strips, four-screen screens, slides, shadow puppets, ballets and other forms, "The White-Haired Girl" also went abroad and was widely disseminated and accepted overseas: the script won the second prize of the Stalin Literature Award in 1951, and the film "The White-Haired Girl" filmed by the Northeast Film Studio in 1950 won the first special honorary award at the 6th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival held in Czechoslovakia in July 1951. As a red classic that fully embodies the spirit of national independence and national liberation of the new Chinese people, it has not only been translated into Japanese, English, Russian, Indonesian, Spanish, Romanian, Sinhala, Czech and other languages and distributed in many countries, but also in the form of song and dance, drama, ballet, film and other performance forms, first in the Soviet Union and Eastern European socialist countries, France, Japan, etc., and then with these countries as the radiation center, In the 1960s and 1970s, it gradually spread to Western society dominated by English-speaking countries, and it still has an important impact today. This has also made it the most influential Chinese red classic in the world so far, and has continuously spread the image of new China to all parts of the world in the course of more than 70 years of history.
The English version of the script of "The White-Haired Girl"
American journalist Jack Belden said: "Of all the plays I have seen in the Liberated Areas, this is the best, probably the most prestigious."
When the Chinese Theater Troupe performed the song and dance "The White-Haired Girl" during a visit to France in 1955, the French writer Vecourt, who had watched the play at the time, marveled at its superb artistic level, noting in an article published in the October 1955 issue of Beidou: "This opera expresses the suffering of the peasants in a way that calls for the awakening of the Chinese people. This approach includes that the Chinese people originally loved the old drama, but this work is not only the love story contained in the old drama, but also has a realistic content, both tenderness and passion, and a rich content structure, a distinct character image, etc. ”
This is not the first time that "The White-Haired Girl" has been highly praised by overseas people, the American journalist Jack Belden once mentioned in the 1970 English book "China Shakes the World" that he had watched the open-air performance of the opera "White-Haired Girl" in Pengcheng, North China, on Women's Day in 1947, although there were still some gag factors in the play at that time, but in terms of literary achievement and overall performance effect, it was almost the same as the revised script published in 1954: "In fact, this script is very mature. No additional modifications are required. It was created collectively by many writers and extensively absorbed the opinions of the peasant masses, with many revisions. Of all the plays I've seen in the Liberated Areas, this is the best, and probably the most prestigious. ”
Coincidentally, in their 1951 English book "Red Chinese Silhouettes," Mr. and Mrs. Redman, who were also American journalists, also talked about the immersive and empathetic scene when they watched the opera "The White-Haired Girl" at a theater in Shanghai after the founding of New China: "When the elderly sharecroppers talked about grief, the audience also cried together. The landlord said that the soup xi'er made for herself was not suitable for her own taste, and the audience also cried out in pain when she stabbed Xi'er's tongue into it. The lustfulness of the landlord, the audience also cursed. ”
And this emotional resonance with the characters in the play crying and laughing also appears in many overseas audiences watching "The White-Haired Girl". For example, in July 1951, the Chinese government sent the Chinese Youth Cultural and Labor Troupe to tour all over the world (mainly in the socialist countries of Eastern Europe and Vienna and other places), which lasted for more than a year. Among them, the song and dance drama "White Haired Girl" also touched the audience of various countries, and the troupe was warmly welcomed everywhere it went. It is precisely because "The White Haired Girl" has an immersive artistic charm that the troupe actors who play Xi'er, Yang Bailao, Dachun and other troupes are respected and loved by local audiences in various countries, and they will receive flowers and applause from the audience after each performance. However, the actors who played the negative characters such as Huang Shiren and Huang Mu never received flowers. Even once when someone was about to give them flowers in the theater, an old lady in the audience stood up and objected, shouting indignantly: "Don't give flowers to the bad guys!" This also shows from the side that the story of "White Haired Girl" is deeply rooted in people's hearts and has a touching and profound aesthetic power. This touching power has always existed since the script of "The White Haired Girl" was created and continuously adapted in 1945, and has become a basic artistic feature of it, and it is also the vitality and soul of its art that has been spread at home and abroad through more than 70 years of historical changes.
Countries such as the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and Japan have also translated and rehearsed the script of "The White-Haired Girl" Chinese and adapted and rehearsed according to their own customs, which has led to some interesting anecdotes. For example, in the 1951 Czech version of the drama "White Haired Girl", there was a "Czech-style" scene in which Yang Bailao took off his coat and hung it on a hanger after going to the home of the landlord Huang Shiren, and Xi'er and Dachun, the unmarried couple, met and kissed each other, because the Czech people's living habits and details were very different from those of old China. However, the wonderful story of a woman who has been oppressed and insulted by the landlord and finally rescued, the emotional shock and aesthetic power generated by it still exist in the play, and does not affect the sympathy of domestic audiences for the vulnerable and the identification with the spirit of resisting oppression and exploitation.
It is worth noting that some Japanese artists in China in the mid-to-late 1940s and early 1950s also participated in the production of "White-Haired Girl" song and dance dramas and films, which can be said to be a masterpiece that brings together forces at home and abroad. In addition to the Japanese soldier Taitaro Takemura (Chinese name "Wu Jun") who played music for the Cultural and Labor Troupe of the Fourth Division of the Second Column of the Northeast Democratic Coalition Army in 1947 when performing "White Haired Girl", Onozawa (Chinese name "Xiao Ye") and Mori Shigeru in 1945 for Zhangjiakou to perform the song and dance drama "White Haired Girl" in the Anti-Enemy Drama Company, as well as the editor Kishi Fumiko (Chinese name "Anfu Mei") and the sound recordist Miya Yamamoto (Chinese name "Shayuan") participated in the film production of the movie "White Haired Girl". The Japanese workers who remained in Tohoku after World War II also formed the Hegang Opera Troupe, and in 1952 performed the opera "White Haired Girl" in Japanese and was recognized by the competent authorities. After these Japanese workers returned to Japan, they became an important force in the dissemination of "The White-Haired Girl".
The first version of the opera play "The White-Haired Girl" to be released by overseas translators was the Japanese version translated by Masao Inada and published by the Tokyo Mirai in 1952. The film "White Haired Girl" was brought to Japan in the same year and screened in many places, and this film, which is considered "really Chinese", has also greatly touched many Japanese audiences like the opera "White Haired Girl". In October 1952, Lu Xun's Japanese friend Uchiyama Watso wrote an article entitled "Remembering Lu Xun from the 'White-Haired Girl'", directly equating the "White-Haired Girl Spirit" with the "Lu Xun Spirit": "I marvel at the tenacity of the vitality of the person who survived all the pain and disaster of Xi'er (the White-Haired Girl) overcame all pain and disaster. The more I thought about the white-haired woman's bitter struggle for survival, and the increasingly strong anger at the viciousness and cruelty of Huang Shiren and others, the more I couldn't help but burn into flames. ...... I think that the spirit of Lu Xun is extremely clearly expressed in the work. No, it is not clear to say so, as far as I can see, it can even be said that 'the white-haired woman is Mr. Lu Xun'. ”
In 1954, the troupe first rehearsed the song and dance drama "White Haired Girl" and put it on the Japanese stage, especially the Matsuyama Ballet's public performance of the adapted ballet "White Haired Girl" in Japan, which made an indelible and important contribution to the wide dissemination and acceptance of the Chinese red classic "White Haired Girl" in Japan and even around the world over the years.
At the National Day Reception held at the Beijing Hotel in 1955, Zhou Enlai took a group photo with three actors who played the role of "White Haired Girl", from left to right: Wang Kun, Songshan Shuzi, and Tian Hua.
"Three Happy Children Pass on a Good Story, Foreign Sisters on the Same Stage"
In 1955, matsuyama Ballet brought the ballet "The White-Haired Girl", which was based on the film "The White-Haired Girl" and the opera script "The White-Haired Girl", onto the stage. The film "The White-Haired Girl" first triggered the adaptation of Japanese artists such as Masao Shimizu and Shuko Matsuyama, who recognized the rebellious spirit of the oppressed and exploited Chinese peasants and sympathized with their tragic fate, as the former recalled many years later that he had the psychological shock of watching the film in a small auditorium in Tokyo's Koto District in 1952: "What touched our heartstrings and made us unforgettable was the theme of how the oppressed peasants sought the liberation of their country... We feel a strong resonance for the liberation of the oppressed people, and we also have deep sympathy for the protagonist of this play, Xi'er. ”
This film also coincides with the many measures taken by the broad masses of the people in Japan at that time to resist the united States in the context of the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea, and confiscated their land as a strategic base in the Far East in accordance with the "Japan-US Security Treaty", thus setting off a social resistance in Japanese society to pursue the climax of the true independence and peace movement; and the situation of Xi'er's liberation was obviously in stark contrast to the current situation of Japanese women's extremely low social status and gender discrimination at that time. Adapting it into a Japanese work that celebrates women's liberation became their main artistic goal. And the ups and downs of the ups and downs of a dark-haired young girl in "White Haired Girl" and the twists and turns of the wonderful storyline in "White Haired Girl" make it very suitable for being adapted into a ballet, so when the ballet "Dream Hall" is rehearsed, Matsuyama Shuzi, who is struggling to find a new repertoire, after watching the movie "White Haired Girl", his eyes immediately lit up, and he had the joy of finding the target: "We are searching everywhere for ballet materials with Japanese human taste, so when "White Haired Girl" appears in front of us, We all all feel the same way: 'Ah, isn't that what we're looking for?' ’”
After writing letters to the Chinese Dramatists Association and receiving materials such as the script of "The White-Haired Girl" mailed by the other party, they began to translate, adapt and other work. After more than a year of preparation and overcoming the obstacles of subjective and objective conditions at the time, the three-act ballet "The White Haired Girl" premiered in February 1955 at the Hibiya Hall in Tokyo. When Matsuyama's "white-haired girl" dressed in silver gray and with her cuff hems cut into jagged costumes appeared on the stage, accompanied by ballet music adapted by the famous Japanese composer Hayashi Hikari, to express her inner sadness and hatred, the audience crowding the auditorium followed her every move, deeply immersed in it, and could not help but shed tears of emotion as the story unfolded. Especially after the performance, the tears in the eyes of the audience, the thunderous applause and the cheers of "one more one" after another show that their performances have been a great success. Since then, not only have some Japanese newspapers published photos and reported on the performances, but Ouyang Yuqian, then president of the Central Academy of Drama in China, had sent a telegram to congratulate her, pointing out that the adapted ballet "The White-Haired Girl" could promote exchanges between China and Japan. Indeed, history has proved that the ballet "The White-Haired Girl" has become an important bridge for friendly exchanges and exchanges between China and Japan for many years.
Matsuyama Ballet's "The White-Haired Girl" went to China for its first visit to China in March 1958 after nearly 40 performances in Japan, which was also a response to Premier Zhou Enlai's previous expectations. As early as June 1955, Shuko Matsuyama attended the World Peace Congress held in Helsinki, Finland, and talked with Guo Moruo, vice chairman of the Council of the Congress, and received an invitation to visit China. After visiting Beijing, during her visit to the Bolshoi Theater in the Soviet Union to observe and study ballet, she received an invitation from Premier Zhou Enlai from Beijing through the Chinese Embassy in Moscow, the Soviet Union, to welcome her to Beijing to participate in the National Day ceremony.
On September 30, 1955, Shuko Matsuyama attended the National Day Reception held at the Beijing Hotel. It was at this reception that Premier Zhou Enlai promoted a good story in which three "white-haired women" from China and Japan gathered together and spoke happily. At that time, after the banquet entered its climax, Premier Zhou first told foreign reporters at the scene: "Now announce an important thing." Then he took two Chinese actresses to a stop in front of Matsuyama Shuzi, held out his hand to her and introduced her to all the guests attending the banquet: "Friends, here are three 'white-haired women', this is Comrade Wang Kun, who was the first to play the opera "White-Haired Girl" in Yan'an; this is Comrade Tian Hua, who acted in the movie "White-Haired Girl", this is the Japanese friend Mr. Matsuyama Shuzi, and the Matsuyama Ballet has adapted "White-Haired Girl" into a ballet staged in Japan. The three "white-haired women" embraced each other with great excitement and joy after hearing this, which became one of the most beautiful moments of their lives and led them to form a deep international friendship. And what is even more touching is that Premier Zhou insisted on standing next to them when taking photos with them, and quipped: "You three 'white-haired women' cannot be separated!" ”
After a lapse of 22 years, Wang Kun visited the Matsuyama Ballet in May 1977 during a visit to Japan with the Tianjin Song and Dance Troupe, and met Matsuyama Shuzi and others, two "white-haired women" who were more than half a hundred years old, and got together again. They recalled the scene when Premier Zhou introduced the Songshan tree, and Wang Kun, in addition to sighing, wrote a classical Chinese poem to present to the Songshan shuzi: "On the Fifth Five-Year Plan, Beijing first met the jun, the premier held hands and ding; three Xi'er spread good stories, and the sisters of foreign countries were on the same stage." Seven seven Tokyo cuckoo red, a few strands of sideburns reunited; the dance snowflakes I sang, still heard the prime minister's beating. Two years later, during the third China Film Festival held in Japan in 1979, Tian Hua went to Japan to participate in the event, and the film version of the "white-haired girl" actor was also warmly welcomed by the Japanese audience. The visit of the two Chinese "white-haired women" to Japan has also become a witness to the friendly exchanges between the Chinese and Japanese peoples.
Matsuyama Shuzi (left) with Wang Kun
"Ballet Diplomacy": A milestone in the history of Sino-Japanese diplomacy
The time goes back to the day of Women's Day in 1958, when the Matsuyama Ballet arrived in China with the ballet "The White-Haired Girl" and began its visit to China. From the 9th to the 11th, the troupe rehearsed at the Tianqiao Theater in Beijing and officially performed on the 13th. At that time, Beijing audiences lined up overnight to buy tickets to watch, and praised the ballet "White Haired Girl" after watching it. At that time, Beijing was also staging the opera "White Haired Girl" starring Wang Kun, the Peking Opera "White Haired Girl" of the China Peking Opera Troupe, etc., and the four simultaneous versions formed a grand scene of "White Haired Girl". Unfortunately, however, Premier Zhou was unable to attend the songshan ballet "The White-Haired Girl", which was first performed by the Songshan Ballet in China because he left Beijing for a meeting in other places, but Chen Yi, Guo Moruo, Ding Xilin and other artists from all walks of life in the capital gave high praise to the play after watching the play, and people's daily also reported on the day after the premiere. At a grand gala held at the Beijing Literary Association Auditorium on March 21, five actresses, including Shuko Matsuyama, who played the "white-haired girl" in Beijing at the time, were able to get together to talk and take a group photo. Guo Moruo, Tian Han and others also improvised poems to record this pomp.
On March 24 of the same year, all the members of the Songshan Ballet took a train from Beijing to Chongqing and began to perform in Chongqing. After the successful completion of the performance in Chongqing, they visited Wuhan and made their last stop in Shanghai, leaving China and returning to Japan on May 1. Matsuyama Ballet has performed a total of 28 performances in less than two months, which is welcomed not only by audiences from all over China, but also by Japanese people who remain in China, and Matsuyama Ballet's visit to China can be said to be a consolation for the latter's homesickness.
Matsuyama Ballet's second major visit to China was in 1964. From September 22 to December 12, Songshan Ballet performed 38 times in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, the Great Hall of the People in Nanjing, and the Great Hall in Guangzhou. The special care of this visit to China is that during their tour in many cities in China, they were always accompanied by 13 performers from the Beijing Dance School, the Central Opera and Dance Theatre Ballet, and 54 members of the Central Orchestra, with the aim of learning from Songshan Ballet's valuable experience in adapting classical ballet into modern ballet. If the Japanese ballet "White Haired Girl" is a masterpiece made by Japanese artists such as Shuko Matsuyama and Masao Shimizu after absorbing the essence of Chinese opera and Peking Opera and infusing the Japanese spirit, then the Chinese ballet "White Haired Girl" is a fruitful result after absorbing the essence of Chinese and Japanese culture and art, indicating that Chinese and Japanese culture has always been progressing and developing together in mutual exchanges and mutual integration.
Matsuyama Ballet performed its third performance in China in 1966, and the members of the group also participated in several symposiums after watching the shanghai dance school's ballet "White Haired Girl" to exchange their performance experiences. From September 20 to December 2, 1971, they performed their fourth visit to China, and the Chinese and Japanese ballet "The White-Haired Girl" was again directly exchanged and artistically exchanged, and both of them were improved to varying degrees in artistic level.
In July 1972, the Shanghai Ballet, under the leadership of Sun Pinghua, secretary general of the China-Japan Friendship Association, visited Japan and performed "The White-Haired Girl", and in September of the same year, China and Japan normalized diplomatic relations, which is the famous "ballet diplomacy" incident in history. The "ballet diplomacy" incident has not only become a milestone in the history of Sino-Japanese diplomacy, but also enabled the Chinese and Japanese people to always remember the great role played by "The White-Haired Girl" in it. Since then, the ballet "The White-Haired Girl" has deservedly become a classic cultural program for Chinese delegations visiting overseas countries, and has been active on stages around the world from the 1980s to this day.
In 2017, the 15th visit of the Japanese Matsuyama Ballet to China performed a poster
"The White-Haired Girl is a first-class cabaret with almost all the traditional techniques"
The English version of the script of "The White-Haired Girl" was first translated by the famous Chinese translators Yang Xianyi and Dai Naidi according to the revised version of "The White-Haired Girl" republished in 1954, and was first published and distributed by the Foreign Language Publishing House in 1954. Cyril Baizhi argued in his 1963 essay "Chinese Communist Literature: Persistence in Traditional Forms" that in Chinese opera in the 1940s, "a highly praised and innovative form was the rice opera, that is, the integration of the Shaanxi peasants' 'rice planting song' with a variety of popular song forms into the drama, and the success of "The White Haired Girl" inspired a large number of imitators." ”
The first book to include the full text of the English version of "The White-Haired Girl" was "Modern Drama in Communist China" co-edited by Walter Merzef and his wife in 1970, which not only included "The White-Haired Girl" translated by Yang Xianyi and his wife, but also included a total of 9 Chinese drama works such as Lu Xun's drama novel "Passerby" and modern Peking Opera "Red Lantern". The "Introduction" to the book praises each of these plays for their own merits, especially the literary achievements of "The White Haired Girl" in inheriting and transforming the old Chinese drama: "As a drama, the White Haired Girl is a first-class song and dance drama, with almost all the traditional techniques... The play does inherit the traditional Chinese reunion ending, in the last scene the Arrival of the Red Army saves everyone who deserves to be saved. ”
After U.S. President Richard Nixon's visit to China in 1972, two articles devoted to the opera and ballet "The White-Haired Girl" appeared between 1973 and 1974. Among them, Norman Wilkinson, then an assistant professor at The University of Maine in the United States, in his 1974 article "The White-Haired Girl: From The Song to the Modern Revolutionary Ballet", combed the historical development of Chinese opera and the transformation process of Yan'an revolutionary literature and art, believing that "The White-Haired Girl" was the most successful opera, and praised "The White-Haired Girl is very easy to read, the plot is clear and the story advances quickly." Among them, the personality characteristics of Xi'er and her father Yang Bailao are carefully depicted, and even the image of the villain Huang Shiren is credible, which can be called a milestone in the history of communist theater. For the huge adaptation of the previous opera by the 1965 ballet "The White Haired Girl", the author believes that yang Bailao's suicide by Huang Shiren for protecting his family and daughter is more worthy of careful depiction than the former's suicide, and the addition of folk songs, choruses and modern costumes of the characters in the ballet will contribute to the success of this new "mixed-race" Chinese modern revolutionary ballet. It is also very successful in the practice of stage performance.
By 1975, the American Martin Aiben edited the best-selling book "The Five-Act Drama of Communist China", which still included two plays translated by Yang Xianyi and his wife, "The White-Haired Girl" and "The Red Lantern", and at that time, the American audience was already more familiar with the "White-Haired Girl" ballet, and its evaluation was also affirmative and praiseworthy, which can also be seen from the "Introduction" of the book. The Introduction begins by criticizing the Long-Standing Misunderstanding and Misunderstanding of China in Western Societies: "For more than a quarter of a century, China has been misunderstood. The editors therefore loudly appealed: "Westerners should avoid the atmosphere that supports the still fanatical stigmatization and presupposition of contemporary Chinese literature and art." We are not dealing with exotic and fascinating rituals in primitive tribes, but with a cultural heritage that is supposed to be an integral part of the overall cultural heritage of mankind. In the introduction and evaluation attached to the script of "The White-Haired Girl", the editor specifically mentioned many changes in the ballet "The White-Haired Girl", arguing that "no matter which form it takes,'The White-Haired Girl' has potentially entertaining and educational significance for people." "Acknowledging that different performance forms of "White Haired Girl" have a high degree of literary value and achievement, this also shows that "White Haired Girl" has been affirmed and praised in Western society, laying a solid foundation for its subsequent overseas dissemination."
In addition to "The White-Haired Girl", Chinese red classics represented by "Song of Youth", "Red Flag Spectrum", "History of Entrepreneurship" and so on have been continuously re-evaluated overseas, and have been given new connotations and new characteristics that fit different historical eras. This shows that they have always been widely disseminated and widely accepted overseas, and have become an important medium and window for continuously disseminating the image of New China. More importantly, this shows that only by telling the Chinese story well with affection can we cross the cultural differences between different ethnic groups, which is also the inspiration that these Chinese red classics can continue to spread overseas.
Guangming Daily (17 December 2021, 13th edition)
Source: Guangming Network - Guangming Daily