Yuan Huiqin: Create a cultural symbol of Beijing city

【Famous Dialect Culture】

Create a cultural symbol of Beijing city

——Interview with Yuan Huiqin, vice president of the National Peking Theatre

Written by Lu Luxing

Yuan Huiqin, vice president of the National Peking Opera Theatre, Peking Opera Lao Dan, national first-class actor, graduate degree, outstanding expert of the Ministry of Culture, enjoys the special government allowance issued by the State Council, and the "four batches" of talents of the Central Propaganda Department.

At the same time, he is also a member of the Standing Committee of the Central Committee of the China Democratic National Construction Association, a deputy director of the Central Cultural Committee of the China Democratic National Construction Association, a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, the director of the Drama and Opera Research Center of the Communication University of China, a member of the Tenth Plenary Committee of the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles, a member of the Cultural, Cultural, Historical and Learning Committee of the 13th National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, and an executive committee member of the All-China Women's Federation. In 2002, he starred in the six-episode Peking Opera TV series "Khitan Yinghou", which won the first prize of the 22nd China Television "Feitian Award". In 2004, he won the Performance Award of the 21st Drama Plum Blossom Awards.

Representative works include "Khitan Yinghou", "Dawn Forbidden City", "Flower Gun", "Red Lantern", "Yangmen Female General", "Li Kui Visiting Mother", "Mother-in-law Thorn Character", "Red Army Story" and so on.

Reporter: After you stepped onto the Stage of Peking Opera, you came to Beijing from Hubei to study and work, what inspiration did the cultural atmosphere of Beijing City bring to you?

Yuan Huiqin: I remember that when I first came to Beijing when I was only 16 years old, a teacher from my hometown brought me to meet Mr. Li Jinquan, a famous Peking Opera performance artist. At the same time, Zheng Yiqiu, a famous director of the National Peking Theatre, also contributed to this visit. Mr. Zheng's Peking Opera "Yangmen Female General" I believe that everyone is very familiar, he and I are both Hubei fellows, it is Mr. Zheng Yiqiu who introduced Mr. Li Jinquan to me and let me come to Beijing to meet Mr. Li. At that time, at the age of 16, I was just a child like a blank piece of paper, but I was fortunate to have the opportunity to face the master, which became a particularly big turning point in my life.

When I was in my hometown in Hubei Province, when I was a child, I was full of a yearning for the city of Beijing, and all I knew was the abstract terms of Tiananmen, summer palace, and temple of heaven. But when I officially set foot in the city and really walked to tiananmen Square, I really felt a very solemn feeling in it, that the building was so tall and magnificent. And when I walked into the Summer Palace and the Temple of Heaven, I suddenly had a sense of substitution, because I was studying the traditional culture and art of the nation, and this architectural structure of the Summer Palace and the Temple of Heaven brought a shock to my soul, and I felt that they and my profession also had a sense of identity. These buildings are so thick and full of heavy cultural atmosphere. That's how the city felt to me when I first came to Beijing.

This feeling has always been with me, and many people still comment that as an opera actor, I attach great importance to the cultivation and improvement of culture and comprehensive quality, which is actually related to the people I came into contact with when I was young and the culture of the city of Beijing. I remember when I met Mr. Zheng Yiqiu, he told me: As an opera actor in the new era, you must not become a traditional old artist, but only perform on stage. With the cultivation style of the National Peking Opera, artists must have a certain cultural accomplishment, which also achieves the artistic style of the National Peking Opera. When all our old plays are performed, they need to be reorganized, their dross, and the essence. Mr. Zheng said that if you want to learn the art of Peking Opera, you must read more books from now on to lay a deep and solid cultural foundation for yourself. So at that time I went to his home on the right side of the house, I remember that it was a bungalow in a courtyard, the home was very simple and clean, and the most unforgettable thing for me was that he had a whole wall of books in his home, both foreign literature, Western philosophy and aesthetics, and many ancient Chinese books. I was dazzled by this wall of books, and I asked Mr. Zheng, have you read so many books? He said I was reading every day. Therefore, everyone who has really reached a certain level must be able to integrate and learn from both Chinese and Western, and they are very strong in their own professional fields, but they are definitely not guarding this bit of their own profession, but they are erudite and open. Such an experience has planted a seed of cultural yearning for a 16-year-old child, so I feel that I am particularly honored, and it can really be said that it is the favor of heaven, so that I came into contact with everyone at this level at that time and came to this city with profound cultural heritage. To this day, I am still willing to pass by Chang'an Avenue every time I drive, because I like her kind of spaciousness, and this open temperament cultivated a broad mind and a pattern of people.

Later, I followed Mr. Li Jinquan to the National Peking Theater for meetings, and I got to know a lot of old seniors. I came to Beijing at the age of 16 to meet Mr. Li Jinquan, and at the age of 17, I came to formally visit the teacher, and then every year I would come to Beijing for three months to study with the teacher. For those three months, I stayed at the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Culture Guest House at No. 83 Beichizi, where there was a particularly convenient condition, that is, when I got up in the morning, I was on the moat when I went to shout my voice, and then I went to the teacher's house to learn drama in the afternoon, and went to the auspicious theater to watch the play in the evening. At that time, the auspicious theater was in Wangfujing, close to where I lived, and I could go to the theater on foot after eating. During that time, I watched a lot of plays at the National Peking Theatre, including Teacher Yuan Shihai, Teacher Feng Zhixiao, Teacher Liu Changyu, Teacher Li Weikang, Teacher Yang Chunxia, etc. I watched almost all the plays performed by famous artists of the National Peking Theater on the spot. In addition to Peking Opera, there are also local dramas from all over the country that come to Beijing to perform, and they are also staged in the auspicious theater, which is really a hundred rivers, basically what kind of drama I have enjoyed, and the top artists on the stage are the top artists of those dramas. This experience made me broaden my horizons at once, I lived there, studied, watched plays, the accumulation of my art and the absorption of culture was really a godsend, I saw a lot of things that I could not see before, since then, I feel that I can not stay in Yichang, Hubei. I am very grateful to my hometown for nurturing me, but I need to study better and more systematically, and I must come to Beijing.

When I arrived at the National Peking Opera house in 2004 and started working officially, I felt like I was part of the city and had truly integrated into the city. Beijing brought me a very atmospheric cultural experience, in such an ancient city with a long history of civilization, as an artist engaged in such a long-standing, ancient national traditional art work, I can especially find a sense of identity in this city. I am often asked, can you, a Southerner, adapt here? I said that I was very adaptable, going all over the world, no matter where I stayed, and finally after walking through that country and that city, I still like Beijing the most. Because Beijing is not only a city with a very deep cultural heritage, but also a city that can absorb hundreds of rivers and rivers, and is a city that gathers a lot of special modern things, the integration of the old and the new in China and the West, for our artists, it is really a very good creative platform, with a working atmosphere that cannot be compared with other cities.

Reporter: In the process of building a national cultural center, how should Peking Opera art better be close to the four cultures mentioned by Secretary Cai Qi (ancient capital culture, red culture, Beijing flavor culture and innovative culture)?

Yuan Huiqin: After coming to work at the National Peking Theatre, I immersed myself in such a pure artistic atmosphere, and only then did I continue to innovate in art. At that time, I almost had a new work presented every year, such as the six-episode Peking Opera TV series "Khitan Yinghou", which has been in the top three of the ratings list since it was broadcast on CCTV. It is precisely because of this play that it has attracted a large number of young audiences and audiences who originally did not like Peking Opera to become my fans. In 2008, I shot China's first Peking Opera digital film "Flower Gun", and in 2009, I won the "Golden Angel" award at the 5th China-US Film Festival in Hollywood. Next, I rehearsed "The Red Mushroom Lady of the Northern Kingdom", which described the deeds of the eight women who threw themselves into the river during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, which belonged to the red culture. In 2018, entrusted by the Central Propaganda Department and the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, and under the support and leadership of President Song Chen, I mainly grasped a red classic play "The Story of the Red Army", and selected the three short stories of a half-cut belt, half a quilt, and a quartermaster told by General Secretary Xi to create the whole play.

When it comes to Beijing flavor culture, for our national Peking Opera Theater and for Peking Opera art, it is not necessary to describe more, Peking Opera itself is the most typical representative of the essence of Beijing flavor culture. At the same time, we have been innovating from the perspective of tradition, national essence, culture and art. If you want to talk about innovative dramas, everyone must definitely watch the National Peking Opera By name. History has developed into our current new era, Beijing as an ancient capital, it is both a cultural center and a political center, so we have been exploring on the road of innovation. For example, when our artists go abroad, we ask them not only to take the repertoire out to perform, but also to open art lecture halls and famous lecture halls abroad to spread our ancient culture to all over the world. Including along the Belt and Road, I myself have given lectures to introduce them to our traditional Chinese Peking Opera art, to introduce our Beijing culture and the history of the capital, so that they can understand the mysterious culture of oriental art and oriental philosophy, and at the same time spread our most attractive cultural forms so that more people can understand our traditional culture. Now, we go abroad to perform, and before each performance, there is a guided tour, which allows people of different cultures to enter our art scene very directly and quickly, so that it is easier to understand the content of the performance and appreciate the charm of Peking Opera art. After watching our performances or listening to our lectures, many foreign friends will say that we must go to Beijing and must go to see Peking Opera. It makes me feel like the work we've done in recent years has been very productive, and a lot of artists like us are doing this kind of communication work continuously. Abroad, audiences basically associate Peking Opera with Beijing. Therefore, the city of Beijing may be more related to us artists engaged in Peking Opera performances than others.

The inheritance of a city's culture, just like the art of Peking Opera, should be better inherited and developed from the long-term cultural accumulation. Every city definitely has its own very important symbol, such as when we go to Los Angeles, we think we want to go to Hollywood Studios and see how Hollywood blockbusters are made. I imagined that if foreigners came to China and Beijing in the future, they would have to think about going to a place to see it. We can make a Peking Opera Entrepreneurship Park, but anyone who comes to Beijing will have to go and see this place called the "Peking Opera Entrepreneurship Park". First, in this garden, you can see a lot of original Peking Opera resident performances, and truly feel the charm of Peking Opera art. Second, we want to set up an exhibition hall for each of those famous Peking opera masters, such as the four famous Dan Mei Shang Chengxun. One of Mr. Mei's pavilions displays his stage costumes, his writings, and his three-dimensional materials, which we can all display with the tools of modern media. Because our current media means are very powerful, after the audience walks in, they only need to scan the QR code to see anything, and all the content in the exhibition hall can be seen. The works created by the four famous contemporary representative artists can be placed in this exhibition hall. And I also want the visitor to see the whole process of completing a work, including the front-end backstage coordination, and how the final effect is presented. This allows them to feel the charm of Peking Opera art in the scene, and realize that the original actors are not simply flipping and performing on the stage, but also the cooperation of the early creation, the four skills and five methods of performance, singing and sitting and virtualized performances, which are the essence of oriental wisdom and oriental philosophy. Through the visit, they can truly appreciate where our charm and wisdom are embodied as an ancient country with thousands of years of civilization. Such an entrepreneurial park can become a symbol of the city of Beijing, and when you think of Beijing, you can think of the Peking Opera Entrepreneurship Park and think of our national art.

The amount of information that Beijing brings to people is very huge, and I often tell friends that if there is an opportunity, I can let my children receive education in Beijing, because the education of children in Beijing not only includes the content received in the classroom, but also covers the cultural atmosphere of the whole city. The city's openness and the amount of information it contains cannot be quantified, but it can bring many, many benefits to children. As artists, we may hope that the city will not only maintain its ancient and rich cultural accumulation and atmosphere, but also hope that it will become a city with a modern atmosphere, a combination of East and West. It is our unshirkable duty to preserve and preserve culture, and we look forward to making more of our efforts for the development of the city.

Reporter: As the vice president of the National Peking Opera House, do you think that Peking Opera is better and what aspects are insufficient in terms of audience, publicity, inheritance and other aspects?

Yuan Huiqin: Now every time I go abroad to perform, the most I do is to spread the culture of our nation through lectures. Once in the Swedish city of Falköping, a former female mayor listened to my lecture and said to me: I didn't understand or understand Peking Opera before, but after listening to your lecture, I understand, I know how to appreciate this art. Since then she said she fell in love with Peking Opera. Therefore, as long as you have the ability to show the most beautiful art to the audience, you will certainly be able to touch people's hearts.

In fact, some young audiences in China also need us to guide them in this way. For traditional art, it's not that they don't like it, it's that we don't guide it well. First, the artistic aesthetics of a young man need to be well guided by artists; second, when he starts, we must present him with the best artistic style, so that we can definitely attract him, and I have always believed in this. Therefore, the audience generally has two states of Peking Opera, either there is no feeling, dislike, and once they get started, they will be obsessed. Along the way, I've seen a lot of audiences who like my plays and end up becoming die-hard Peking Opera fans, which is a good thing.

We in the industry have been pursuing inheritance and innovation, and traditional art also needs to be promoted by the public, but there are indeed great problems in the promotion of traditional art. This has to talk about our propaganda, and I think that in terms of propaganda policy orientation, we must have some policy preference for the dissemination of our national traditional culture, such as Peking Opera. At the same time, there must be a basic requirement and normative constraint on the content of media publicity, and I hope that the media can publicize more national traditional arts like ours. At present, Peking Opera, as our national essence, has not really matched the high degree of the term "national essence" in propaganda, including the policy orientation of propaganda and the requirements of our domestic media. Now as soon as the media platform is opened, every day is the private life of film and television stars, which occupies most of the space, which is a very bad impact on our teenagers, and it is also a particularly big damage, so that they do not know which content is good and which is not good. So at the National Political Consultative Conference, we have been talking about the education of young people. I also often emphasize that as an artist, I want to fight for an audience and an audience, and to compete with these bad online games and multimedia for our teenagers. In the process of this competition, I hope that our media will help more, publicize our excellent traditional culture, and pay less attention to the private lives of traffic stars. We are pulling teenagers to the side of traditional culture, and if the media does not cooperate, this will be a very difficult thing. If we do not instill in our national traditional and excellent culture in young people, it will be a very terrible thing and will affect our education of young people. Once there is a problem in education, it is a big thing that affects the country. So what we're going to do now is compete with these bad stuff for our audience, for our teenage community.

Reporter: Do you have any good suggestions or experiences for promoting the inheritance and development of Peking Opera or opera art?

Yuan Huiqin: For the inheritance and development of traditional arts, we are working hard to promote it step by step. On October 8th, I went to Karamay, Xinjiang for the third time with my team, where I completed the ribbon cutting of the "Peking Opera Cultural Center" of the National Peking Opera House. In the future, in Karamay, we will send teachers to the campus and the community to teach Peking Opera. The reason why Peking Opera can be called the "essence of the country" is not limited to circulation in Beijing, it is also an art that the people of the whole country like. Therefore, we must have Peking Opera in every corner of our country, so that audiences in these remote areas can also enjoy Peking Opera and sing Peking Opera. This is a very meaningful thing, from a political point of view, we want to talk about the great unity of the nation, the process of teaching Peking Opera, learning Peking Opera will deepen the understanding between different nationalities; culturally speaking, to pursue cultural identity, in fact, it is very simple, they must learn Mandarin to learn Peking Opera, so that they will learn more Chinese civilization.

Now that we have done a very good job in the battle against poverty, the people in remote areas, young and old, have made great changes in their material lives, which is a very remarkable thing. The next thing we have to do is implant our cultural and art education, especially art education. Art education is very important for a person's growth, and it is especially important for the comprehensive cultivation of a child. Art can bring people a rich imagination, and many scientists are also art lovers. I often appeal that in today's rapid economic development, the art education of children in remote areas of all ages will not be allowed to be absent, which is also the direction of our efforts.

As our capital, Beijing also has a core driving role in the dissemination of culture. In June this year, I went to Karamay for the first time with chairman Tie Ning's team of the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles, and more than a month later I took a team of 32 people to Karamay for the second time, and Karamay's ethnic minority friends and leaders said that you were the fastest returning artist who came here at that time. That time, we had five performances and two art lectures there in three days, and the audience was very excited. Ethnic minority friends said, Teacher Yuan, you are back again, we are so happy. You say it, we listen to what you say. I was particularly touched by their words, for an artist, spreading culture on the frontier is also a responsibility and responsibility for society. In particular, the artists in the capital, representing the people of the capital, carry the essence of the national culture to remote areas of the old and young, and the audiences of these frontiers are full of reverence for us, so we cannot live up to their expectations. After the people in the frontier have a certain degree of satisfaction in their material lives, they also want to pursue cultural and spiritual satisfaction, which depends on how we guide them.

In Beijing, our opera art has been on campus for more than ten years, and the effect is very good, Tsinghua, Peking University, and Beijing Normal University all have Peking Opera Clubs to attract students to learn Peking Opera art at school. In the vicinity of the National Peking Opera House, we also have a Peking Opera training center, and when the exam is taken, children come from all over the country to take the exam, of course, the most students in Beijing. The three branches of Chaoyang Primary School in Beijing have Peking Opera classes, and many other primary and secondary schools, we also send teachers to teach. Through the entry of opera into the campus, we are constantly sowing beautiful seeds, and I firmly believe that these seeds will take root, sprout, blossom and bear fruit. Among these children, some may engage in professional performances in the future, some will become professional critics, and some will become loyal fans of Peking Opera art. In short, such sowing has a great effect on the dissemination and inheritance of art. I hope that these children, no matter which city in the world they go to in the future, at least when people ask what the most representative Peking Opera art in your country looks like, at least he can give you a general introduction to our national essence and reflect our cultural self-confidence, which is very good.

In addition, in terms of creation, I think that as a national-level theater troupe, the level of artistic creation of the National Peking Opera Should match the degree of civilization of the city and the speed of economic development. This requires our artists to have a very broad vision when creating, stand at the height of internationalization, and radiate our creative content, so that such works of art can match the temperament of the city.

The National Peking Opera Has also made many new attempts over the years, including moving some famous foreign plays to the Peking Opera stage, such as classics like "Turandot". We are still talking about repertoire cooperation with foreign countries. But we must first better inherit our national art, on the basis of solid inheritance, and then do innovation, so as to deserve to become a national academy that can truly lead this industry.

Engaged in this ancient art, we must always think about how to let our ancient art plug in the wings of modern media, so that she can fly higher and go further!