With a deep, hoarse and Qipai charm sigh singing, the small theater of the Shanghai Peking Opera Company Peking Opera "Deer Song" kicked off. This is a story of hope and desire, humanity and demonism, redemption and betrayal. The exquisite use of puppets representing the demons in the play, the stage art with both Dunhuang color and simple modernity, and the performance full of the traditional core of opera art singing and chanting all show a high degree of completion, and many beneficial explorations have been made between integrity and innovation.
In the post-performance talk on the same day, the main creative team introduced that three kinds of combined explorations were made in this play: "traditional music + modern musical instruments", "traditional opera + Western characteristics", "traditional programs + contemporary limbs (folk dance)". In the drama viewing, you can experience it. The most striking of these is undoubtedly the combination of traditional music and modern instruments. At the beginning of the performance, the ethereal and dreamlike feeling created by the modern musical instrument handset, coupled with the sound of pipa and camel bells, immediately brought people to the Gobi. Duduk, a traditional musical instrument from Armenia, creates a strong tone of desolation, loneliness and tragedy, which is appropriate and deep in this play.
The three composers, Lin Yuan, Zhou Yi and Gao Jun, are like musical magicians, and their creations are full of whimsy: the hand disc can play a melody or become a harmonic texture, and if necessary, it can also be a special sound. Peking Opera percussion, bamboo flute, and hand disc play the "Wannian Huan" song together, which is refreshing. When connecting with the Peking Opera Orchestra, because of the stitching of Peking Opera percussion and the typical music of [Xipi], "Erhuang" or "Siping" played in modern instruments, the transition between the two is seamless and abrupt. What is impressive is that when the King of the Apocalypse is bloodied in the oasis, a beam of chasing light in the dark field only hits the lobby drum. With the slow and urgent, sometimes strong and sometimes weak, and intermittent and intermittent rhythm, a colorful movement with turbulent blood and energy was played, and the exquisite skills and abundant emotions ignited the audience, causing the audience to applaud in unison. What makes this cadenza even more subtle is that it gives full play to the symbolic, imaginative, illusory, and abstract nature of music.
In the climax of the play, there is no traditional opera beating, but only a drum. In the case of stage performances that are deprived of vision, the auditory art exerts its greatest effectiveness, even beyond the expression of visual presentation. In the dense drumbeat, the tragic scene of swords, swords, rivers of blood, wails and shouts intertwined, everything appeared in front of you. Stripped of the visual and let the sound tell the story, it is really a wonderful creation. Exploring the boundaries of artistic expression, injecting more diverse artistic means into ancient art, "absorbing" the essence of traditional culture, and "exhaling" new ideas, new situations, and new ideas are not exactly the unremitting pursuit of small theater opera performances? From this point of view, the exploration of music in the play "Luming" allows us to see an exciting new atmosphere.
At the end of the whole play, the traditional suona ending is rearranged into a musical segment with rock and roll colors, which makes people feel that when the play is over and wakes up from a dream, the musicians fiddle with the color palette like a naughty boy, colorful, and finally humorously cover up the previous paintings, bringing people back to reality, those battles, betrayals, and love are just a scene.
Text: Zhang Xuan
Photo: Courtesy of the organizer
Editor: Sun Yanyang (Xi student)