In 1994, the Goethe-Institut asked Lin Zhaohua, deputy director of the People's Art Theatre in Beijing, to rearrange Faust, and he hesitated for a year before replying to the head of the Goethe-Institut, "This is a classic of German cultural classics, and for Germans, this is inviolable." But Chinese have a Chinese interpretation of it, and I will not rank it if I do not follow my nature. ”
Then he hired the band "43 Baojia Street" and let the trendy band get over the drama addiction.
The addition of rock elements to a grand and solemn classic drama stunned all the audiences and surprised the rigorous drama experts, who claimed that this person "has no theoretical framework at all!" However, in Lin Zhaohua's view, stage art is not theoretical, he believes that he has no theoretical basis since the day he became a director, and claimed that "it was intuition that saved me, at that time I also found a lot of books on intuition, and copied some quotations to strengthen my courage." “
Although he has always declared that "his creative state is also half-hard and half-lazy, he has not sorted out a complete director's idea." "But how could this vice dean of Chinese art who came from this class not understand drama?"
He just sees rules and regulations as child's play and stumbling blocks.
Creators, he said, should always despise authority.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="7">1． Fireworks are gorgeous, don't you bother to see more</h1>
Great people mostly survive intuitively. Watching Lin Zhaohua's play, it is difficult for you to imagine what surprising props or lines will appear in the next scene. Who would have thought that a play that should be classified as serious literature would be so playful? However, in Lin Zhaohua's eyes, the serious stage drama was so imaginative and funny.
Tianjin people have an eclectic personality in their bones. When he was a child, Lin Zhaohua had abundant energy and the pleasure of playing. When he was in elementary school, he was relegated for two years for playing, and the tavern in front of his house was opened by Russians, and he and his friends ran to the tavern after school, used a small stick to touch the skirt of the female boss, and at night they would run to the alley with a flashlight to take a picture of the face of the lover who was hiding in the corner. The elders gave him the comment that he was "naughty", but he only admitted "not" and did not admit "inferior".
At the age of 21, he was admitted to the Chinese opera, but he still did not change his play, but now he no longer plays flashlights and sticks, but wants to "have fun and play the drama". But that era deprived him of the right to play, and he was arranged to do labor work in the Ming Tombs Reservoir, only three or five days a year symbolically sitting in class, and only learning Dazhai to learn Daqing, at that time he always thought, "Why did I come to China Opera?" To go deep into the countryside and factories, is it okay for me to study the college of agriculture? “
The naturally rebellious man is always different, and he begins to write letters and give advice to the leaders of the academy, and then he is sure enough to be crowned with the hat of "liberalism".
Fortunately, after graduation, he still became a director as he wished. He had wasted years of study time and he had to make up for it. At that time, he called himself a "fart curtain director", followed by the older generation to catch who called who teacher, but really let him have a new way, but more understanding of drama, the rebellious spirit in his bones began to emerge again, after the rules and regulations directed a few non-painful and itchy plays, he began to wonder, "Drama in China's hundreds of thousands of years of history, why is the script to be written according to the routine?" The directors are all directed according to the ideas of the old directors, and the actors must also copy the old model to act? In his feeling, the drama should be like fireworks, after lighting one and then putting on a new one, always the same sound and the same color, fireworks are gorgeous, don't you bother to see more?
Find some like-minded actors who don't act, do your own drama that is not like drama, and be the director who is least like a director. The seedlings of liberalism began to survive in their hearts again to the crazy spring.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="41">2． Form itself is content</h1>
In 1982, Gao Xingjian (the first Chinese to win the Nobel Prize in Literature) collaborated with Liu Huiyuan, a creator of the Railway Repertory Theatre, to create the avant-garde drama "Absolute Signal", which is about the psychological changes of unemployed youth in society during the robbery on the train. Lin Zhaohua adapted it into a small theater drama without scenes, but the leaders of the arts did not support it, because the performance theme of "Absolute Signal" and the "small theater" form of Lin Zhaohua Lane did not meet the needs of the social situation, and the orthodoxy of the insulting serious drama, and the avant-garde nature of its theme and expression method made it difficult to climb the elegant hall. But Lin Zhaohua's team has been established, the script and actors are ready, and his stubborn tenacity has come up again.
He first changed the script to a positive theme of "warning teenagers by example", and finally got the performance qualification for internal review. But the rehearsal was still "discriminated against", the courtyard only provided seven lights, a wooden table and three chairs, the train cars in the play were made of old cardboard boxes, Lin Zhaohua bought dozens of flashlights, this time not to go to the alley to take care of the romantic farce of the lovers, but because the light chasing lights were not enough. So hard and "unpopular" He Leng was gritted his teeth and lined up, and many of the old leaders and old experts in the courtyard who had been engaged in stage plays for a lifetime were hooked, "You can still act like this!" "On the spot, I agreed to the performance.
"Absolute Signal" began to perform in November 1982, a total of more than 100 performances, the scene was full of rave reviews, Mr. Cao Yu, the first dean of Renyi, personally wrote a letter of congratulations, and American newspapers also reported that "China's avant-garde theater was born!" “
Lin Zhaohua's passion was completely ignited. This former "fart curtain director" has finally begun to take charge of the banner of new drama. He's also getting busier. After serving as the vice dean of human arts, he never had any interest in administrative work, and the dean's office never found his shadow, he had his own "kennel": there was a dilapidated three-story building in the courtyard, a cotton curtain, a hard bed, cluttered and full of "drama factors" that only he could read, and countless high-quality works were born in the "kennel", each with a very different maverick style.
When arranging the "New Story Compilation", he did not come up with a complete script in advance, but asked the actors to "improvise" based on Lu Xun's original book. The daily task of the actors is not to rehearse the lines, but to read the "New Story Compilation" over and over again, find the sentences that each person can touch them most, and then collide passionately on the stage, and he completes the final cut, and the actions and lines of each performance are different.
It was 2000, his "kennel" place was too small to show, so he took all the cast members to an abandoned workshop in the southern city of Beijing for a month and a half to eat and live in that closed door, the prop machine for making briquettes on the stage was a real guy from the countryside by the stage dancers, and there were seven or eight tons of coal balls in the props, which were real coal balls, and the actors crawled and played in the briquettes every day, and the whole body and nostrils were black when bathing.
What is even more amazing is that when they went to Germany to perform, the crew's luggage was compressed and compressed, but the huge briquette machine, along with the seven or eight tons of briquettes, was transported to the plane. What impressed Lin Zhaohua was the big gasoline barrels, and in the interval between the German performances, he personally went to the battle, placed the briquettes in the gasoline barrels, put on the stove grate, and roasted the sweet potatoes on them, "Really roasted, really eaten, and really fragrant." ”
"Lin Zhaohua is so old, why are he still playing with formalism?" Nor do I learn from Akira Kurosawa, and return to the profundity of philosophy. For the incomprehension and questioning of others, Lin Zhaohua just laughed and did not say anything, and when he was idle, he would reply: the form itself is the content, and the seriousness itself is the attitude.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="42" >3</h1>
Lin Zhaohua admitted that he had been playing seriously all his life, playing seriously and enjoying it.
In 1998, Lin Zhaohua fell seriously ill, lying in his "kennel" for more than a month, and suddenly one day he was completely sick and jumped up, and he wanted to combine Chekhov's "Three Sisters" and Becket's "Waiting for Godot" into a play. The leaders of the academy still disagree, so ridiculous classics, why do you let the two literary masters and the audience around the world feel bad? Lin Zhaohua can only raise funds on his own.
It should be a masterpiece that won't feel left behind in a few decades. Yu Hua said that the play "places the melancholy beauty of Chekhov and the sad vulgarity of Beckett on the same stage and at the same time, which is surprising and gratifying." But in the end, it only played a dozen times and could not continue to perform, because "lost several Fukang cars, and at that time, Fukang cars were 180,000." I have no money to lose. “
"The biggest problem of our system, education, and system is to stifle individuality, and most public opinion emphasizes consistency and unity, but art needs individuality the most." As for the out-of-pocket rehearsal, he admitted: "Fun is more important than anything else." ”
He always remembered a classic scene on this "two-in-one" stage: an isolated island in the water, three sisters waiting to leave; on the other side of the island was a tree, and two people were waiting for Godot under the tree. Across a quiet line of water, the lines fell one by one, fell into the water, and fell into his heart. The water is not wide, and people on the island can easily get out, and people outside the island can easily break in. But they remained still, waiting in silence, they always contained hope, hope in hopelessness, like Lin Zhaohua himself, who never learned to despair in hope.
In 2011, the title of Lin Zhaohua's Drama Invitational Exhibition was: What is Drama? In 2012, at the Lin Zhaohua Drama Invitation Exhibition, he asked himself: Drama is a game. A play is not to repeated a literary theme and life doctrine, but through the feelings of the director and actors poured into the re-understanding of the work, in Lin Zhaohua's mind, this is the director's "second theme", and his understanding of the drama is that the profound is too heavy, the business is too shallow, and it is happy to be able to do something you like. "I do not serve shakespeare's masters, only for self-expression.
For example, he platooned Hamlet. In the southern Hu and Beilin of the theater world, Hu is Hu Weimin of Shanghai. Hu Weimin said that people who engage in drama must line up a "Hamlet" that belongs only to themselves in this life, but for this classic, even Lin Zhaohua, who is so confident and arrogant, does not dare to try it easily, and later at Hu Weimin's memorial service, Lin Zhaohua solemnly promised to the portrait: I must line up my own "Hamlet".
The final stage backdrop is made of rags and cotton collage, a broken fan, an old barber chair, and broken old electrical appliances. The actors don't wear wigs, they don't even wear makeup, their costumes are full of pleats, and they ask questions in a set similar to old Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s: Live or Die!
It seems to be a question of Orthodox Chinese drama, and it is also like ringing the death knell of the old theory of drama. The reporter interviewed him, and he said that this play is to fulfill Hu Weimin's dream and not mine. Drama is too difficult, a book to write for a few years, review a few years, row a few years, more than ten years have passed, how can the times still keep up?
Later, in the row of "White Deer Plain", he specially found the Xi'an "Old Cavity" Troupe, singing from northern Shaanxi to Beijing, in fact, the play did not very much need these singing segments, but when he learned that the "Old Cavity" did not pass on foreign surnames, only his own family, the world would sing only these seven or eight people and the youngest was almost sixty, he decided to bring the "Old Cavity". When Chen Zhongzhong wrote "White Deer Plain", he said that he wanted to write a book that could be used as a pillow when he died. The book was completed, and Chen Zhongzhong was gone. The old cavity is the same, I am really afraid that it will not be able to sing one day, absolutely. ”
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="43" >4</h1>
For several years, Lin Zhaohua did not like to survive within the system. On the cover of his autobiography, The Director's Little Man's Book, he laughs at himself. "Zhongju is my mother, Renyi is my father, but they don't love me, who makes me a 'contrarian son'?"
Indeed, such a deviant old boy has always been a rebel of traditional drama and an alternative to kicking the field, and he interprets his identity as a contrarian in this way. "I had to find a form to convey my interpretation of the play to the audience, but the traditional, ready-made form of expression was not enough, I had to find a special form to convey my interpretation, but in artistic creation, the text was not able to interpret my play." Frankly speaking, I don't think it's okay to create art by relying on theory, and I despise theory. ”
He received an invitation but did not attend the seminar on the centenary of the birth of Chinese drama, the Great Hall of the People awarded the award, the general secretary personally received it because the rehearsal did not catch up, he asked Pu Cunxin to do the work, and when he returned, he took a photo with the award certificate, "Organizational recognition, heart collar." "As for the administrative position and the honor he has won in China's no. 1 theater hall, he is completely unsympathetic, and he also understands the incomprehension of the leaders and the audience." In fact, I grew up under the education of the party, but I still retained some personality and was not strangled, maybe it was too late for them to want to be strangled, so I went on mixing. ”
Another decision of the seminar was to plant a white fruit tree for each winner in Beijing's Qingnian Lake Park, and to hang a name tag, where a "Chinese Drama Theme Park" would be built in the future. Although he was in Beijing, Lin Zhaohua did not visit this tree in the past, nor did he wait for it to be watered and fertilized, so he took his little grandson to see it once.
"The little grandson likes this tree, also called Lin Zhaohua, and climbs up the trunk of the tree, and it makes people happy to see the award."