Famous duo performance artist - Fan Liu

Comrade Fan Liu, a member of the China Dramatists Association, a member of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region Literary Federation, a member of the Baotou Municipal Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, a member of the Municipal Federation of Literary and Art Circles, and an honorary chairman of the Municipal Drama Association, has written a brilliant chapter in the development of duotai art on the artistic stage for more than 50 years, with the spirit of assiduous exploration and extensive harvesting, exquisite and delicate performance style, and enthusiastic attitude of passing on the art, and has left a deep impression on the minds of the vast number of audiences in the western region of Inner Mongolia. His name is included in the Dictionary of Chinese Artists. He is worthy of being a famous duo performance artist in the sonic boom art world and full of Saibei.

A difficult childhood

Fan Liu was born in 1910 to a poor peasant family in Fanjiagou, Hequ County, Shanxi Province. He has six older brothers. In the old society, due to the compulsion of life, his father had no choice but to sell his third brother to a piece of earthen cloth. He changed from old seven to old six, so his name was Fan Six. When he was born, the family was so poor that his mother added another mouth, consulted with her husband with tears in her eyes, and threw him in the urinal and drowned; thanks to the fact that his third mother (aunt) had no sons, she took Fan Liu away and saved her life.

The three mothers' family is not surplus, and relies on wild vegetable chaff skins to survive. When Fan was sixty years old, the third mother gave birth to a son, and fan liu had to return to his home. The father could not support his six sons, so he took Fan Liu out to beg. On a stormy first moon day, the father and son asked for a few days to eat, but they did not eat enough, hungry, tired, desperate... Desperate. His father lost his eyes and his legs were heavy, so he pulled Fan Liu to the bank of the Yellow River and wandered, hesitating, ready to commit suicide by throwing himself into the river. In the struggle between life and death, father and son cried in the snow on the shore. In this wilderness where the wind and snow howled, he actually encountered two wandering artists carrying four beards and yangqin, and advised his father and son not to take their lives lightly. One of them took out two copper coins and asked them to take them as a plate fee and go outside the mouth to make a living.

Fan Liu's father repeatedly asked the two artists to leave their names in order to repay the life-saving grace in the future. The two artists do not want to repay, but they see that Fan Liu will be a "play art" material in the future. The artist's unintentional praise gave birth to a thought in Fan Liu's young mind: playing with art can earn money, and earning money can have food to eat.

The father and son ran to Baotou with these two hanging money. His father gave the landlord a long-term job, and the thirteen-year-old Fan Liu learned to weave in Yonghe Pingpu in Yushugou. The apprentices at that time only ate and did not pay. From morning to night, Fan Liu was exhausted, and his fingers were cut by the slits. Winter freezing is even more difficult, often dry until the middle of the night, sometimes a nap, the treasurer's wife will be beaten with a stick. Poor Fan Liu, helplessly, sneaked out to find his father, bent on finding the two wandering artists to learn to sing. The father and son went from village to village, inquiring everywhere, and it was not easy to find the two artists. As soon as they met, his father asked him to kowtow to the teacher, and since then Fan Liu has learned to stand for two people.

Hard work

Fan Liu studied hard day and night, and after half a year, he could pull four hu to sing some popular two-person stage minor tunes. They meditated in the village, sang church meetings to rich people, sang stalls to people who cut big cigarettes, and sang on the spot at gatherings. Unfortunately, this situation was not long, and the next year there was a famine, the play group was disbanded, the artists were looking for a way to live, and the fifteen-year-old Fan Liu changed his profession to selling tofu. Grains are not collected, and tofu cannot be sold. One night, he wandered to a big shop of carriages and horses, and because he had no money to live in the hotel, he sang a little song to others. He sang "Nun Sifan", "Five Brothers Herding Sheep", "Smoking Big Cigarettes", and "Hanging Red Lights", which won the applause of the car owners, and the shopkeeper also happily introduced to him that there was a play group in Xinmingpu. He ran all day, until the palm light, and found the new Shop. A kind old man introduced him to Sun Yinyu, the predecessor of the duo, and he began to study drama again.

Under the guidance of Master Sun, Fan Liu often ran to the wild beach to practice his throat before dawn, and at night, after everyone went to bed, he walked behind the house to practice footwork. In fan skills, he practiced scattering fans, vertical fans, anti-wrist fans, cross flower fans, and then learned "holding the moon in his arms", "Erlang Danshan", "phoenix single spread wings", "phoenix double wings", etc.; he also used fans to pick up objects, cover, flutter butterflies, so that the fans are ever-changing and colorful.

Because of his hard work and tenacious practice, during this period, he successively learned more than ten traditional programs such as "Jumping the Pink Wall", "Sending Four Doors", "Playing Son-in-Law", "Entering the Orchid Room", "Top Lamp", "Nail Cylinder" and so on, and made his debut in the two-person Taiwan drama circle and won praise. Once, the main family suddenly named him to sing "Zhu Yingtai Down the Mountain". Fan Liu had not studied this play before, but in order to earn money to make a living, he asked his teacher Fu to read the lines again, and he remembered it in his heart. That night, he took the stage to do a play, not only the lines were not correct at all, but the performance action was also just right. Many viewers were fascinated by it and asked each other, who is this descendant of Zhu Yingtai?

In the twenty years from 1925 to 1945, Fan Liu successively studied dramas such as "Yangge" and "Daoqing", and absorbed a lot of nutrition from the performing arts of his brothers' dramas. This laid the foundation for the gradual maturation of his later performing arts. From 1946 onwards, he began to work with the famous taiwanese artist Ji Ziyu and others, and the scale of singing was slightly expanded, from two to six or seven, from street stalls to small theater stages. During this period, he mainly played Xiaosheng and Xiaodan, such as Sun Yulian in "Walking west", the big sister in "Swing", and "Water Flooding The Golden Mountain" and "Little Widow on the Grave" and other plays. He studied diligently and vividly portrayed the characters vividly and vividly.

Although Fan Liu has such acting skills, in the old society, artists belong to the lower nine streams, and their social status is low, and they cannot change their fate at all. Fan Liu once said: "In the old society, I sang for more than twenty years on the two-person stage, did not live a life of a person for a day, was homeless and unemployed, wandered everywhere, and lived by selling and singing and begging all day. At the age of fifteen, he learned art, and at the age of eighteen, he took classes like a ghost without a grave, eating without food, living without a place to live, and finally wandering to the "dead man's ditch" and "begging kiln" in Baotou. For more than twenty years, I have personally seen several of my colleagues killed by the Japanese puppet army for an excuse, and I myself have been dragged to the Yellow River by the Japanese puppet army and shot for the crime of "spying on the national army.". Once in Zhongtan, I was bitten by the landlord's dog and hit people with a few words, and the dog's leg beat me to death, and I was "pinched with typhoid fever" and almost lost my life; another time, the bandits wanted to rob me of the millet I had earned, and tied me back to the beam of a landlord's mill, causing me to get a serious illness..."

Harvest widely

After liberation, under the care and support of the party and the people's government, the duotai, which was deeply loved by the broad masses of the masses in the western region of Inner Mongolia, became active on the big stage of socialism and developed rapidly, completely putting an end to the situation of floating in the stalls, churches, streets and alleys of the old society. They grew from a "folk song group" of more than a dozen people to a "folk art society" of more than forty people, with Fan Liu as the president. In the early days of the founding of the People's Republic of China, they cooperated with the party's various reforms and publicized the party's policies, and successively rehearsed modern plays such as "Long Worker Turning Over", which reflected land reform, "Old Godmother", which has always harmed humanity, "Wang Gui and Li Xiangxiang", which praised marital autonomy, and "Fang Sijie", a large-scale opera against feudal etiquette.

With the continuous innovation and development of the duo's drama genre, under the guidance of the party's literary and artistic policy, Fan Liu's ideological consciousness has been newly improved. After a long period of hard artistic training and meticulous observation, he has accumulated rich stage experience and formed his own unique performing arts style by absorbing the performance art of peking opera, Jin opera, Yue opera, Huangmei opera and other brother dramas. His performance is simple and generous, real and delicate, conveying affection with God, and sincere and sincere. For example, when playing a young girl, his fan action of chasing butterflies and covering his face integrates life with performing arts, making the traditional performing arts program have new vitality. In shaping the image of the Caidan landlord in "Borrowing the Crown", his light-tongued, witty and humorous acting skills are full of rich local atmosphere, which has won the unanimous praise of the audience.

Fan Liu's profound artistic attainments can be summarized as eight words: "inheritance, eclecticism, development, and improvement". This is the result of his collection of the 1940s to the 1950s of the Caidan performing arts, the essence of the bocai brothers' drama performing arts, the test of aesthetic views, the cultivation of artistic character, the meticulous creation, and the continuous development and improvement, that is, the artistic production process from "Bo" to "Specialized", from "Specialized" to "Chemical", from "Transformation" to "Refinement", so as to shape the characteristics of the characters in the play vividly, accurately, and closely follow the heartstrings of the audience. When he performed the details of Huang Po's sitting in a car in "Mei Yu Matching", according to the opera program, he could have generalized. But he is not satisfied, but grasps the personality of the characters in the play and designs a set of actions that conform to the image and personality of the characters. For example, the flattered, suspicious and uneasy mood before the car, because of the sudden change of identity; the prostration and bumping of the head before the car that is not accustomed to sitting in the car; the tongue blinking when touching the glass because of curiosity, the rare and strange left and right look; and the relaxed and proud expression of crossing the ditch after sitting on the car, going uphill and down the weir, leaning forward and backward, all performed witty and coordinated, funny, and humorous.

In the play "Willow Well", he played a mother-in-law who abused his daughter-in-law. When he performed the plot of "After the criticism and education of the township government, the former non-correction was painfully changed", the expression of shame and repentance, the act of embarrassment and contradiction, a long sigh and a short sigh, a moment of beating his chest, crying to the sad place, and the reverse of the opera program of wiping tears with the sleeve of the sleeve, turning over and picking up the inside of the shirt to wipe the tears. This action is both exaggerated and reasonable, giving people an artistic impression of "inexhaustible". In order to highlight the local atmosphere and regional characteristics, when he played this mother-in-law, he always inserted a needle with a white thread behind his bun. This is particularly true from life to art. This is the same as his performance of Liu Ganma wearing a thimble in "Visiting the Sick", which is quite similar in a specific environment.

In the performing arts, Fan Liu is afraid of rigidity that does not conform to the character's personality, and opposes the drawbacks of a thousand people. Among the many roles he has created in his life, the image of middle-aged and elderly women is the most prominent, and it is difficult to see the similarities in performance, it can be said that he has opened up a broad performance conception for Cai Danxing. Among these Caidan performances, the most successful is Liu Ganma in "Visiting the Sick", from the introduction to the end, full of drama. You see him lifting his feet, shaking his hands and twisting his waist, opening and closing the door, every subtle movement is performed very vividly and delicately, funny and humorous. For example, the expression on Liu Gan's mother's face before talking to her daughter is really wonderful. She trembled as she approached the kangtou, dusted the dust on the kang first, lifted the knee of her right leg with her hand, twisted the kang, and pulled the back of the skirt up with her hand, pressing her left leg on her right leg and giving a long sigh. These actions, real, natural, clean and neat, portray the image of Liu Ganma to the fullest, Wei Miao Wei Xiao. Every time they arrived here, the audience shouted and shouted. In 1955, in the first professional literary and artistic performance of the autonomous region, Fan Liu's "Visiting the Sick" won the first prize of the performance. In 1960, the master of art, Mr. Lao She, came to Baotou, and after watching his performance, he said that it was difficult to find such an old Caidan in Beijing, and praised him as a "folk art performer". At that time, Mr. Shu Qingchun also published an article in the newspaper praising Fan Liu's performing arts. The play "Visiting the Sick" is a remarkable originality and achievement for Fan Liu, a folk artist with a low level of education, and a monument in his nearly sixty years of performing arts career.

In 1963, Fan Liu participated in the Inner Mongolia Duotai's reporting performance in Beijing, and was cordially received by Zhu De, Chen Yi, He Long, Dong Biwu and other proletarian revolutionaries of the older generation, and took a group photo to commemorate the occasion. After taking time out of his busy schedule to watch the debriefing performance, Premier Zhou stepped onto the stage to shake hands with them one by one and congratulate them on the success of the performance. The care of the party has inspired Fan Liu and other cast members to create a two-person stage drama road as soon as possible and establish firm confidence.

Enthusiastic about passing on the art

Comrade Fan Liu is very enthusiastic about the art of duotai, cares about and attaches importance to the research and development of duotai drama, and is even more enthusiastic about the cultivation and growth of young actors. Whether it is a professional or amateur duo actor inside or outside the autonomous region, or an actor in the troupe, all those who ask for advice, he always comes, responds to everything, is approachable, and never puts up a shelf. Sometimes when he performs in other places, he also seizes the time to teach young actors to perform and practice singing in the car, and even exchanges ideas with amateurs and exchange skills.

During the ten years of civil strife, he was forced to resign and driven out of the literary and artistic circles, but he insisted on not receiving the retirement pension, preferring to burn boilers for others than leave his beloved duotai art.

In the more than 30 years since the founding of the People's Republic of China, he has trained a group of young and middle-aged actors for the duo's drama genre, and most of them have become the backbone of the troupe. Xie Meiyun, who has always played with him and been influenced by him, has become a well-known art school teacher in the 1960s, and as for those who have directly inherited in performing arts, such as Jia Shiyuan in the Hetao region, the head of the five brothers known as the "Five Sisters" in the Hohhot generation, Ji Jinxi in the Guyang area, and Wen Jixiang of the Inner Mongolia Duorentai performance team, among other young and middle-aged actors, there are hohhot, Qiao Yulian of Baotou, Yu Guilian, Ren Xiuying, Ye Shuzhen, Han Meiling and others.

After smashing the "Gang of Four", the party implemented the policy for Comrade Fan Liu. He was refreshed and returned to the art garden, where he was conscientious and meticulous in his performances.

In October 1979, he represented the Inner Mongolian theater circles at the National Literary Congress and was cordially received by the party and state leaders. On November 15 of the same year, Fan Liu, who was nearly ancient, fulfilled his long-cherished wish for many years and joined the glorious Communist Party of China. On July 1, 1981, on the occasion of the celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of the birth of the great Communist Party of China, he said with great emotion: "My fate is closely related to the cause of the duorentai. Without the leadership of the party, there would be no two-person Taiwan cause, and there would be no Fan Liu. My life was given by the Party, and the two-person platform was single-handedly supported by the Party. We must further develop and improve it so that it can better serve the construction of the four modernizations. ”

With simple class feelings, Comrade Fan Liu loved the party, socialism, and theater, and poured his life's efforts into the performing arts of the duo. As early as the sixties, he suffered from emphysema and severe stomach disease, often vomiting blood, but whenever there was a performance, he insisted. In the winter of 1982, the city's first young and middle-aged actors will perform, he is seventy-two years old, still full of interest, to give everyone a wonderful demonstration performance.

In the summer of 1984, Comrade Fan Liu was hospitalized in the Second Municipal Hospital for several months due to illness, and the leaders of the Municipal Bureau of Culture and the Opera Troupe visited the hospital many times and offered condolences. On November 28 of the same year, Comrade Fan Liu died at home at the age of seventy-four.

Comrade Fan Liu poured his life's efforts into the performing arts of the duo. His spirit of hard work, continuous exploration, continuous exploration, and continuous innovation is worth learning. In particular, young actors should inherit, develop and improve their performing arts, and create a broader world for the performing arts of the duo.

Source: Baotou Historical Materials (Volume 14), October 1985, authors: Lao Nan and Fang Shu

Data collation: Huang Xiang, screen name "Yinshan Worm", Secretary General of Baotou Local Culture Research Center, Director of Baotou Jiuyuan Museum, Vice President of Baotou Cooking and Catering Hotel Industry Association. Read thousands of books, travel thousands of miles, taste all kinds of tastes.