Character business card
Zhou Liya, choreographer of China Oriental Performing Arts Group, graduated from the Choreography Department of Beijing Dance Academy, a talent of the national "10,000 Talents Program", an outstanding expert of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism in 2020, and a young top-notch talent of the Ministry of Culture in 2016. Artistic consultant of China Silk Road International Theatre Alliance, artistic consultant of Sichuan Grand Theatre, etc. He has won many times: "Wenhua Award", "Lotus Cup Dance Drama Award", "Five One Project Award", "National Stage Art Quality Project" and so on. His dance works have won many national dance competitions, Tao Li Cup, All Army Dance Competition, Lotus Cup "Gold Award" and so on. Representative works: "Only this green", "The eternal radio wave", "Shawan Past", "Du Fu", "Mulan", "Husband and Wife Whistle", "Jasmine" and so on.
Chuanguan News Reporter Li Ting Photography Wu Feng Clip Zhou Zhibing Intern Chen Yimin
At the "strong request" of her mother, director Zhou Liya, who has not returned home for 2 years, finally returned to her hometown of Emeishan City, Sichuan on the third day of the Chinese New Year, a city famous for its world cultural and material heritage of Mount Emei, which is a city with the misty drizzle common in winter in the Sichuan Basin, overlooking the high-rise buildings in the urban area, and there is a deep and shallow contour line of Mount Emei on the edge of the sky. The green mountains are like Dai, and the daughter is returning to her hometown, looking for the "green" at the tip of her heart.
Three days earlier, the dance poetry drama "Only This Green" directed by Zhou Liya and Han Zhen was on the CCTV Spring Festival Gala on the night of the Chinese New Year's Eve, and with a beautiful and powerful dance posture, it activated the national treasure "A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains" more than 900 years ago, instantly capturing the hearts of many viewers. Netizens used "brush screen" to express their love for this clip, and the people of the country also set off a wave of imitation of "green waist" during the New Year. At present, the 2022 national tour of "Only This Green" has begun, and the major cities have sold out soon after the tickets were issued. In the "green and green" gap, we met Zhou Liya, who was resting in her hometown in Sichuan, and this Sichuan girl nagged homely and spent an "ordinary day".
★ Go home ★
Where has the time gone
Zhou Liya was wearing a white dress sweater at home, and she was lean, with her hair coiled behind her head, with a beautiful melon face, and there was a Sichuan girl's sharpness. On the morning of February 10, she did not have time to attend her cousin's wedding because of work, and relatives and friends joked that they wanted to take a group photo of her and send her to the circle of friends to recognize her "sister". In the afternoon, while accompanying her parents to watch cross-country skiing at the Winter Olympics, she coordinated things about the revision and tour of "Only This Green" on WeChat. My father joked: "I haven't stopped since I got up in the past few days, sometimes I can answer a phone call for an hour or two, and sometimes I can't even see each other after a year." ”
In the "post-80s" director Zhou Liya, there are indeed many dance works and national honors envied by young directors of the same age. Dance drama "Shawan Past", "The Eternal Radio Wave", "Du Fu", "Mulan", "Only This Green"... Her collaboration with her partner Han Zhen has created a box office record for the dance drama industry, and has also won the Wenhua Director Award, the Wenhua Award Special Award, the National Five One Project Award, the National Dance Competition Repertoire Creation Gold Award, the "Tao Li Cup" Repertoire Gold Award and other top awards in the industry.
But what is surprising is that unlike most art workers, Zhou Liya is the only member of the family who is engaged in art, and the whole family atmosphere reveals a rigorous and gentle "academic and engineering temperament". My father is a construction engineer, my mother is a kindergarten teacher, and many relatives are graduate students and doctors. Where did the "art cell" come from? Mom is not easy to say, she only remembers when she was a child, Zhou Liya took a special "monster" (Sichuanese, elf weird), the camera sense is particularly good, posing has a look, if the music comes, the body language is more abundant, xiao ZhouLia lively dances with the rhythm.
This time home, Zhou Liya specially sorted out the family photo album, and warm memories of growing up followed the yellowed photos to her heart. In the photos, there are rehearsal photos of her childhood dancing practice, as well as daily life photos of her mother's "dance flavor" posture. There are "fashion" travel photos of my parents going to Chengdu for honeymoon when they were young, and there are also dads who love photography who use secondary exposure to make there are two ZhouLia in the photo, and the portraits with different actions look like "twins". At that time, the baby who was crying for the first time turned into a young girl in the photo, and the young parents at that time, now sitting next to Zhou Liya, had two white hair, and Zhou Liya and her parents looked at it while chanting: "Every time I look at the photo, this time passes too fast, too fast." ”
★ Select ★
Zhuhai is still Beijing
The group photo of the two groups of families of 16 and 20 years old attracted the attention of the family, and these two time nodes were unforgettable for Zhou Liya.
When she was in elementary school, watching her daughter have something that interested her at a young age, Zhou Liya's mother, who is a teacher, was happy in her heart: "People should find what they like and then carry it forward." The mother believed that teaching according to aptitude would be beneficial to the shaping of children's growth, but the father, who was an engineer, had reservations about it at the time, and he still preferred his daughter to pursue engineering research. But no matter what, the selfless love of parents for their daughters has turned into silent support for the hobby of dance.
When she was a child, Zhou Liya took dance as a hobby, and in the sixth grade, she began to learn the basic skills of dance at the Youth Palace in Emeishan City. "In fact, many children were very good at that time, and I was not the best natural condition in it." Zhou Liya recalled that perhaps because of her love and seriousness for dance, she impressed the teacher, so Liu Ying, the enlightenment teacher of the Youth Palace at that time, talked to her parents and told them that the Sichuan Provincial Art School (now merged with other colleges to form sichuan art vocational college) had a campus in Neijiang, and the admissions teacher also came to Mount Emei to recruit people, hoping that Zhou Liya could apply for the examination.
This opportunity allowed Zhou Liya to slowly open the door to professional dance learning. In 1994, when xiang Zongxu, a teacher at the school, recruited Zhou Liya into the school, he recalled that Zhou Liya was small, had good physical fitness, and treated dance very seriously. In a class, practicing side flips, Zhou Liya practiced for a long time and could not reach the standard, she took the initiative to ask for additional exercises after class, and perfectly completed this action when she returned to class, but at this time the teacher found that the little girl's legs were full of bruises. However, in Zhou Liya's engineering family atmosphere, her father and she both believe that this kind of "hard work" is a normal career requirement, "doing every line and every job has pain and tiredness, and your profession makes you should do this, which is a very basic thing and a reasonable thing." ”
Zhou Liya left her hometown Emei Mountain at the age of 13, and in the three years of secondary school in Neijiang, she occasionally went to Chengdu for further study, which opened her dance horizons and saw better dancers and creators in the country. At the age of 16, she decided to go to Beijing to apply for the Dance Academy, and also bought two T-shirts of the Beijing Dance Academy, which were printed with the school logo, and the family took a train to send Zhou Liya to the North Dance, and took a photo by the lake in the Summer Palace. But this exam failed, Zhou Liya confessed: "I saw the gap between myself and the outstanding dancers in the country." ”
Faced with the first "setback" in her life, Zhou Liya really couldn't let go of her "self-esteem" at that time: "I felt that after buying those two sympathies, I was not a student of North Dance, just like a fake." This is like a heart knot, which has been around Zhou Liya's heart for a long time. After graduating from secondary school, Zhou Liya, as the class leader, was assigned to the Zhuhai Art Troupe with excellent results.
In the past five years of working in Zhuhai, in addition to performing her own dance, Zhou Liya has gradually accumulated experience in choreographing and creating dances, and her salary is also good, so she thought that she would become a stable dancer in this way, settle down in the pleasant city of Zhuhai, and save money to buy a house. Only occasionally in the middle, there were teachers who advised her to take the North Dance exam, but her inner hurdle still couldn't pass, and it was difficult to start a model again.
A car accident changed the trajectory of Zhou Liya's life, and for the first time she passed by the god of death, making her feel the preciousness of life. In the days of hospitalization, I gradually wanted to do a lot of things: "Do what you want, nothing else matters." ”
The back road has been blocked, and there is no turning back. In that year, Zhou Liya used family leave to apply for the Choreography Department of Beijing Dance Academy, and her professional results ranked among the best. Seeing that there was a great hope for admission to professional courses, she resolutely quit her job, prepared for cultural classes at home, and spent two months preparing for cultural examinations. ”
★ Turquoise ★
It is a heavy awe
Now mention Emei Mountain, more like Zhou Liya's eyes far away warm hometown, her taste buds still preserve the feeling of hometown, every time you go home to the plane, you have to eat local tofu brain, bowl chicken, cake, hot pot with your cousin, of course, the favorite is still the home cooking made by your mother: "You have to punch in the same way as you like to go." Han Zhen, the partner who choreographed the dance works with her, often joked with Zhou Liya: "Leia, you are so pitiful, you left Sichuan and left so many delicacies." ”
Zhou Liya and Han Zhen are known as the gemini stars in today's dance world, and Zhou Liya jokes that the longer the two work together, the advantages and disadvantages will be more obvious, because knowing what the other party is good at, they will trust each other with the relevant content. There is also a lot of noise in the middle, but it is all for the work, and it is quickly reconciled, and the personalities are very complementary.
Returning to this "Only This Green" is also the result of her and Han Zhen, all the staff in front of and behind the scenes constantly colliding, overturning, re-establishing, and working hard. Zhou Liya admits that from the beginning of the birth of the work to the current tour, her heart is worried. Because it is different from the previous realistic dance drama works such as "Electric Wave", the dance that surprised the Spring Festival Gala can be said to be a "rhythm" faster segment in the whole play, the rhythm of the complete "Only This Green" is relatively slow, she is a little worried that the audience can not accept this "contrast", but on the other hand, she also sincerely hopes to hold the audience's hand into the theater, so that everyone can slowly feel this kind of freehand dance works that are not the same as in the past, if everyone has valuable and kind opinions, the team will also think hard to improve. "Looking at fast works, lively works, there is a corresponding mentality, we first open our hearts, and then to feel the beauty of different forms of art to us." 」
From dancers to choreographers, facing every subject, Zhou Liya enjoyed the time of immersing herself in dance creation, but this time the creation of green was more of a deep awe. In order to make the work more professional and accurate, rather than "castle in the air", in the process of creation, the main creative team of the dance poetry drama "Only This Green" not only read a large number of documents, but also invited experts from the Palace Museum and intangible cultural heritage inheritors of chinese painting paint, emblem ink, Xuan pen, Shuanglin Aya silk weaving and other production techniques as consultants. In the play, seal engravers, silk weavers, grinding stone people, pen makers, and ink makers all appear on the stage as important figures to pay tribute to the craftsmen and guardians who are silently dedicated to the inheritance and development of traditional culture.
Wang Zhongxu, a research librarian at the Palace Museum, once joked that whenever the public thought of a question about "A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains", the "Only This Green" team asked. Reverence also comes from the touch of the heartstrings. They once asked Wang Zhongxu: "This painting has been more than 900 years old, how long can it be preserved?" Wang Zhongxu thought carefully with the rigor of the cultural and cultural workers, and then slowly looked up, seemingly ordinary but firmly said: "At least in the hands of our generation, it will not disappear." After Zhou Liya listened to this answer, her heart was full of respect and emotion, and the prototype of the scroll in "Only This Green" had the figure of Wang Zhongxu.
In the face of this group of sincere cultural workers, Zhou Liya felt heavy on her shoulders. She is also more willing to understand this popularity as everyone's love for traditional Chinese culture, on this basis, the team has made a little effort in dissemination.
★ Heritage ★
Sincerity allows the heart to see each other
In the creation, Zhou Liya believes that the work is like a mirror, what kind of person are you, how do you have the mentality to face your creation, it is how it is on the stage, and its texture, state, degree of intention, the audience can also feel, "so sincerely I think it is we as creators, we should treat the audience, treat the work, and engage in this profession." ”
And sincerity often exists in the deep communication between people, touching the deep moving moments of the soul. When creating "Only This Green", the creator has always answered a question, "A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains" can meet us after a thousand years, who is it from?
Nearly a thousand years ago in the Song Dynasty, there was an 18-year-old genius teenager, with a unique mineral stone color made of turquoise ink dot dyeing long silk paintings, a thousand years later, the early death of the teenager left the "Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains" under the care of cultural and museum workers, the color is like a new view of the popularity, becoming one of the treasures of the palace museum.
At the end of "Only This Green", through the hands of cultural relics restorers, cultural and museum workers and Wang Ximeng, a talented teenager of the Song Dynasty who died early at the age of 18, looked at each other from a distance across the 11-meter-long picture scroll cabinet, and more than 900 years of time flowed quietly in the eyes of the two people, and outside the exhibition cabinet was an endless stream of tourists, queuing up to watch this magnificent masterpiece. Every time the rehearsal comes here, many actors and the audience will shed tears, and Zhang Han, the actor who plays Wang Ximeng, once looked at an audience who saw the collapse and crying here in a performance, and he almost couldn't control the tears, which is the unique charm of the stage.
In Zhou Liya's view, the whole drama is not documentary, but carries the subjective perspective of the exhibition person. Therefore, in the play, the young Wang Ximeng, except for the moment at the end, cannot see the exhibition of people representing the cultural and bo workers. However, the relationship between the two is full of subtle contradictions - in the process of studying cultural relics, the exhibition volume people already know the fate of this teenager and know that he will create amazing paintings. As cultural relics workers, of course, they want to see this painting, because with this painting, there will be a successor, and the national treasure will be passed on to their hands. But at the same time, he also painfully realized that the day the painting was completed also meant that the teenager had little time to stay in this world, and he wanted to protect the teenager, but the teenager could not see himself in different time and space. Because of this "Map of a Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains", the two saw each other.
The team members once saw a photo of the audience lying on their stomachs in the Forbidden City in 2017 looking at "A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains": "Then suddenly I thought, if the painting has a soul, you will find that all the people who created it and the people who inherited it, including the people who watched it, were just passers-by in his life, only it and the bright moon." The only thing that connects with each other and makes people feel nostalgic for today is the green in "A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains", which is like the soul of the whole painting.
In fact, in the play, when you see her often looking up like this, she looks at a round of bright moon, linking the two time and space of the exhibition volume and Wang Ximeng, so I think many viewers have read and understood the romance that belongs to Chinese, "only this green" looks at "only this bright moon". In "Only This Green", the green and green played by Meng Qingyang is visualized, and often looks at the moon: "Today's people don't see the ancient moon, this month once looked at the ancients." ”
dialogue
Chuanguan News Reporter: Will this play be performed in Chengdu in the future?
JC: Yes. "Only This Green" is a dance poetry drama produced by the Palace Museum, China Oriental Performing Arts Group Co., Ltd., People's Network Co., Ltd., and jointly produced by Domain Hemei Cultural Development Co., Ltd. There will be no changes in the touring version, but the protagonist will consider the state of the actors to make adjustments (this is the norm of the tour), and in the future, the show will also be promoted by Domain And beauty culture development co., Ltd. to perform in residence.
Chuanguan News Reporter: Omitting the exhibition scroll and the teenager Xi Meng, why did you choose this period to attend the Spring Festival Gala this time?
Zhou Liya: To present these plots, it is necessary to turn the stage, and it is difficult to achieve the scene, so the CCTV director team finally synthesized various factors such as the venue and chose the green clip.
Chuanguan News Reporter: How do you see the dance sections of "Li Ren Xing", "Morning Light Song" and "Green Green" on social networks?
Zhou Liya: I think that whether it is "National Treasure" or "Spring Festival Gala", including "Station B", we hope that through these good platforms, more people will pay attention to the works and enter the theater. Not only pay attention to "Only This Green", but also pay attention to more of our dance drama works. In fact, we in the Chinese dance industry have a lot of excellent dance drama works, although our dancers do not have so many "star effect", but they are very good.
Chuanguan News Reporter: Is it difficult for the dancers to move green, and what to say to the audience imitating the "green waist"?
Zhou Liya: The green waist actually has certain requirements for the strength of the core muscles of the human abdomen. Bending over is not difficult, but the "green waist" requires you to slowly bend the waist, there is a certain degree of difficulty, if the strength is not enough, the waist muscles will have a strong trembling. In fact, in the early stages of rehearsal, we actors bent down to maintain a slow pace, and also practiced repeatedly.