Theoretical Weekly·New Domain丨Contemporary Expression of Innovative Classics Playing Endless Cultural "Movement"

Core tips

Take the rules of the ancients and open up your own life. General Secretary Xi Jinping stressed at the symposium on cultural inheritance and development that only by comprehensively understanding the history of Chinese civilization can we more effectively promote the creative transformation and innovative development of China's excellent traditional culture, more effectively promote the construction of socialist culture with Chinese characteristics, and build the modern civilization of the Chinese nation. Looking forward to the new era, excellent works containing Chinese culture and style, such as the dance drama "Da Meng Dunhuang" and the TV program "Chinese Poetry Conference", have continued to emerge, providing reference for exploring creative transformation and innovative development, and will contribute to the development of Chinese culture.

Cai Song Gu Yuhan

The report of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China put forward: "Promote cultural self-confidence and self-improvement, and create a new glory of socialist culture." This points out the direction and focus of innovation for literary and artistic workers. In recent years, domestic new dance drama masterpieces have been produced one after another, giving birth to a number of excellent main theme works that are artistic, entertaining, and rich in traditional cultural connotations, such as the 2022 CCTV Spring Festival Gala, the dance poetry drama "Only This Green Green" inspired by "A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains" has received rave reviews. The artistic value and artistic soul of the new dance drama lies in its ability to deeply inherit and develop the excellent traditional Chinese culture, enhance cultural self-confidence, improve the aesthetic level, and promote the all-round development of people. At a time when the construction of spiritual civilization is deepening, dance drama art in the new era provides a high-quality carrier for the development of advanced socialist culture, the promotion of revolutionary culture, and the inheritance of excellent traditional Chinese culture, which is of great significance for promoting the further development of socialist culture with Chinese characteristics in the new era.

Contemporary empowerment of traditional culture

Chinese culture has a long history, and Chinese civilization is broad and profound. Drawing nutrients from excellent traditional culture is a main line of the development of modern Chinese dance drama. Since 1939, when Wu Xiaobang, the founder of the mainland's "new dance art", created the three-act dance drama "Poppy", Chinese modern dance drama has been innovated and gradually become a cultural carrier that the people like to see. However, under the influence of the literary and artistic creation of the former Soviet Union, for a period of time after the founding of New China, domestic dance dramas were mainly ballet, and the well-known ones were "Dove of Peace" and "Thief of Immortal Grass". As an art with body language as the main mode of expression, dance naturally lacks the means to carry out complex narratives, and the intuitive display of human beauty is the main means of lyricism. Since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, some artists have returned to tradition, explored materials in literary and artistic classics, actively explored the deep combination of dance drama and traditional culture, and strived to create a number of literary and artistic masterpieces with Chinese national characteristics.

Anchor classics. The excellent traditional Chinese culture has a long history and is the spiritual lifeblood of the Chinese nation. New dance drama is good at finding cultural genes from traditional literature and art, and recreating traditional works through recreation. As the culmination of traditional Chinese aesthetics and traditional culture, "Dream of Red Mansions" has naturally become a source of inspiration for many literary and artistic workers. The dance drama "Dream of Red Mansions" produced by Jiangsu Grand Theatre adopts the traditional chapter novel structure, reinterprets its classic scenes, and reconstructs the symmetrical and neat oriental aesthetics with elements such as "twelve dance segments", "twelve golden dragons" and "twelve colors", so that the artistic essence in "Dream of Red Mansions" is finally integrated into the meaning space of stage art.

Promote national characteristics. What is national is what is world. New dance dramas should be good at showing national characteristics and interpreting Chinese national culture to the world in the form of dance dramas. For example, the large-scale dance drama "Awakening Lion" created by Guangzhou Song and Dance Theater with the theme of the national intangible cultural heritage project "Guangdong Awakening Lion" tells the heroic deeds of the people in Sanyuanli during the Opium War to resist the British by going back in history, showing the posture of today's awakening lions looking back at their ancestors. Through the new presentation of the lion dance, a national cultural symbol, the dance drama actively promotes the promotion of the national spirit and the transmission of cultural bloodline.

By reproducing classic works and promoting national characteristics, the new dance drama evokes the resonance and echo of the soul of the vast audience to the traditional culture and national spirit, which is of great significance to the inheritance and development of culture.

Innovative leadership of trend culture

The inheritance and development of culture is not the mechanical appropriation of old cultural symbols, but the innovative development of traditional culture, and further produces new cultural content and new forms that meet the needs of the new era. As a trend culture that will be produced in every era and generally accepted by the public, its content and form reflect the trend of social preferences to a certain extent. In the practice of the creation and dissemination of new dance dramas, it is not difficult to see that some artists are embarking on a development path based on traditional culture and guided by trend culture, constantly promoting the breaking of thinking walls, getting rid of creative stereotypes, and strengthening the integration of forms, which is worthy of reference for later generations.

Push your thinking to break the wall. "Let Marxism become Chinese, the excellent traditional Chinese culture become modern, and let the new culture formed through 'combination' become the cultural form of Chinese-style modernization." Cultural innovation takes traditional culture as the source and foundation, and emerges by changing the way of organization and expression. In the creation of new dance dramas, learning from the excellent achievements of trend culture and breaking the inherent creative thinking and creation methods is a main line. At the CCTV Spring Festival Gala in 2020, the dance "Fishing Light Song" excerpted from the dance drama "Never Dying Airwaves" was widely acclaimed. Under the joint creation of the director and choreographer, this revolutionary historical theme dance restores the old Shanghai buildings such as Shikumen, newspaper hall, and qipao shop in the thirties and forties of the last century by creating life-oriented and cinematic scenes, presenting the story to the audience in a more three-dimensional way, which not only deepens the theme expression of the dance, but also enhances the visual experience of the audience.

Strengthen formal integration. Through the translation of emerging art, traditional cultural elements are reorganized into new works of art with new forms and styles. In recent years, a new cultural form formed by the re-creation of traditional culture and called "national tide" has become a representative of trend culture and has extended from the field of clothing to other fields. In "Only This Green Green", the main creative team uses dance as a bridge to connect ancient and modern, combines the dancers' posture with the intangible cultural heritage skills of "A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains", visually shows the beauty of classical art, the fresh beauty of national colors, and the beauty of poetry and painting, successfully expanding the dramatic space and artistic meaning of allusions and anecdotes in the play, and presenting it in a way that the audience likes to see at present.

The symbiosis of consumer culture

The report of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China pointed out: "Improve the modern public cultural service system and innovate the implementation of cultural benefit projects." "In the context of the increasingly hot cultural consumption market, the formation of consumer culture has greatly promoted the development of the cultural industry, significantly broadened the influence of artistic works in the commercial field, and fed back creators and cultural communication platforms by accelerating and deepening the economic transformation of cultural products." This consumer culture promotes self-inclusion and value-added of cultural products as consumer goods to better meet the needs of young people. The balance between commercial value and artistic value is a major innovation of new dance drama compared with traditional dance drama, and its consumption is mainly young people, and has basically formed a long-tail consumption culture. In recent years, the new dance drama has not only achieved innovation in content and form, but also carried out digital transformation and communication path optimization through Internet new media, guided by audience needs, broadened consumption scenarios, cultivated consumer groups, achieved strong hematopoietic function, let industrial development feed back the development of cultural undertakings, and artistic creation and consumption have formed a new cultural form of mutual assistance and symbiotic development.

Deepen digital transformation. In the all-media era, influence communication and visual storytelling have become the mainstream forms of mass media, and are very suitable for the visual physical expression characteristics represented by dance. When the art of dance drama is gradually digitized, from offline to online, its exhibition space has been greatly extended. For example, since its premiere in 2021, "Only This Green Green" has toured all over the country, and there have been many times that "one ticket is hard to find". The emergence of this phenomenon is inseparable from the topic and traffic impact brought by the show's embrace of the Internet ecology. The People's Daily Weibo topic #Thousands of miles of rivers and mountains are alive# and #Dance poetry drama only this green # has a total of 61 million views, and the creative short video "Challenging the Green Waist" has a total of 58.4 million views and 2.18 million likes. In December 2021, "Only This Green Green" appeared on the "Most Beautiful Night" New Year's Eve party hosted by UGC platform Bilibili, with more than 180 million online viewers. In the digital exploration of new dance dramas, the success of "Only This Green Green" is by no means unique. At present, a number of excellent new dance drama works have successfully set off a boom in watching stage art, and the theater has become a hot cultural consumption place.

Optimize propagation paths. Why can new dance dramas set off a wide range of cultural booms, especially to gain the love and attention of young people? The publicity effect of communication path optimization is one of the main reasons. With the traffic advantage and communication breadth of the Internet platform, the new dance drama can break through the time and space limitations of the fixed stage and penetrate into the audience terminal. At the same time, in order to eliminate the acceptance threshold of the audience as much as possible and get more views, the work should be disseminated in a more condensed and attractive way. Discussion groups and interest groups related to works have emerged as the times require, which can transform relatively static works into dynamic cyber information, continuously maintain the communication effect, and constantly gain new audiences.

[The authors are special researchers of Hunan Normal University Base of Hunan Province Research Center for Theoretical System of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, and master's students of the College of Literature of Hunan Normal University; This article is a phased research result of the major project of Hunan Provincial Social Science Foundation Think Tank "Research on Strengthening the Party's Political Supervision in the Field of Propaganda, Ideology and Culture" (20AZD105)]