Chen Li
Not long ago, playwright Chen Li's new work "Villa" was well received by industry experts and audiences at the script reading conference held in Beijing. The appearance of the play brought gorky, the great writer of the previous era, back to the public eye. What is particularly valuable is that the soul torture issued by the author in the play through polyphonic forms such as dialogue shakes people's heartstrings.
On the occasion of the Spring Festival of the Year of the Tiger, a reporter from Beijing Youth Daily interviewed Chen Li, a playwright, director and poet, and launched a dialogue on the origin of the creation of "Villa" and its creative experience. Prior to this, Chen Li's "The King's Love" was hailed as an "intellectual drama that opened up time and space", which triggered the audience's deep thinking on the superstructure of politics, philosophy, law and so on.
Profile: Chen Li, screenwriter, director, ph.D. in film science. The film director's debut "Cherry on the Pomegranate Tree" participated in the Moscow Film Festival, the short film "Opponent" was shortlisted for screening at the Cannes Film Festival, and became the opening film of the main competition section of the Moscow Film Festival. His directed plays "House Dream" and "Trial Parasite" were extremely successful on stage.
Hats off to Gorky
Use the drama "Villa" to reproduce him and reflect on him
Reporter: Please talk about the on-site reaction to the script reading, and what was your original intention in writing the play "Villa"?
Chen Li: For Chinese readers, Gorky can be said to have influenced generations. In my opinion, throughout the history of Russian literature, Gorky is a very unique, very remarkable person. He was very different from his contemporaries, who came from aristocratic or intellectual families, but he also won the world with literature, and also impressed all the literary giants of that era, and his humanitarian ideals even extend to this day. Gorky is particularly worth studying and remembering. Gorky once said that drama is the most difficult form of literature to control, so I think it is valuable to use the drama "Villa" to reproduce him, to reflect on him, and to pay tribute to Gorky.
Due to the epidemic, the script reading meeting was changed twice, and more people should have come. Happily, some weighty intellectuals and theater lovers have come, such as modern historians like Lei Yi, and Huang Jisu, who is both a sociological researcher and a playwright, and "Che Guevara" was written by him, he was very sincere and brave. Everyone said their most direct feelings: some said that the recitation form has a particularly strong ability to shape the characters, and can express Gorky's life particularly richly; some hope to highlight more drama in the human world and at the bottom, highlightIng Gorky's observers and critics; others say that the last three scenes have a thrilling feeling, and even discuss the form of the recitation drama and the stage play which is better. In short, I feel a lot of kindness and resonance, or quite touched. I think this kind of recognition and integrity between people will always exist.
Reporter: About the creative experience of this play, is it written smoothly?
Chen Li: I have been reading Gorky's works since I was a child, "My University" and "In the Human World", all of which I read word for word. Gorky once said, "Anthropology is literature", I think the greatest charm of this person lies in his respect for people - his words repeatedly emphasize "people", different classes, different beliefs, different circumstances, all belong to one "person", in his works, people are greater than everything.
Specific to the book "Villa", from the idea to the beginning of the writing, the writing process I used for a month. But there was a time before I started writing that I studied him quite intensively and digested him. Fortunately, since the 1920s, our country has begun to translate and introduce Gorky, such as Lu Xun, Mao Dun, and Zou Taofen, who have translated his major works, and the publication of his works in various periods is very good in quantity and quality, and the quality of translation is also very high. I hope that through this writing, I can more fully reproduce the literary empire established by Gorky, including the most anxious old age of his entire life, the last insistence, the final inner conflict, and the final non-abandonment, all of which can be concentrated on the stage.
Reporter: Gorky seems to be a little far away from today's young people, what do you think is the significance of doing this drama?
Chen Li: Looking at it today, I think Gorky, who died in the 1930s, is still a mirror. For example, Gorky had a strong curiosity and ability to learn, he had a very good judgment on the most fashionable modernist art of the era, classical music and other categories, and was a great writer with a balanced aesthetic. Looking back at a realist writer who is so highly regarded by the world, his writing ability, his fictional ability, his tension and the intensity of life can all constitute a good contrast. Today, on the other hand, I often ask myself, can we have the strength to live and think?
Reporter: How to present an original work on the Chinese drama stage with the theme of foreign literary giants?
Chen Li: Actually, when I wrote this book, I had an overall idea of the use of music, sound effects, vocals, instrumental music, and lighting, and these presentations on the stage would be richer and more flexible. On stage, it can be a small theater, a minimalist expression, or a large theater, presented in a magnificent environment. If the conditions are there, they can be presented at any time. The script of "Villa", at present, I score 6.5 points myself, because it is still only presented in the state of the text. Whether it's really good or bad still requires the theater to speak.
Putting a foreign literary giant on the stage is not that I deliberately want to do something that my peers have not touched, but in fact, this character makes me have emotions to express. I think that Russia is a huge and rich cultural body, and it is difficult for our writers to say that they are completely unaffected by it. Gorky's literary world is eternal and has a value that transcends time and space, and that thing will not fade away in time.
Reporter: Where do you think the value of doing theater is reflected?
Chen Li: Constantly performing and generating its influence, this is for sure. I don't rule out showing it on an influential stage as much as possible, such as "The King's Love" and "The Villa", which have performance plans. In addition, drama must develop innovative thinking and innovative collaboration with extremely sincere thinking, and must be able to speak what the predecessors cannot say and dare not say. On the road to a good artist, we can also do a lot of things, such as the actors and theaters we work with, or the artists of various disciplines, to stimulate each other's genius in the middle of interaction.
Drama gradually became a way for me to see the world
Reporter: After reading the script, I feel that your play has a lot of knowledge and information.
Chen Li: When I was a child, I was very quiet and not moving, and I had the habit of reading at a very young age. My grandfather was an air force in the United States, and he taught me English when I was two years old, and when I was four years old, he felt that there was nothing to teach me, and I would know all kinds of words that were difficult to use in various parts of the aircraft. I remember watching "Romance of the Three Kingdoms", adults casually turned to any page, and I began to tell them, when they were still in preschool. When I was in junior high school, there was a Chengdu Ancient Books Bookstore next to our house, and I remember very clearly, when I saw the Sichuan People's Publishing House's Chinese-English comparison of the "English Poetry Treasury", 17 yuan up and down two volumes, which were translated by Guo Moruo and Huang Zuolin, which were mainly British poets from the classical period and the Romantic period. The clerk of the bookstore saw a child of twelve or thirteen years old and asked me, "Do you like poetry?" I said, like.
I have always thought that the meaning of poetry, like the need for people to eat and breathe, I can feel the kind of connection with it. As for not starting to write so quickly, the explanation I gave was that it needed to be thick and thin. I have my own standards for the quality of writing, and I always feel that I am not open enough. Now it seems that certain technical standards and artistic standards should be established, and we should not be afraid of the eyes and the masters.
Reporter: That is to say, in the present, you are still writing poetry?
Chen Li: I have expectations for my poetry. From a worldwide perspective, I think there are very few masters in contemporary poetry, one I like is Louise Glick, who won the Nobel Prize the year before, and the other is Derek Walcott of the West Indies, these two people have surpassed many great poets of their generation. I have just finished a narrative poem of more than three thousand lines, and I am confident that this is a work that bridges the gap between classical and contemporary.
Speaking of which, it was drama that opened up the world of poetry. In 2011, I directed "House Dream" for the first time, and it was the only time that I didn't write the script myself, and when I revised the script, I had an instinctive touch, and I felt the affinity between drama and poetry. In 2011, Tronström's poetry had just won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and he had published more than two hundred poems in his lifetime.
Later, I participated in the International Youth Theater Festival after directing "House Dream", and the audience on the night of the performance almost overturned the theater. Later, through the contact of teacher Yang Qianwu, "House Dream" was performed 18 times in Beijing Renyi, and an Englishman who studied drama watched this play and asked Teacher Yang to say that he felt that it was the best play to watch in China. This is also a great encouragement to me. Since then, theater has gradually become a way for me to look at the world, and my usual thinking has also carried a deliberate or instinctive creative attitude of writing for theater.
Later, as I grew up, although I still felt that Tronström was great, he originated from the poetic world in the high latitudes, and the attitude of caring for the entire civilization with a cold and gentle eye, I think it is far less than the thinking space provided by the huge ancient civilization system of the East, and we have to write more complex and more infectious poetry than him.
I'm going to write well and ask for things from myself as much as I can
Reporter: Will your focus on foreign literary giants be focused on next?
Chen Li: Not necessarily. I have written a play before, based on one of the three monographs of the contemporary American sinologist Kong Feili, "Calling the Soul". In the late 1980s, its first Chinese edition came out, and what particularly appealed to me was the subtitle, Qianlong 33 Years of Chinese Witchcraft Panic. The background of this drama is that in the prosperous years of Qianlong, there was an incident in Deqing, Zhejiang Province, where displaced people took scissors to cut the braids of women and children, and at that time, these people who were uploaded by society would take away people's souls, and people were panicked, which aggravated the conflict between indigenous people and outsiders. Qianlong continued to intensify interrogation, and the means became harder and harder, but the soul-calling incident not only did not stop, but began to appear outside Zhejiang, and even in the third year, the city of Beijing appeared, and Qianlong was once very anxious. At this time, Qianlong's important minister Fu Kang'an and others all advocated that it should be diluted, and later after three years, this incident slowly slowed down.
This story has a great inspiration for me, I conceived of a real world and a mythical world entry point, in the script through the emotional line of the underlying characters, the unknown mythological world and the real world did a dramatic combing and thinking. This is a book that I am more satisfied with.
There is also a windfall, two days ago I received my film script "Zou Rong" shooting record, this is indeed very surprising, very pleased. I think that Zou Rong, a revolutionary, has the color of romanticism soaring, and he is eager to absorb traditional culture and the most advanced ideas in the West, and is a revolutionary youth of epoch-making significance. In the process of script writing, I approached the historical truth with a rigorous attitude, tried to truly reproduce the light of Zou Rong and cultural giant Zhang Taiyan's thoughts, and shaped their dramatic image with the fullest enthusiasm. Teacher Lei Yi once said that he felt invulnerable in the use of historical materials in the script of "Zou Rong".
Reporter: There is a clear feeling in you that you are very confident in traditional Chinese culture.
Chen Li: I am extremely confident in this. I think people really have to have this kind of self-confidence, which is a methodology that needs to be cultivated and established in artistic practice. Or back to Gorky's script, and I thought to goergi how he created himself? He came from the bottom and could never have played the piano and trained in painting as a child, but Gorky was an artist who grew up completely on his own, and he had a very good judgment of classical music, film art, and contemporary art, all of which came from the power of the works he saw himself. I later realized that when people's comprehensive ability reaches a certain level and their psychology is in a healthy creative state, there may be no barrier between heaven and earth.
Reporter: You have been to cannes and the Moscow Film Festival, have you ever looked forward to any awards in theater?
Chen Li: If honor is coming, I will not resist, but if not, then there is none. Because I feel like life has given me enough. Now I can write more than I envisioned myself yesterday. I even feel that I have no complaints or regrets in this life, and I am most content, but I must ask for something from myself.
There must be some accumulation before the muse's hand can touch you
Reporter: Looking at your book, it is difficult to imagine that it is almost the age of knowing the destiny, and what impact does age have on the creative mentality or thinking?
Chen Li: I think I have lived from a child to a child. The people closest to me always say that I am actually a child mentality, and this has always been the case. My emotional intelligence is not high at all, but I don't think it's high, and it may not be bad for writing. Because I will still be naïve, and I will laugh and be touched with special unscrupulousness.
Also, my life is very rich, and I may have a little more to do than my peers about the professions I've worked in, the schools I've attended, the people I've met, and so on. I practice martial arts, I also write poems and plays; I do fieldwork, I travel all over the countryside, looking for teachers and friends; I make friends, monks and Taoists, three teachings and nine streams. Wherever there are people with ability, or inherited skills that are about to disappear, I run to people's homes. I have been to Hebei, Shandong, Henan, Shanxi... Of course, this also took me a lot of time, but slowly I fixed the mode of writing and thinking, in short, the sense of fulfillment that creation gives people is too interesting.
Reporter: In addition to writing, what hobbies do you usually have?
Chen Li: Every week I go to Panjiayuan Book Market, and this habit has been adhered to for 20 years. I think Panjiayuan is the cutest place in Beijing, and many of the book dealers there know me.
One of the main things I gained there was the popular literature published by China since the 1950s and 1960s, including books such as opera, commentary, commentary, etc. This kind of folk literature and folk legend books are vivid and rich, and it can be said that it is a legendary presentation of Chinese literary and artistic styles, which is a good help to me. There is also a book of Soviet and Eastern Literature, mainly in the Soviet Union, from the 1940s we began to translate and introduce, from drama, novel to literary and artistic theory, performance theory, theory of drama creation methodology, commentary, the translation at that time was very timely, very rich.
Reporter: It sounds like you can mingle with them.
Chen Li: Haha, the advantage of visiting Panjiayuan is that sometimes it can satisfy my vanity. Once a man was there with a print he had bought from Japan. I talked to him next to him and talked about some of the characteristics of this kind of cultural relics that have returned to China from Japan. The bookseller said to him, "He's the most learned man we have here, and you just have to listen to him." "I was a little happy to hear that these people were well-informed, so his approval carried weight.
But sometimes it's also very funny. Once I bought some old English books from an old man who often bought books. He saw me holding these books and said, "How do you play with English books?" I didn't understand it at the time, and he continued, "Can I make money with this?" "I just reacted, he thought I was a bookseller. I asked him what money I made, and he said, "You don't sell books, why do you buy so many English books?" After I left, I heard the vendor behind me say to the old man, "They can make more money than we do, and they sell books online." Oops, me.
Reporter: In addition to visiting Panjiayuan, what is your daily life status?
Chen Li: I am very fulfilling, and now the proportion of writing is getting bigger and bigger. I think there must be a certain accumulation before the muse's hand can touch you. Over the years, I myself have been in a relatively mature artistic state, and it is time to exert my strength.
The only contradiction is that writing and practicing are difficult to balance. I found that especially when writing poetry, the requirements of mental energy are more intense than drama, and writing poetry will make me feel that my kung fu is wasted. My irresponsible friends and playwright Guo Shixing often give opinions on my works, and we have nothing to say. Ms. Wu Tong, director of Beijing Renyi Creative Studio, also provided a pertinent evaluation of my plays every time. Sincere friendship is the light in life, and I want to write well.
Photo by Li Zhe/BENFICA