Thunder drama "Blood Flame".
The troupe is rehearsing.
Performance clip of lei opera "Lei Zu Chen Wenyu".
Lei drama folding zi drama "Breaking into the Temple examination clam".
Thunder drama "Our Lady of Lingnan".
The gong sounded, the drumstick fell, the guzheng pipa sounded, the sound was melodious, and a good drama was staged. "Mice catch cats and throw them through the window, chickens catch eagles and half-sky flights..." At the Zhanjiang Art Season, which just ended not long ago, the five generations of old, middle-aged and young thunder opera actors jointly performed the large-scale revolutionary historical theme thunder drama "Blood Flame", which won a round of applause from online and offline audiences.
In Zhanjiang, the cultural genes of Lei opera penetrate into the bone marrow of every Hong Kong city, walking in the streets and alleys, you can listen to authentic Lei opera songs. As one of the four major drama genres in Guangdong, Lei Opera was included in the list of national intangible cultural heritage protection in 2010.
In the long history of development, Lei Opera has made innovative breakthroughs, but also encountered lows, looking back at the sour, sweet and bitter spicy of Lei Opera along the way, you may be able to glimpse the future of Lei Opera's road to breaking the circle.
Nanfang Daily reporter Fu Xiaobing The pictures in this edition are provided by the interviewees
The spiritual food of the local people
Zhanjiang is known as the "opera oasis", and there are more than 200 troupes that perform in the folk all year round, and the number of performances reaches more than 20,000 times a year. Among them, thunder drama accounts for half of it. This local drama performed in the Leizhou dialect has a strong vitality and a broad mass base, and is the spiritual food of the local people.
Lei opera is a unique genre of drama in Leizhou Peninsula, from singing and form to stage performance, it is constantly evolving in the inheritance of history. According to the "Lei Opera Chronicle" edited by Chen Xiang, Song Rui and Zhan Nansheng, it was recorded that it evolved from Leizhou opera to Lei opera, which lasted more than 300 years, during which it experienced four historical stages, such as girl song, persuasion song, daban song and thunder opera.
In 1964, the teachers of the Leizhou Opera Experimental Class of zhanjiang regional art school suggested that the Leizhou opera be renamed "Lei opera", and after obtaining relevant approvals and recognitions, lei opera was listed on the list of theater arts and evolved into a wonderful flower in the opera industry.
Lei opera is inseparable from the strong local color of the Leizhou Peninsula, and its development is closely related to the nature of the divine birth drama. The countryside of Zhanjiang celebrates the New Year's Festival by paying tribute to the gods to sing operas and pray for smooth wind and rain, peace and smoothness. For example, in Ming Jiajing's "Guangdong Tongzhi Minwuzhi Customs", the "Leizhoufu" article says: "Lantern ... It is time to sound gongs and drums, play orchestras, pretend to be ghosts, play along the street, and reach the dawn. ”
Going to the countryside to perform is the norm for the troupe, and the audience in many villages is very popular. Embellished by the starry sky at night, on the makeshift country stage, the troupe sang for several days.
The development of lei opera depends on the customs and habits of the Leizhou Peninsula, although the thunder opera performance has a market throughout the year, but in recent years, affected by the epidemic, there have been many troupes that cannot survive and have no choice but to disband. In addition, modern people have more entertainment options, and the audience of thunder dramas is decreasing.
The audience of thunder drama, in addition to the elderly, is mostly children. "We are ignorantly enjoying thunder drama at an ignorant age." Ms. Chen said. This "post-90s" Leizhou person recalled that when she was a child, the village invited the troupe to perform every year, and she went to watch with her friends, and after "returning from school", she imitated danjiao broken steps, twisting steps, waving sleeves, swinging sleeves and other actions at home. "It's hard to see what it was like now."
A batch of leading figures of thunder opera came out of Zhanjiang, and they discharged one high-quality drama after another and stepped onto one big stage after another. Good actors and good repertoire not only bloom on the land of Leizhou, in addition to Southeast Asian countries such as Malaysia, France and other European countries have the footprints of thunder drama.
So far, Lei Opera has its foothold in the national theater art and opera circle, and has achieved remarkable results. Tang Jinfeng, general manager of Zhanjiang Experimental Lei Opera Troupe Co., Ltd., introduced that the "Chief of Catching The Cast of Casts", "Liang Hongyu Hanging Commander" and "Lingnan Virgin" created by Zhanjiang Experimental Lei Opera Troupe were performed in Beijing three times in 1992, 2001 and 2015. Among them, "The Chief of the Village of Catching Lots" won the "Five One Project Award" of the Central Propaganda Department of the CPC Central Committee in 1992, Lin Fen, the star of "Liang Hongyu Hanging Commander", won the 19th Chinese Drama Plum Blossom Award, and "Our Lady of Lingnan" won the excellent repertoire, excellent music singing design, excellent performance and other awards in the Fourth National Ethnic Minority Drama Show.
Innovative exploration of upward breakthroughs
As an opera for the people of leizhou peninsula to entertain themselves, lei opera just had no script at the beginning, the performers exported into chapters, and the singing voice only had one tone, simple and bland, and could not adapt to the complex plot. In 1963, Chen Xiangpu, the originator of the Lei opera singing cavity reform, created more than 20 new tones, and recorded and sorted out Leizhou folk music as the stage atmosphere music of Leizhou opera, and established a system of singing cavity to make it its own style.
With the support of relevant departments, the Zhanjiang Art Research Office solicited papers, comprehensively collected, sorted out and screened in the city, selected excellent Thunder Opera singing voices through the big waves and sand and classified them one by one, carried out "three definites" (fixed cavity, fixed plate, and fixed name), and finally edited and published "Thunder Opera Music". It is reported that this collection and collation of 4 categories, such as singing cavity, small songs, instrumental music, gong and drum sutras, a total of 386 songs (articles), 22 people participated in the creation.
"The singing voice is the soul of a drama genre, and we can't let the thunder opera singing voice float around like a falling leaf." If the troupe sings its own songs, it will be difficult to form a synergy of promotion in the long run. The relevant person in charge of the Zhanjiang Art Research Office said, "We have put together the singing voice of Lei Opera and sorted out everyone's painstaking efforts into a book." Let the fellow drama people know that the thunder drama has a rich family foundation. ”
If the singing voice is the soul of opera, then the repertoire is the background of opera. The singing voice is constantly innovating, and the repertoire has been exploring the road. The rich repertoire and its creation are an important magic weapon for the long-term prosperity of thunder opera.
In recent years, Zhanjiang has carried forward the essence of thunder opera, rooted in the locality, based on the times, and created high-quality plays.
In order to rescue and inherit the traditional pomp and circumstance of Lei opera and "unique work", Lin Fen, a national first-class actor, and Zeng Cheng, a famous uglier of Lei opera, created "Breaking into the Temple, Torturing Clams", which incorporated the difficulty skill program actions such as "swinging array", "eighteen frames", "sling rope" and "jumping chair" of Lei opera, hoping that the play would become a model drama that must be learned by Lei opera students to get started, and it is also a compulsory course for inheriting lei opera skills.
In 2014, Zhanjiang Experimental Lei Opera Troupe boldly purchased the excellent local theme script "Lingnan Virgin", contacted experts to ask for advice, and obtained 2 million yuan of supporting financial support, striving to create high-quality products with high standards.
For more than a year, all members of Zhanjiang Experimental Lei Opera Troupe Co., Ltd. have united to continuously rehearse and revise the script of "Lingnan Virgin", and invited the help of seniors, experts and art students in the theater industry, and finally "Lingnan Virgin" shined on the stage and won many national and provincial awards.
There are 11 drama genres in the province, but lei opera has no inheritance center, how to solve the bottleneck problem of thunder opera development? Tang Jinfeng has been calling for the establishment of the "Zhanjiang Lei Opera Inheritance and Protection Center" on the agenda, planning to build a heritage base integrating lei opera rehearsal, performance, teaching, office, warehouse, etc. The relevant departments of Zhanjiang City have issued documents to standardize the lei opera market, giving play to the leading role of zhanjiang lei opera troupe and county-level lei opera troupe.
Pass on the baton of opera talents
After the reform of the cultural system in 2012, people kept leaving the troupe, and the 15 classmates who joined the troupe with Tang Jinfeng were now the only ones who remained in the Zhanjiang Experimental Lei Troupe. Tang Jinfeng said, "The cultivation of opera talents needs the accumulation and precipitation of time, however, due to the difficult living environment of lei opera practitioners, it is difficult to attract high-level talents to engage in lei opera research now, and it is difficult for young people to sink their hearts into this line." ”
In order to let the thunder opera have successors, in 2016, the thunder opera industry launched the "famous teachers and apprentices", passing on the skills of the famous thunder opera masters themselves through the form of passing on the help, and watering the flower of art. Lin Fen, winner of the Chinese Drama Plum Blossom Award, accepted Tang Jinfeng, He Dongjuan, Wu Hui, Li Meiqiao, and Cai Guining as apprentices; Zeng Cheng, a famous lei opera artist and the first ugliest person in lei opera, accepted Huang Gui, Chen Zhongsheng, and Xu Jiaoyan as apprentices; Zeng Jian, a famous lei opera artist and second-level composer, accepted Ou Zhiming as an apprentice. Last year, Huang Gui, an apprentice, accepted young actor Wu Renping as an apprentice.
In 2018, Zhanjiang Experimental Lei Opera Troupe entrusted the secondary opera school affiliated to the China Academy of Performing Arts to send 13 lei opera students to Beijing to study. Through the school's professional training program and professional teacher guidance, it is hoped to train a group of high-end opera talents with standardized systems.
In addition, Tang Jinfeng plans to cultivate her own creative team, she thought, set up the platform, start with the folding play, encourage young people to boldly try to create, "even if the audience who is currently discharged has not recognized it, it doesn't matter, allow us to fail, we can really grow." ”
The wonderful performance of the 2021 Zhanjiang Art Season has brought great shock to the industry, but also made them float a little worry. Many of the plays performed during the period, in addition to the actors are local, the screenwriters, directors, lighting, stage artists and many others are not locals.
"We do not exclude the excellent team that has been parachuted in, they have the talent resources and network resources that we lack at this stage, which can inject more vitality into the opera." The relevant person in charge of the Zhanjiang Art Research Office said, "If the performance is separated from the main creative team members, they must be invited back again during the next rehearsal, so that the communication cost is too large and the drama is difficult to sustainably develop." ”
Next, Zhanjiang Art Research Office will help set up an incubation base for opera creation in western Guangdong, establish a good growth mechanism for creators, and cultivate and form a local creative team.
The inheritance of opera should also start from the dolls to cultivate the main force of future performances. From 2015 to 2022, Zhanjiang Art Research Office has hosted the "Opera into Campus" activity for three consecutive years to cultivate students' sense of identity with Zhanjiang's characteristic culture. As the main teacher of the opera section, Tang Jinfeng let the children cooperate with the performance of the folding drama in the classroom, and led the children to the ocean of thunder opera through personal demonstration. Tang Jinfeng said that after the class, many children came to feedback and had a new understanding of lei opera.
During the epidemic period, the offline performance market was restricted, drawing on the model of cultivating theater audiences promoted by other brother dramas across the country, Tang Jinfeng said that next, she hopes to use the small stage of the troupe to seek cooperation to build a thunder opera "cloud theater", so as to expand the promotion of thunder opera and promote the growth of talent in the troupe.