The 2020 CCTV Spring Evening surprised everyone's "Morning Light Song", from the excerpt of the dance drama "The Eternal Electric Wave", the actors wore cheongsam, using pu fans as props, and danced in the national style
Sun Jiashan
Summary of views
The "out-of-the-loop" national style has quietly become a cultural fact. After experiencing the transmission of stage arts from variety shows to evening parties, how to achieve creative transformation and innovative development of China's excellent traditional culture has begun to penetrate into the relevant propositions in the field of cultural and tourism integration.
The creative transformation and innovative development of Traditional Chinese Culture to the World is not "according to the story", but "then on", which is guided by the contemporary Chinese spirit and Chinese experience, telling Chinese stories, conveying Chinese ideas to the world, and creatively transforming new contemporary cultural connotations, and constantly completing innovative development in a higher dimension.
In the first month of the Year of the Tiger, the theme and elements of the national style have inadvertently become the standard of various evenings. From the traditional Chinese New Year's Eve CCTV Spring Festival Gala to the CCTV Lantern Party, the B Station Lantern Party "Shangyuan Thousand Lantern Festival", "Remembering Jiangnan", "Only This Green", "Aoshan Xiaojie", "The Fifteenth Flower Lantern of the First Month" and other excellent traditional cultural programs of different styles and types have been swept across the network and are sought after by the majority of teenagers.
How to achieve creative transformation and innovative development of China's outstanding traditional culture, especially how to combine it with mass culture, has always been a contemporary historical proposition in the field of mainland culture. From the beginning of "I Repair Cultural Relics in the Forbidden City" in 2016 to 2017 and 2018, traditional cultural variety shows such as "Chinese Poetry Conference" and "National Treasures" have not only achieved a double harvest of ratings and word of mouth, but also formed many national topics around China's excellent traditional culture and continue to this day. Different from the general variety shows that were imported from abroad, invested hugely, and were pressed by traffic stars and one-sidedly emphasized visual effects, dramatic conflicts, and tense atmospheres, cultural variety shows were unanimously praised as the "clear stream" of the mainland variety show model, and the mainland variety show model has also completed a certain degree of model innovation after experiencing the European model and the Korean model.
It can be seen that in recent years, the form of traditional cultural programs has developed its own unique model and characteristics. Whether it is the traditional radio and television system represented by CCTV, or the emerging media of the mobile Internet era represented by station B, they vividly present China's excellent traditional culture through comprehensive art forms such as evening parties and variety shows, which not only win ratings and click rates, but also win word-of-mouth and commercial acclaim and popularity, and have also become the largest cultural common denominator for the majority of teenagers in different regions and circles. CCTV Spring Festival Gala's "Remembering Jiangnan" and "Only This Green" broke the stereotype of traditional cultural stage art at the past public level that it was too sunny and snowy and not grounded. Previously, "Only This Green" has been broadcast at the New Year's Eve Party at Station B, and has triggered a heated discussion among young people about the beautiful traditional dance. These programs take music and dance poetry and painting as the starting point, pursue the restoration of artistry itself, no longer emphasize traffic and drama, but use the technological dividends of emerging media in the mobile Internet era, boldly call the cutting-edge technology of XR technology, holographic scanning, CG technology and other emerging media forms, and solidly penetrate into the texture of Chinese excellent traditional culture such as music and dance poetry and painting, and reproduce the millennium charm at a glance.
Even the relatively traditional form of the CCTV Lantern Party has made a very pioneering attempt at traditional opera that used to seem boring and only belongs to the middle-aged and elderly groups, and the B Station Lantern Party "Shangyuan Thousand Lantern Festival" has reproduced the classic national essences such as "General Xianghe", "Spring and Autumn Pen", "Dingjun Mountain", "Suolin Capsule" and "Fighting Dragon Robe" in a film and television manner, balancing the proportion of drama and hard-core opera, and effectively integrating with contemporary youth culture in multiple senses. Including programs such as "Aoshan Xiaojie" sung by 13 children, "Yan Homecoming" sung by well-known Peking Opera actor Wang Peiyu and singer Alain, and "Little" that integrates Kunqu opera with figure skating, the excellent traditional cultural content is organically integrated with various new trend cultural elements such as national tide, aerospace, winter Olympics, women's football, and popular songs.
In particular, at the same time as the famous opera masters gathered, the six chapters of "Shangyuan Thousand Lantern Festival", "Lantern Splendid Embroidery", "Lantern Evening Meeting", "Watching The Lantern And Singing", "Dreaming with the Lamp", "Lantern Viewing Drama" and "Aoshan Illumination", with a very immersive narrative mode of substitution, incorporated the mature types and model experiences in network dramas and online variety shows into the evening space of outdoor street scenes, forming a sense of form and rhythm in art with typical contemporary Chinese experience. Only through the ascending development of cross-media and media circles, and the deep integration with the integration of culture and tourism, can China's excellent traditional culture reach a wider range of young people, cover more diverse cultural circles, obtain a broader cultural space, and finally transform into solid cultural soft power, and better promote the "going out" of Chinese culture.
The continuous exploration and innovation of comprehensive art forms such as mainland evenings and variety shows is even in the world. Some cultural fields that may have been boring in the past generations are still setting off a boom among the new generation of teenagers, who not only easily accept and pay attention to all kinds of excellent Chinese traditional culture from the heart. For example, the circle of fans of Peking Opera is getting younger and younger, and it is no longer the exclusive of the middle-aged and elderly groups in the past. At the beginning of 2021, UP master "Bian Jingting" led the 416 dormitory girls' troupe of the Shanghai Theater Academy to become popular throughout the Internet by interpreting different Peking Opera roles, and finally was invited to appear on the "Shangyuan Thousand Lantern Festival". Coincidentally, the domestic mobile game "Yuan Shen", which is also from Shanghai, was widely discussed and praised by foreign game players at the beginning of the year due to the release of a new game character that gathers Chinese opera elements, Yunyi. The PV video of the opera "Goddess Splitting View" sung by Yun wei has been played more than 3 million times overseas, and many foreign netizens have been "moved to choke", and even in different countries and regions, there has been a trend of cover singing classic songs.
Undoubtedly, the "out-of-the-loop" national style has quietly become a cultural fact. From last year's "Tang Palace Night Banquet", "Mid-Autumn Festival Fantastic Tour", "Flower Good Moon Full Moon Festival" to this year's Lantern Festival's "Shangyuan Thousand Lantern Festival", a series of evening parties and variety shows around China's excellent traditional culture have successively become "circle-breaking" hits, and the types and models of comprehensive arts such as mainland evening parties and variety shows have also been greatly enriched in this process. This phenomenon is obviously not accidental, after more than 20 years of marketization and industrialization reform in the film and television field at the turn of the century, we are now entering a period of harvest dividends. The precipitation and screening of the types and models of comprehensive art forms such as evening parties and variety shows can be completed through marketization and industrialization, and we are gradually finding a sustainable development path of Chinese-style originality for comprehensive art forms such as evening parties and variety shows. Moreover, the value and significance of such screening and precipitation are not limited to comprehensive art forms such as evenings and variety shows, and have a positive demonstration effect on the emerging literary and art categories in the mobile Internet era, such as film and television, music and art, to emerging literary and art categories in the mobile Internet era such as online games, online animation and short videos, and related themes, types and models have an evolutionary path that can be cross-referenced and referenced. China's excellent traditional culture is thus realizing the promotion and dissemination of cross-media and media circles, which will undoubtedly have a long-term, far-reaching and complex structural impact on comprehensively promoting the high-quality development of the mainland's cultural industry and giving better play to the cultural industry as the pillar industry of the mainland's national economy, including the mainland's youth culture, mainstream culture and the construction of dialectical and organic relations between the two.
Not only that, after experiencing the transmission of stage arts from variety shows to evening parties, how to achieve creative transformation and innovative development of China's excellent traditional culture has begun to penetrate into the relevant propositions in the field of cultural tourism integration, and cultural tourism resources in different regions are likely to be activated and empowered in this new cultural logic. The creative transformation and innovative development of Traditional Chinese Culture to the World is not "according to the story", but "then on", which is guided by the contemporary Chinese spirit and Chinese experience, telling Chinese stories, conveying Chinese ideas to the world, and creatively transforming new contemporary cultural connotations, and constantly completing innovative development in a higher dimension. On this basis, we see the vast space and potential cultural potential of China's local IP theme parks outside of Disney and Universal, and how to achieve creative transformation and innovative development of China's excellent traditional culture has also opened a new historical chapter in the new era.
(The author is an associate researcher of the China Academy of Arts and the deputy secretary-general of the Youth Working Committee of the China Literary and Art Critics Association)
Source: Wen Wei Po