Li Shiping and his wife Zhang Minying simply changed their clothes and showed off their love
Li Shiping and his son Li Haipeng are both stage partners and band friends
Li Shiping tutored his grandson Li Jinkun to dance the gun and get the stick
In the "one village, one drama a year" cultural activity in Shan County to benefit the people, there is a four-flat performance team, which is very popular with the rural masses. As a representative inheritor of the sipping opera art of the shanxian provincial intangible cultural heritage project, Li Shiping is not only the pillar of the troupe, but also the "number one" of the troupe, while enlivening the cultural life of the rural masses, he is also diligently sowing the seeds of excellent traditional culture.
It is reported that sipping was once popular in the border areas of the four provinces of Lusu, Yuwan and Anhui, and evolved for the folk flower drum, which has a history of one hundred years. Because it uses the flower drum singing voice as the main tone, and absorbs some tunes of drama genres such as commentary, Peking Opera, and Zizi, it is called "four spellings", and later renamed "four flat tones". Some people also believe that the tune of the four flat tones is "four flats and eight stables, four sentences and one flat", so it is called "four flat tones", which is called "a microcosm of the development of Chinese opera" and is a strange flower in Chinese folk art. At present, Li Shiping, Tao Aimei, Wang Yuying, Wang Guixiang, Hou Aili and a number of other sipping art inheritors are still active on the stage of mass culture.
Li Shiping, 56 years old this year, is a native of Duanzhuang Village, Huanggang Town, Shan County, who lost his mother at an early age, and at the age of 14, he entered the regiment to follow his master Wang Xianli to learn to sing sipping tunes, mainly attacking Hongsheng and later attacking Xiaosheng. Two years later, the troupe, which gradually fell into a low point, had no choice but to disband. In the tenth month of the lunar calendar in 1982, when the shanxian urban area and rural market towns resumed the traditional October material exchange conference, Li Shiping saw the hope of a comeback, and he formed a four-flat performance team of more than 40 cast members, touring various conferences, selling tickets for performances, and taking responsibility for his own profits and losses. Unexpectedly, it snowed heavily, the performance was terminated, and I owed more than 300 yuan for food for a few days. They then moved to Huanggang Town to catch the conference, and paid off the loan after 5 days of performance, leaving the whole troupe with only 8 cents left.
Subsequently, Li Shiping sold the family's rations and went to Shangqiu to buy costumes and props, which was really his own belongings. He then ran to Zhongshan and Yucheng, invited familiar excellent actors, reorganized the team, and then set up a stage, named "Single County Elite Hui Si Ping Tune Troupe", and he was both the leader of the group and the protagonist, running the dragon set. His appearance sings rigid and soft, the words are clear, sometimes like clouds flowing water, sometimes like pearls falling on a jade plate, good at stealing words flashing boards, adding words to grab the board, sounding like crying, moving and heartfelt. And its clown interpretation can be clever as a spring, as fast as a shooting star, as slow as a stream, at the right time to shake off the baggage, make people laugh.
In the past 40 years since the group was organized, Li Shiping and his "elite hui team" have performed more than 300 times a year, retaining more than 50 representative plays such as "Velvet", "Bee", "Golden Bracelet and Jade Ring" and so on.
Since 2019, due to the influence of physical illness, Li Shiping's opportunities to take the stage are few, but performing with the troupe is still his "main business". Between performances, he also mobilized 6 children in the village to learn four-flat performance, and practiced with his wife Zhang Minying, his son Li Haipeng, his grandson Li Jinkun and other families, hoping that this artistic treasure would be passed on from generation to generation and carried forward. "Letting the four flat tones continue to sing is the biggest long-cherished wish of my life!" Li Shiping said. ( Text/Figure Liu Houmin)