In 1995, members of the Sino-Japanese Niya Site Academic Expedition found a Han Dynasty Shudi brocade arm guard, 18.5 cm long and 12.5 cm wide, woven with eight seal Chinese characters: "Five stars out of the East and China".
What is the moving legend behind this national treasure, which is known as "one of the greatest discoveries of Chinese archaeology in the 20th century"?
Based on the creation of this national treasure-level cultural relics IP, the dance drama "Five Stars out of the East" depicts a magnificent imagination that integrates ancient and modern.
The premiere, the "second performance" is difficult to find, the field is full, and the classic dance sections such as "Splendid Embroidery" land on the B station and a number of satellite TV Lantern Festival galas, which are popular out of the circle... Recently, with the start of a new round of national tours, people's eyes have once again focused on this tapestry spanning thousands of years and this dance drama.
How does a dance drama tell a good story of cultural relics? How to vividly present the profound cultural connotation carried by precious cultural relics on the stage? A few days ago, at the observation seminar of the dance drama "Five Stars out of the East" sponsored by the China Literary and Art Critics Association, the main creators of the dance drama, the producers and experts and scholars in the industry discussed the artistic techniques, theme presentation, and creative concepts, and unveiled the secret of its popularity.
Innovation: A dance imagination of "point history into poetry"
Wind and sand rolling, the desert is vast; the lights are glimmering, the weather is prosperous... The dance drama is led by the excavation of the Han Dynasty cultural relics "Five Stars Out of the East and Li China" brocade arm guard at the archaeological site, and opens the tunnel of time and space, thus telling the moving story of the deep friendship between the Han Dynasty Shubian generals and Jiante, the son of the Northern Leader, and the daughter of the Jingjie Leader, from sword-rattling to side-by-side, from unknown to deep identification.
Behind the story is a creative process of "point history into poetry".
According to Zhao Jiachen, a representative of the producer and secretary of the Party Committee of Beijing Performing Arts Group, the play took two years to create, because the story occurred too early, there are few historical materials to refer to, and the creation is very difficult. A piece of "five stars out of the East and China" brocade armband, a piece of bamboo excavated from the Niya site, "Feng Jing asked Chunjun with Lang Jie unanimously, fortunately not forgotten", became all the clues for the main creators to carry out their creations.
"As a national first-class cultural relic, the historical information of this brocade arm guard is extremely scarce. Because its historical predictions and coincidences spanning thousands of years are highly in line with the picture of the times and the beautiful expectations of the Chinese nation, it is a precious theme of literary and artistic creation. In the view of Xu Yuechun, vice chairman and secretary general of the China Literary and Art Critics Association, it is precisely because of its extreme scarcity of historical information that it has left a huge imagination space for literary and artistic creation.
With the fragments of "history", how to give it the connotation of "poetry"?
In order to excavate more materials, the main creative team went deep into Xinjiang to collect style and did a lot of historical research, changed their drafts, repeatedly revised and tempered, and held expert seminars to discuss relevant history, cultural relics, philosophy, religion, dance, music and other issues.
Wang Yichuan, director of the Research Center for Literature and Art of Beijing Normal University, said that the most prominent artistic innovation of dance drama is that the dance imagination activates the vivid stories buried in the archaeological relics of the frontier, imagines the archaeological relics as a multi-level dance art landscape, and shows the audience a historical picture of the intermingling and symbiosis between Chinese multi-ethnic cultures.
Core: Praise the chinese national community consciousness
A history of China is a history of the integration and convergence of various nationalities into a pluralistic and integrated Chinese nation, and a history of the great motherland in which all nationalities jointly created, developed, and consolidated reunification.
From chunjun, the daughter of the innocent and innocent leader who yearns for the East with the Name of Han, the General Feng Feng of Hanshubian who is dedicated to guarding the tranquility of the Western Regions, the shaping of characters such as Jiante, the son of the Northern Leader who is fierce and honest and eventually returns to the Han Dynasty, to the lantern dance referring to the "Guizi Mural" in the Kyzyl Grottoes, to the elaborate costume design of various ethnic groups, this dance drama deeply touched the audience.
"After all, dance drama must rely on dance language to speak, it is not spoken but danced, and the story of national integration needs to be expressed by the dance language of national fusion." Wang Yichuan said that from the Western Wind Dance "Lantern Dance" and "Flying Sky Dance" represented by the Jingjie City, to the Han Dynasty Central Plains Style Dance "Lady Dance", and then to the Central and Western Fusion Wind Dance when the Central Plains Nationalities interacted with the frontier nationalities, the dance drama "Five Stars Out of the East" conveyed the contemporary theme of forging a solid sense of the Chinese national community through the combination of these three series of dance languages and dance images.
Yu Ping, honorary dean of the Dance School of Nanjing University of the Arts, believes that the preciousness of this national treasure-level cultural relic is to witness the exchanges and exchanges of various ethnic groups in China, and the dance drama also conveys this connotation very well, showing an inclusive civilization with great virtue.
Revelation: The artistic creation space of cultural relics theme is vast
From the sensational Spring Festival Gala's "Only This Green" to "Five Stars Out of the East", how to use the language of modern art to live and talk about the thickness of the Chinese context has aroused people's thinking.
Take "Five Stars out of the East", from a cultural relic to a story, and then to a dance drama, every enrichment and perfection, each round of performance modification and refinement, all embody the original intention and exploration of the main creative team to "make the cultural relics 'alive' and use dance to 'tell' stories".
"We hope to use cultural relics to tell Chinese stories well, so that the works can become fine products and even classics." Zhao Jiachen said.
"Art is imagination, fiction based on facts, history and art complement each other, history gives art the fact that imagination is reliable, and art can fill in the omissions and omissions of history." Xu Yuechun said that the high-level choreography and performance of a dance imagination that integrates ancient and modern times, hooks and sinks the profound historical accumulation of cultural relics, releases the rich cultural connotations in it, reveals the historical truth of the continuous development of the Chinese nation, and creates a new form of dance drama with cultural relics themes.
Wang Yichuan believes that the emergence of this work can give valuable inspiration to artistic creation, in China, a country with a long history and rich archaeological resources, there are many cultural treasures such as "five stars out of the East to benefit China" are looking forward to artists to deepen the cultivation, so that the sleeping treasures can be transformed into a fresh footnote of cultural self-confidence in the new era Chinese.
Reporter: Wang Sibei
Editors: Jia Zhen, Wang Wei
Image courtesy of the organizer
Produced by Xinhua News Agency