On the evening of November 18, 2021, Chen Peisi's new work "Frightening Dreams" premiered in Shanghai. (Visual China/Photo)
In 2021, the performing arts market is still facing many uncertainties. In the first half of the year, the performance market has crossed the tipping point of stop loss and handed over a beautiful report card; in the second half of the year, due to the rebound of the epidemic, the upward trend has stopped abruptly. According to the data of the China Performance Industry Association, since August, more than 20 provinces across the country have successively closed theaters and cancelled performances in a large area, such as nearly 700 suspension projects and nearly 200 postponement projects in Poly Theater Line.
For the foreseeable future, all walks of life affected by the epidemic will swing in uncertainty, especially for the crowded theater industry.
Represented by the Wuzhen Drama Festival and the variety show "Drama New Life", drama is exploring and opening up a more popular industrial form. On the other hand, the artwork itself, whether it is an original repertoire or an adaptation, the theatrical stage in 2021 as a whole presents a tendency of narrative conservatism. In addition to mature commercial dramas, the creation of small theaters by campus drama clubs and private theater troupes is booming, which deserves more attention.
After leaving the circle, has Chinese drama ushered in spring?
The emergence of the drama variety show "Drama New Life" can be seen as a compromise between the inability to hold a drama festival under the epidemic situation in 2020. As initiators and guests, Huang Lei and Lai Shengchuan are the two founders of the Wuzhen Theatre Festival. The program has made the drama gain popularity in the public eye, and the commercial benefits should not be underestimated.
After a year of skipping the stalls, the 8th Wuzhen Drama Festival showed a good market. Within one week of ticketing, more than 25,000 tickets for specially invited plays were sold out, the fastest time for a single drama to sell out was 8.4 seconds, and the number of participants in the whole network ticket purchase was 356,000. To a certain extent, this prosperity scene is blessed by the out-of-the-loop of "Drama New Life". Five short plays from variety shows, including "The Story of the Chicken Farm", were re-enacted at the festival and ranked among the fastest sold out plays.
Compared with previous years, the ticket price has also risen. Several plays from variety shows, except for "Reflection", which does not have seats, are priced at 480 yuan, and the performance duration is about 30 minutes. In 2021, only three dramas from colleges and universities such as Chinese opera and shanghai opera will be sold at a ticket price of 80 yuan, and the minimum ticket price of the six dramas with higher popularity will be more than 480 yuan, and the minimum ticket price of eight dramas will be 380 yuan.
Under the out-of-the-loop effect brought about by the variety show, there is no shortage of audiences to watch the performance with the mentality of chasing stars, and some people get the signature of a certain creator and burst into tears after the end of "Brazil/Chicken Farm Story". Drama critic Xi Muliang pointed out: "This phenomenon, which was very rare in the theater industry before, marks a new industrial form of drama explored and opened up by "New Life of Drama" facing the public. ”
At present, the survival of the industry level is more imminent than the progress of the artistic level, and the theater festival and even the entire industry seem to have made a choice. Xi Muliang is worried about this: "The industry is weak and strong, and the winner is the strong at the industrial level, so Chinese drama has begun to appear capitalization or even bubble precursors." ”
In June 2021, the first Aranya Drama Festival was held in Qinhuangdao, Hebei Province, a theater festival that set up a theater on the seashore and was regarded as a northern drama feast in line with the Wuzhen Theater Festival in Jiangnan. The two operating models are similar, in a closed area, the audience buys tickets to enter, invite foreign plays to participate.
But because the Aranya Theatre Festival is placed in an upscale neighborhood, the audience is mostly the owners of the community. The audience of wuzhen drama festival is basically outsiders, including people in the industry and audiences with the habit of watching plays, and there are not many local residents. This is also a point that has been questioned by the Wuzhen Theatre Festival - the drama is not born locally, even if there is local production and audience, it is not the focus. The owners of Aranya spontaneously formed an amateur drama club and rehearsed their own plays every year, which makes the Aranya Theater Festival more like a party in the middle-class community. As for whether the drama can continue to grow here, it will take time to verify.
Before the epidemic, foreign dramas were introduced into The country on a large scale, which was called the "second degree of western tide" by the academic circles, the audience was reveling, and the market was soaring. Another special feature of the 8th Wuzhen Drama Festival is that there are no foreign troupes participating. At present, the entire Chinese theater market is also facing the situation of the disappearance of foreign dramas, followed by the question of "whether domestic dramas can withstand inspection".
A conservative narrative in the post-pandemic era
In 2021, coinciding with the 140th anniversary of Lu Xun's birth, Polish director Lu Pa was invited to serve as the choreographer of the drama "Diary of a Madman". Combined with Lu Xun's other works, he interpreted and expanded the whole story and constructed a "Lu Xun universe". At the end of act THREE, the madman meets a contemporary student on the high-speed train and begins a dialogue of "new awakening and old order". In the face of this classic text familiar to Chinese audiences, Lu Pa completed the challenge of reinterpreting "Diary of a Madman" with a sharp edge of contemporaryness and straight into the inner world of the people behind the text. The whole play not only has a strong literary nature, but also creates a unique stage rhythm in the roundabout and repeated interpretation of the text.
"Drama sometimes has to fight against the world, it has to fight against time, and maybe Lupa also wants to fight against our habit of watching drama." Four and a half hours, so long, I read the diary several times, and I later found out that he was just doing it, and I hope you can see his rhythm and slowly subvert it in the theater. There is another manifestation of the confrontation time, that is, after watching it, this play will haunt you. Yu Rongjun, artistic director of shanghai drama center, said at the seminar.
Another work with Lu Xun's temperament is "Hometown". The story takes place in the contemporary Jiangnan water town, presenting the spiritual plight of the people in the countryside, which is a rare theme on the domestic theatrical stage. In the past, almost all works on rural themes were state-run dramas, focusing on the achievements of rural revitalization and poverty alleviation; the focus of private dramas often fell on urban life and urban people. More insidiously, the show doesn't stop at revealing rural reality. The protagonist Li Xin received higher education and came from a humble background, relying on the exploitation of family affection to maintain dignity, and the creator's critical and ironic attitude towards this character is out of reflection on the intellectual class in which he is located.
Compared with the innovation and breakthrough in the theme, "Hometown" still follows the form of realism. In 2021, the most of the standard works on the theatrical stage are traditional works with such complete narratives. This may reflect the post-epidemic era, and the mentality of theater people tends to seek stability. After all, experimentation is risky and is often a more confident choice.
This shift is particularly pronounced in directors known for their pioneering experiments. Li Jianjun is famous for his so-called theaters, and in 2021 his two works appeared at the Aranya Theatre Festival and the Wuzhen Theatre Festival. Metamorphosis is based on Kafka's original book of the same name, setting the protagonist as a contemporary courier. Critic Yang Xiaoxue commented that the play "seems to be simple and rough—the stage is empty, the images are rough, the performance is rough—in fact, the work is very cautious, and every act in the theater is appropriate and reasonable, and there are traces in the original text." "Between the Worlds" is adapted from the 1973 film of the same name, although the whole play uses real-time green screen keying, portrait masks, video game visual effects and other ideas, but in the narrative did not play too much flower work, the actors just reenacted the plot of the movie. In the 2021 repertoire, Li Jianjun's plays have gone far in experimental terms, but compared with his previous more post-dramatic works, both works are very complete in meaning, using a more traditional and conservative narrative method.
The same is true of Meng Jinghui's "The Red and the Black", which is honestly narrated in the narrative order of the original book, only collaged with a series of text fragments. The most outrageous part of the whole play is the collage of Heiner Muller's script in the last half hour, and in terms of audience feedback, this clip is the worst acceptance effect. "Maybe the audience is more inclined to listen to a full story." Chen Tian, an associate professor at Nanjing University, analyzed to the Southern Weekend reporter that the conservative narrative not only comes from the mentality of the creators, but also from the audience's aesthetic tendencies.
"Dream of the Red Chamber", "The Dust Has Settled", "Activities Change into Human Form", "Blossoms" (Season 2) and other dramas adapted from literary masterpieces, the whole is above the standard, the production is relatively sophisticated, and the ideas of adaptation are loyal to the original.
Chen Tian pointed out that this adaptation that is faithful to the original work is a double-edged sword. The advantage of this is that there is a guarantee of quality, but it also causes problems: on the basis of loyalty to the original and thorough understanding of the original, the authors of these adaptations seem to have gone too far themselves. One is that subjectively, they want to compress a long story like the original book into stage time, and they also want to tell the complete story. This makes it more difficult to adapt. On the other hand, this will also limit the combination of classical texts and contemporary times. ”
Compared with director Li Jianjun's previous works, his 2021 new work "The World Between the Sunsets" is more conservative in narrative, which is common to many theatrical works in the post-epidemic era. (Tasu/Photo)
Niche and public
The popularity of drama festivals and the out-of-the-loop drama variety shows are not enough to change the fact that drama is extremely niche in China. It can be seen from the number of douban ratings, in addition to commercial hits and head dramatists, there are very few plays that have reached four figures.
After six years, Chen Peisi launched "Frightening Dreams" after "Drama Stage". The story takes place during the Liberation War, when the Kunqu Opera Class and the Chunshe Are Accidentally Involved in Strategic Locations, Fighting a Roundabout Battle Between Saving Lives and Sticking to Tradition. In the chaotic world, the opera class is like ants under the hub, and the art and beauty represented by Kunqu opera are tough and fragile in the face of the times. On Douban, the score of more than a thousand people participating was as high as 9.3, which reflected the double harvest of box office reputation of this drama to some extent. In 2021, such works are rare. If you take your eyes off the big stage, you will find that in some less inconspicuous places, more "wild" drama is thriving.
Campus drama is gradually emerging. On the one hand, its market performance is not bad. Following the Nanjing University Master of Arts Troupe's "Jiang Gong's Face", the series of dramas created by the "Drama Nine" Troupe of Peking University have also attracted much attention. From "Four Machines" in 2019 to "Spring Death" in 2020 to "Double Maple" in 2021, the technology has become more and more mature.
On the other hand, the student drama club is not affected by too much business, and has made a more pure exploration and voice. The experimental drama "Cancer Friend Hamlet" is completely planned, organized, produced and operated by several undergraduate and master students of Nanjing University. The creators contacted the Nanjing Qinhuai District Cancer Friends Association and invited more than a dozen cancer survivors and patients as the main actors to create a situation through the rehearsal of the classic drama "Hamlet", allowing them to tell their own life stories freely. With sincerity and bravery, the work confronts the big question of contemporary theater — whether it is possible for theater art to become less and less likely to intervene in life.
In the second year of the outbreak, the days passed between the ordinary and the impermanent. The direct reflection and reflection on the current ordinary people's lives quietly appeared in the small theater.
"Miscellaneous, Folding or Salad" is a scene about "being trapped": the person who has lost his loved one is trapped in the memory without an answer, the person who has failed is trapped in the obsession of self-realization, and the person who cannot do without the terminal is trapped in the monitoring of big data. Like the title, the whole play presents three loosely related and very different styles. The background of the post-pandemic era is salad dressing, which gives the ingredients in the bowl a harmonious taste after being mixed.
The CaotaiBan Drama Club launched a new work " Clam Island " to re-salvage the various situations of the epidemic. It is still a collective creation, reservation system, no ticket sales, performing in a non-traditional theater space, leaving a long audience discussion after the performance - the founder Zhao Chuan's so-called "post-performance theater". Similar to student theatre clubs, the "amateur" status of folk theatre groups helps to maintain their free creative state.
Guo Chenzi, associate professor of the Shanghai Theater Academy, believes that the "amateur" caotai class presents a "professional" drama, and the professionalism lies in the "field" it constructs: "This 'field' is composed of the joint efforts of the performers and the viewers on the topics of common concern, and is a field of focus and sharing; this 'field' is public, presenting public events and public memory, triggering public discussion, and is one of the values and reasons for the existence of the theater." ”
When opera merges with new mediums
As part of traditional theater performances, Xiqu has also suffered from the epidemic, and the opera market is already sluggish, which has forced the industry to make greater and more drastic reforms. Under the influence of media changes, the artistic laws, aesthetic concepts, viewing methods, and interactive feedback of opera creation and performance have undergone greater or smaller changes. The advent of the "cloud" era has accelerated the transformation of the way opera is disseminated, and this ancient art has gradually explored a path to open up modern media and attract young audiences in the competition with multicultural markets.
In 2021, the Cantonese opera film "The Legend of the White Snake" broke the record for the highest grossing Chinese opera film. The day the film was released was the 15th anniversary of Cantonese opera being inscribed on the first batch of national intangible cultural heritage lists. The cross-border integration of opera singing and playing with the figurative film language has been around for a long time. Different from the previous opera films that shot stage or real scenes, "The Legend of the White Snake" has made a breakthrough in visual effects, and the all-round intervention of modern film and television stunts has made the film scene present the effect of combining virtual and real.
Throughout the film, the dynamic special effects used in the "Water Flood Golden Mountain" fight scene are quite eye-catching. On the original opera stage, the actors showed the water flooding the golden mountain by throwing water sleeves, and in the movie, this six-minute long special effects scene set off a very realistic monstrous wave. The movie trailer highlighting the clip was the top spot on Station B. "Special effects + drama? Good novelty", many post-90s and post-00s viewers have been curious, and similar comments appear frequently.
Zeng Xiaomin, the actor of the White Lady, performed the film promotion song "Waiting for Your Return" with singer Liang Hanwen at the 2021 B Station New Year's Eve Party. This is the second time that opera actors have participated in the "cross-night" of Station B. In 2020, Qiu Jirong, the heir of the Peking Opera Qiu Sect, took to the stage and, together with several actors from different dramas, performed the program "Surprise Hong", which integrates opera and dance. This program, which seems to be the furthest away from the young people of Generation Z, has become the best word-of-mouth work since the entire evening was broadcast.
Under the momentum of the rise of the national style, young people look at opera with a new eye and look for aesthetic resources in it. Local opera dramas have also actively responded to the needs of young people, a considerable number of opera troupes and actors have opened vibrato numbers, small red books, and the topic of "re-employment of unemployed Yue opera actors in the live broadcast room of the epidemic" once rushed to Weibo hot search. In addition to the regular performance preview, uploading a video of the origami play or live broadcasting the whole process, the opera performers began to try more people-friendly ways of expression, the most common of which was to sing ancient songs in a dramatic way. Actors and actresses who once only performed on the stage adapted to the means of new media on the Internet and gradually formed a new relationship with the audience.
With the help of new media and riding on the east wind of traditional cultural revival, opera has been rejuvenated at present. However, the lack of good screenwriters and scripts with contemporary consciousness is still a problem to be broken. After all, only content that keeps pace with the times is the magic weapon to attract and retain audiences.
Southern Weekend reporter Zhu Yuan