The Peking Opera "A Temple of Gold" interprets the main drama in a light comedy style. ◆ The picture shows the stills of "A Pot of Gold"
The "2021 China Small Theater Opera Exhibition" co-sponsored by the China Dramatists Association, Shanghai Opera Art Center, the Propaganda Department of the Huangpu District Committee of the Communist Party of China and Wen Wei Po Agency recently came to an end, and in nine days, 12 outstanding small theater opera works from nine genres across the country were staged in the Yangtze River Theater and Wanping Theater located in the core area of the "Big World of Performing Arts", of which Pu Opera and Han Opera joined the exhibition for the first time.
After years of careful care of the platform by the organizers, the small theater opera in Shanghai, the big wharf of xiqu, is gathering more and more attention, the tickets for many performances have been sold out in a short period of time, and the online tour live broadcast has received nearly 200,000 viewers.
Gu Haohao, secretary of the party committee and president of the Shanghai Xiqu Art Center, believes that the characteristics of small theater opera lie in the courage to forge ahead and constantly innovate and make breakthroughs. In the small theater, we see the review and innovation of contemporary opera on the classic tradition. In this year's repertoire, many works have chosen traditional Chinese stories that are commonly found on the theatrical stage, but through text reconstruction or performance style innovation, they strive to move closer to the aesthetics of modern audiences. In the small theater, we also see the exploration and attempt of contemporary opera for the future, and new ideas can be seen everywhere behind the stage: in terms of theme selection, many works introduce Chinese modern and contemporary literature into the script; in terms of artistic techniques, some plays boldly use means such as "crossing" and "flashback" to achieve flexible jumps between different plots; in terms of music improvement, modern elements in the soundtrack and orchestra make opera music more easily accepted by young audiences.
Cui Wei, secretary general of the China Dramatists Association, believes that the innovation and development of opera has ushered in a golden age, and the unique geographical advantages of this cultural platform can be felt in Shanghai. The small theater opera condenses the talents of young opera artists, and also reflects the frontier trend of the current opera, and the arrival of excellent works every year also brings vitality to the performance market in Shanghai. In the future, as one of the organizers, this newspaper specially invited industry experts to discuss and speak together on the "2021 China Small Theater Opera Exhibition", and to explore drums and shouts for the forge ahead of small theater opera. - Editor
Keep your original intentions and let go of your dreams
Geng Xuhua Is the Executive Vice President of the Chinese Drama Society and the former editor-in-chief of China Drama Magazine
The small globe, the new crown raging, provokes human health, disrupts the normal life of human beings. However, people's yearning and pursuit of a better life cannot be stopped. On December 8, the "2021 China Small Theater Opera Exhibition" opened as scheduled. In the Yangtze River Theater and Wanping Theater, the purlin drum gong and the flute huqin are full of strong Chinese style. The square mask covers the audience's mouth and nose, but a pair of bright eyes flash with affection for art. Since 2015, the Small Theater Opera Exhibition has been held for seven consecutive years, and nearly 70 plays have appeared at the Shanghai Grand Pier. In winter, going to Shanghai to see small theater opera has gradually become a common practice, and a number of excellent plays such as Kun opera "Chair" and Huangmei opera "Jade Heavenly Immortal" have been performed for a long time and have been deeply loved by the audience.
Throughout the exhibition, the 12 repertoire has distinct personalities and remarkable points. In particular, the Peking opera "A Temple of Gold", the Kun opera "Bai Luo Shirt", the Yu opera "Nanhua Jing", the Huangmei opera "Beauty", the Cantonese opera "Golden Lotus", the Pu opera "Odi King", etc., either bring people pleasure, or make people contemplate, or surprise, or leave a topic. Although "A Temple of Gold" is taken from the historical event of Fan Zhongyan's "Cellar Gold Donation Temple", after the erosion of the years and the adaptation of the present people, it has precipitated into a story with allegorical colors. In particular, the setting of the role of "A Mouse" makes the whole play a lot more flexible. The gags of the clowns and the improvisational performances of jumping in and out, on and off the stage, and now hanging and hanging, make the spirit of the game of the opera return and make watching the play a pleasure.
Henan Yu Opera, which has the reputation of the first major drama genre of local drama, sent the "South China Classic". Based on the story of "Zhuang Zhou's Wife Trial", the screenwriter made a large leaf cutting section, expecting to highlight a branch of brilliance. However, the branches and leaves are cut fiercely, and it is easy to lead to only the result, no process, and even logic. The most eye-catching thing about this work is the performance of the heroine, the singing is excellent, the steps, the water sleeves, the figure, and the hands are very delicate and elaborate, so that the Yu opera, which has always been warm and rough, is much more exquisite. The "Su Xin" created by Wu Suzhen, who was personally passed down by the famous "Chen Pai" Niu Shuxian, has a sense of involvement, and his joys and sorrows have hearts and emotions. The sound cavity, the door, and the background music of the whole play are all new, and some seemingly dissonant tuning treatments have a bit of an eye effect on externalizing the protagonist's deepest trepidation.
The "White Luo Shirt" launched by the Shanghai Kun Opera Troupe tells a story of great righteousness and extermination of relatives in ancient times, and the judgment is directly pointed to the hearts of the people in the world at present. The highlight is still the singing voice and music design, he integrates traditional percussion into the performance, so that the stage rhythm and rhythm of the whole play are both traditional and fashionable. Huangmei opera is a young drama genre, very popular with the audience, and has been an active participant in small theater opera in recent years. This time, the Huangmei Drama Theater in Hubei Province brought "Beauty", which triggered the audience's thinking. Dong Zhuo, Lü Bu, Marten Cicada, and Wang Yun each had their own thoughts, and a pair of righteous fathers and sons and a pair of righteous fathers and daughters began to fight humanly. The lack of satisfaction is that the use of the accompaniment belt is not coordinated enough with the singing voice, which somewhat affects the performance of the actor's vocal cavity singing. When the actors closed the curtain, the audience shouted: "I must come back to Shanghai next year." "It shows the audience's love." The Cantonese Cantonese opera "Golden Lotus" also allows the audience to re-recognize the adulteress Jin Lian, who has been scolded for hundreds of years, while enjoying Jiang Wenduan's wonderful performance. Director Hu Jiawei led the audience gently into Jin Lian's inner world. The Pu opera "Odi King" debuted in Shanghai for the first time this year, which allowed the audience to see the kung fu and charm of Puzhou Zizi.
There are a few points to share with the Fang family: First, the analysis of the women's perspective is almost the focus of the creation of the previous small theater operas, perhaps the repressed humanity of women for thousands of years to be released. Can you turn the perspective on a little more? Social, secular, and home-country feelings should become the focus of care for small theater opera. After all, the ultimate care of literary and artistic works is humanistic care; second, celebrities join and famous artists interpret to produce masterpieces; third, paying tribute to the classics is the avenue of small theater opera creation, surpassing classics in relying on classics and learning classics, which is also the essence of "breathing" in small theater opera performances. Traditional repertoire is interpreted in different types of dramas, and different famous characters can sing different life stories; fourth, artistry is the core competitiveness of small theater opera. Private dishes pay attention to real materials, pay attention to freshness, pay attention to color and fragrance. Small theater opera works must also have real strength, and the most taboo is to make it up. There are real "things" to have repeat customers, and there is word of mouth to have a brand effect.
Shanghai is the center of Chinese culture and the big pier of opera. The charm of culture lies in diversity. The "China Small Theater Opera Exhibition" that has been painstakingly operated for seven years has accumulated rich artistic achievements and popularity. In time, it will become a great instrument. Practitioners should balance their mentality, avoid rushing to make quick profits, accumulate one drama after another, and grow up with the audience. Finally, borrow the famous words of the famous playwright Jinyun Teacher: do opera, do research, be an actor, keep the brilliance, can not keep the game.
Ancient wood vicissitudes, new green people
Lee Shou-sung theatre critic
Although it is still in the midst of a global immersive and continuous fight against the epidemic, Shanghai has successfully held the annual "China Small Theater Opera Exhibition" as scheduled. The circle of friends participating in the drama is expanding, and the Pu opera and Han opera with a history of 400 years have also appeared on the stage of small theater opera for the first time this year, bringing surprises to the audience in Shanghai with its rich cultural heritage and bold and innovative modern consciousness. The vicissitudes of ancient wood and the new green are gratifying, and the outstanding impression of this exhibition and performance is precisely the innovative concept embodied in the exploration of small theater opera by several dramas with heavy historical accumulation.
The Peking opera "The Death of a Small Official" from Chekhov's short story "The Death of a Small Civil Servant" found his mixed officialdom, because of a sneeze and panic all day long, until the absurd taste of sudden death of panic, he applied a "sinicized" change of face to the work and made it into a small theater opera. The play gives full play to the means of expression of peking opera art, the whole play has only one actor, suddenly the unlucky Jiupinguan, and suddenly the narrator of the story, not only with the ugly work of the small officials, but also with the "Yanpai" old student singing the patrol's elegance, with the "Ye Pai" Xiaosheng singing the anger of the county grandfather. This kind of one-person multi-angle and jump-in-and-out ridicule skillfully integrates the freehand virtual and small theater opera pioneer experiments of Chinese opera aesthetics, and tells the world story without leaving its parcel.
The Pu opera "Oedipal King" seamlessly connects the high-pitched excitement of Shanxi Zizi with the heavy sadness of Greek tragedy, giving us a surprise. The minimalist cast is a layered representation of Odi's fate. The sinicization of Greek mythology, transformed without trace, highlights the local characteristics. Large passages such as "Knowing that a life curse is difficult to break, why should we work hard to escape" not only translate the song team narrative and character dialogue in the Greek text, but also rich in Chinese cultural rhyme. What surprised me even more was that when I recounted the past, two Oedipus also appeared on the stage of the ancient Pu opera, revealing the inner fission with the two selves of the characters. In this psychologically externalized virtual space, at the same time, the real queen appears, which concisely and profoundly reveals the inner struggles of the characters. Although I feel sorry that the play did not set up a whole series of characters, and I feel a little sorry that it did not strengthen Oedip's belief in the destiny of fate to reflect a kind of personality strength, but the bold creativity of Pu Opera is really exciting.
If the above two plays tell the story of the world in Chinese Chinese, then "Bai Luo Shirt" and "Goodbye Zhuo Wenjun" interpret the historical story in contemporary terms. I remember that last year's "Grass Bridge Dream" was based on the depressed Zhang Sheng sleepwalking and floating, with the love of the fiery "past tense" and the cold and miserable "present tense" intertext, the plot of "West Chamber". Today's condensed version of "Bai Luo Shirt" focuses on the psychological torment of the newly promoted official Xu Jizu in the face of how to deal with his father who is both a murderer of his father and an adoptive father who has raised him for 18 years. The young creative team of the Shanghai KunQu Troupe deleted the original work and simplified it, using flashbacks and interludes to outline Xu Jizu's reading paper, encountering an old woman who drew water from the well, and learning the truth about his own life from the mouth of the milk gong, and then grasped the core of the play and re-created the "trial father" fold. This scene is a trial of the "adoptive father" and an examination of his own soul, not only the trial of the father killer, but also the trial of the "one scale" in his heart! At the end of the curtain, the painting style changed, under the sensationalism of the composer and conductor, the people in the play walked out of history, one by one from the audience to the stage, they changed the life and death feud in the plot, twisted their bodies, sang popular music, and even Xu Jizu, who was "a law enforcement pen, with blood in his heart", also sang a play song with a raw voice at this time. The audience in the audience boiled, which gave them an emotional relief and found empathy with the people in the play in the contemporary vocabulary.
The Chinese drama "Goodbye Zhuo Wenjun" is a witty and relaxed absurd comedy. The parallel unfolding of the love stories of the two eras and the interconnection of the characters' "crossing" are the main structures of the play. Two "third parties" of different eras have been busy through the ages in exchange for money for love... The plot is absurd, but it reflects the common concept of love between ancient and modern times. Although the feelings of the two groups of couples have bumped and bumped, "no matter how ancient and modern, the true feelings can not be separated lightly." This kind of "crossing" is a very familiar vocabulary for young people in the era of e-sports and online games, and the two "local tycoons" in ancient and modern times are actually the symbols of "capital". Although the performance is more straightforward, it is also quite interesting. It is gratifying that a drama with a long history can still show such a youthful state.
The exploration of small theater opera has gone through seven years, which is seven years of successful climbing and seven years of arduous trekking. Overall, I am still a little dissatisfied with the works in this exhibition, and there are still many topics worth discussing and practicing. To adhere to the original intention of "the pioneering nature of the concept and the experimental nature of art", and to measure it by the standard of "learning from the ancients and not violating the law", we look forward to more new breakthroughs in the exploration of small theater opera.
Why not make the small theater more "deviant"?
Mao Shi'an is a literary critic
The earliest inspiration for small theater opera came from the drama small theater art that was in full swing in the 1980s. The small theater art of opera is, first of all, the definition of space. As the name suggests, its performance theater is not realized in the large space theater of traditional conventional drama, but in the small space small theater. But small theater art is not only the concept of space, but more importantly, the concept of artistic ideology and artistic aesthetics. That is, because it is small, it has the flexibility and maneuverability that facilitates artistic experimentation and exploration. Therefore, in my mind, the small theater opera is not the more mature the more it scores. On the contrary, it can be immature, even if it is green! But there must be a sharp edge of exploration, some new "things" with artistic experimental colors that we have not seen or heard in the theater.
As far as opera is concerned, on the one hand, because the traditions it has left behind for hundreds of years are too rich and huge, the space for "breaking" and "standing" that are worth exploring and experimenting in art is particularly large. Small theater opera is not a simple reproduction of the small theater drama art. Small theater opera involves a variety of performance elements in the opera itself - hand-eye body steps, four skills and five methods, singing voice, vocal methods, music, makeup, accompaniment, etc., it is far more than the concept of space size. In a sense, small theater opera may be "deviant" and shocking. Because of this, the difficulty of small theater opera is far greater than that of small theater drama. The heavier the baggage, the harder it is to break through. It is difficult for small theater opera to have a presentation mode and style that everyone can emulate, and if I personally position it, it is a genre of opera that is constantly moving forward on the road of exploration.
It should be admitted that artists are doing everything in their power to explore the possibilities of the future of opera in small theater opera. The first is the modern consciousness of the text, such as the feminist re-understanding of the relationship between men and women, and the subversive interpretation of the connotation of traditional texts by the strengthening of human consciousness. The second is the breakthrough of artistic presentation, for example, the Shanghai Kunqu Opera Troupe uses some modern musical techniques to highlight the timbre and rhythm of the instrument in "Bai Luo Shirt", so that it can get rid of the shackles of the singing cavity and become an artistic expression with relatively independent significance and parallel to the opera.
However, there are also some small theater dramas that confuse me. First, some works are simply compressed old plays, they only compress the length and scale of performances, and the rest of the performances, singing voices, music, and makeup are basically copied from old plays; second, some newly created small theater repertoire is actually just a miniature version of the big theater opera - is this also a small theater opera? Where is it experimental? Not experimental, or a small theater opera? Small theater opera must emphasize the experimental nature of the opera itself. Opera is an ancient art, and we respect its tradition, but since we have entered the field of small theater art, we look forward to its renewed pioneering and innovative achievements in tradition, and be more open-minded.
The essence behind the experiment and exploration of small theater opera is the urbanization, modernization and rejuvenation of opera, and there should be a breakthrough direction that gradually becomes clear. The exhibition can call on young opera artists to jointly find the key points and difficulties of the breakthrough of the "breaking circle" of opera: for example, whether there are new possibilities for singing music, which can make the audience of this era have a new aural enjoyment. Another example is the performance program, the original performance program must be both accepted and broken. There are broken and standing, how to combine breaking and standing, you can do special topic discussion and creation.
Small theater opera was born out of traditional opera, but it can get out of the shadow of tradition and feed the mother with new exploration of nutrition. Contemporary opera people should think about what touches and contributions it can bring to conventional opera performances after the expansion of the ontology. What new nutrients can be conveyed to conventional opera performances, and what kind of thinking content can be conveyed? Small theater opera should win the future for the development of opera. On the road, how far to go? This is an artistic question worth pondering.
Let the Kunqu music "Hi" up
Gao Jun's "White Luo Shirt" singing voice and music design
"White Shirt" is often performed in the traditional folding drama only "Looking Shape", this time the small theater version uses this as the main line for a new interpretation, and the director requires that there must be more immersion in music and singing. The small theater is a stage for experimentation, and it is always necessary to have the courage to try new things in order to continue to improve. In terms of music creation, I used immersive techniques to produce the music of the whole play, returning to the origin of the music and showing the beauty and rationality of the melody. My own interpretation of music is three points – "pleasant", "substitution", and "brainwashing".
"Pleasant" is good to listen; "sense of substitution" is reasonable, what music appears in any scene, the audience can be immediately brought into the scene as soon as they listen; the word "brainwashing" is positive, all the songs that are sung, the music up to the world's famous songs, down to the vibrato Kagura, all have this characteristic. In my opinion, every song in Kunqu is a "divine comedy", and I use this as a starting point to create.
After communicating with the art director Yue Meiti and the director, I decided to follow the way the Kunqu Opera North and South Sets were written. Since the screenwriter has changed and written new lyrics to the original, under the careful guidance of teacher Yue Meiti, I have made a new design for almost all the singing voices. After several trade-offs, except for the "Taishi Ying" section in the "Kanzhi" that did not move according to the cavity of the original old play, almost all the song and card singing sections were rewritten, of which there were more than six paragraphs such as "Guizhixiang", "Nagging Order" and "Chao Tianzi", which were written in full compliance with the rigor of the Kunqu Ge law. Due to the restrictions of male and female voice areas, generally in the old play, the southern song lao dan part of the north and south sets is sung with "key bottom". The actor Zhou Yali, who played Lao Dan this time, had a very good voice, so I asked her to completely subvert the previous singing method and sing in the D key "tuning face" (high octave true tone), which almost did not appear on the Kunqu opera stage before, the actor sang it too much, and the audience listened to it.
In terms of musical instruments, I wanted to achieve the fullest display effect with the fewest number of people, so I added Western instruments such as cello and aluminum sheet to the traditional instruments. The soundtrack is also the most concise, not pursuing flamboyance, but only requiring "appropriateness". I hope that each instrument has its own sense of character, every musician has his sense of existence, we are not the traditional sense of the accompaniment, but an important part of the small theater system, not only play the score, but also have an improvisational component, to "dialogue" with the actors, so as to better integrate into the small theater opera.
Percussion is my strong point, but according to the sound environment of the scene and the auditory feelings of the audience, the director asked after careful consideration and asked not to use traditional opera instruments such as gongs and cymbals. I had to find another way, using the foreign experimental percussion instrument "seven-tone wooden box drum" for the first time, supplemented by traditional big drums and plate drums plus small gongs. The rhythm uses the modern percussion rhythm type to match the actor's performance, and from the actual effect of the performance, there is no sense of violation.
The curtain pop song "White Shirt in the Water" was accidentally conceived by me and the director after work, wanting to make a contrast, closer to the times, younger and more energetic. After the song was written, I completed the background recording of the accompaniment with the help of my friend Peng Cheng, and I hoped that the audience and the actors could "hi" at the last moment of the curtain, and then walk out of the theater with a happy and satisfied mood.
Finally, after the first rehearsal in the group, two cleaning aunts of our group walked up to me with a smile and said, "Great! We understood, understood. At this moment, I also laughed. General Secretary Xi Jinping demanded at the Wendai meeting: "I hope that the vast number of literary and art workers will adhere to the principle of integrity and innovation, and use the fine works that keep up with the times to open up a new realm of literature and art." "I will also continue to work hard to make opera music more vital and influential."
Source: Wen Wei Po