Ten fingers flicked the silk thread, and the originally static puppet villain was immediately injected into the soul - I saw the scholar flicking his sleeves, his breath was high, and he sang about his ambition while flipping through the scroll. The tune is melodious and the puppets are flexible and interesting.
Marionette folk artist Cai Dongmei is the one who makes the puppet villain "live". Under her tugging, the puppets can not only dance knives and guns, but also dance and ink, and the vivid puppet villains seem to have come out of the record book.
Three years ago, Cai Dongmei was still an unknown folk puppet artist, most of the time, her performance stage was the small stall at the temple fair, with her, there were two or three musical instrument teachers, one or two actors, sometimes there were a dozen or so audiences, sometimes there was none.
Country roads, fields, and gatherings are all her stages. After more than 20 years of art, she has never stepped into the theater with a puppet show, let alone imagined that one day she would be able to walk out of Zhangpu County and Zhangzhou, Fujian.
The turning point occurred during a fortuitous video upload. One day in 2021, Cai Dongmei uploaded a video of her performance to Douyin, and unexpectedly received 77,000 likes from netizens: "The girl is really not simple, the master is in the folk!" "The heart of the hand, the perfect unity, traditional culture and art are worth inheriting and carrying forward"......
In the past three years, Cai Dongmei's Douyin account has accumulated 1.12 million followers, and she is known to the majority of fans under the name Amei.
Coming to the Spring Festival in 2024, Cai Dongmei waited for a bigger stage that was seen by more attention: the Spring Festival Gala - she deliberately wore a different bun from the usual ponytail, wore a white satin shirt and a dark horse-faced skirt, and appeared on the stage of CCTV's Chinese New Year's Eve opera party with the puppet "Brother An Tong".
As soon as Amei opened her voice standing on the stage, it was a warm and cordial Hokkien language: "Brother Antong!" After 23 years of art, Amei took the puppet "Brother Atong" and finally walked into the ideal opera hall from the stage in Zhangpu Village.
into the play, like intoxicated
The seeds of puppetry were planted as early as Amei's childhood.
Amei was born in 1987 in rural southern Fujian. Every year, the children in the village are most looking forward to the troupe that will come to perform in the 11th month of the lunar calendar. The improvised simple stage transforms into a wonderful opera world, which has become the place that Amei yearns for the most.
She was only seven or eight years old and was so obsessed with drama that she spread a straw mat on the straw and wrapped it in a quilt at night. If the performance is performed until three o'clock in the morning, Amei will go home at three o'clock, and she must watch it before leaving. Once, she followed her grandfather to herd cattle, and she was still thinking about the drama that others were singing, and she almost fell down without paying attention, and when she looked up, she couldn't even see her grandfather's shadow.
Because of the poor conditions at home, when she was 14 years old, Amei began to work and study, learning from the old puppet show artists in the village.
Because I really like it, and I have some talent, Ah Mei learned puppet show faster than others, and on the third day of learning from the master, Ah Mei had the courage to stand on the stage, and every time the master taught a new content, Ah Mei would sing the next day. The more she went deeper, the more she felt the charm of this craft.
Puppet theatre originated in the Han Dynasty and flourished in the Tang Dynasty, and during the Jin and Tang dynasties, it moved south with the Central Plains scholars into Quanzhou, Fujian and other places. According to the "Book of Transformation" written by Tan Qiao, a Taoist priest from Quanzhou in the late Tang Dynasty, puppet shows that puppet shows were popular in Quanzhou at the latest in the late Tang Dynasty. In 2006, the Hokkien marionette was included in the national intangible cultural heritage.
According to the different puppet shapes and manipulation skills, puppet shows are divided into bag puppets, marionettes, stick puppets, wire puppets and other forms, and it is the marionettes that Amei learned. It has nearly 300 tunes, and the performance requires the actors to be familiar with the lyrics and singing, and they need to hide behind the puppets, relying only a few thin threads in their hands to draw out the movements and emotions of the characters.
The soul of a marionette comes entirely from the performer. "You have to lift the line and control it, otherwise it will float around. What kind of character is mentioned, I have to let it take what form, and I have to follow the mood of the character at different paces. Getting the puppet to walk well is the hardest. ”
Amei said that the puppet performance will also encounter the problem of stuck wires, especially when performing martial arts scenes, the puppet's helmets, costumes, hands and feet are easy to trip together, and it is necessary to "have words in the mouth, scenes in the mind, and knowledge in the heart".
The growth and success of a puppeteer is not easy. When Amei first learned, there were four senior sisters and junior sisters, but within two or three years, only Amei was left. "Sometimes there isn't even one show a month, and people don't see a way out. "They went out to work, slowly got married, started a family, and finally gave up." I'm the only one who can't bear it. ”
In order to balance survival and love, Amei has worked five jobs. My first job was as a waiter at a restaurant in Gulangyu, Xiamen, at the age of 17. Later, she returned to her hometown and worked as a storage box in a battery car factory, a conductor on a bus bound for the county seat, and an administrator in a factory office.
There is no threshold for these jobs that Amei does, and she doesn't have much demand for work, the only thing she cares about is whether she needs to work overtime. Because she can't work overtime, she often has to go to the puppet show in the evening, and then take the morning bus back to work the next day.
The show will eventually appear
Singing can't make money, this used to be a cruel reality. Folk puppet theatre is withering day by day, falling into a vicious circle of no audience, no actors, and declining performance quality.
When it was prosperous, Master Amei's team could have 12 people, the income was considerable, and the members of the troupe were able to build a good house in the village. But in Amei's generation, the team was reduced to 4 people, one erhu and one gong, and two people sang a whole play. "There is no quality at all, the quality is not good, and no one wants to listen to it," said Amei, who said that there are not a few performances a month, "and I really feel that I am on the verge of extinction." ”
There was a temple fair, there was no audience at the bottom, and the empty scene made Amei feel frustrated in her heart.
But when the gong is opened, it can't be stopped. She remembers the master's strict teachings in the past: whether there is an audience or not, you must perform well.
She never thought of going out of Zhangpu County to perform, because even in the local area, very few people knew about puppet shows. But along the way, Amei didn't dare to be lazy. From the age of 14 to 34, she persevered with five jobs and a passion. She always remembers what her master often said - "One day you leave, no one will be able to act in this play".
Amei is somewhat unwilling, in her heart, the puppet show should not be buried. In August 2021, Amei, who is still working as a taxi driver in her hometown, released her first video "Spring Rain Song" on Douyin with the help of her friends.
"My cousin left in a hurry, and I didn't say a word for the time being...... "Amei held a thin thread, and the villain in her hand also followed her step by step, lifelike. It is difficult to see the details of the performance in offline performances, and when it was moved online, the novel performance form suddenly caught the attention of netizens: "It hasn't been lost yet! I've only heard of it before, but I haven't seen it!"
What Amei didn't expect was that a simple short video quickly exploded on the "unpopular track" of traditional opera, and the number of views exceeded one million within a week. As a result, Amei and the team have successively released classic singing segments such as "Kaizhang Shengwang", "Twin Love", "Ba Fujian Renzu Wang Judgment", and praise has poured in, with more than 10,000 likes on each video, and the number of views often exceeds one million.
Amei has been acting in puppet shows for 20 years in obscurity, and finally "became popular" in the era of short videos. When the fourth work was posted, Amei began to test the waters of live broadcasting. Although the first webcast was just a stand at the performance, the number of viewers who were online at the same time exceeded 5,000 on the same day.
Amei was deeply shocked by the wide spread and deep impact of the live broadcast - in the past two decades, Amei has performed more than 1,000 performances in total, and just one live broadcast can catch up with the number of viewers accumulated in twenty years. After careful consideration, Amei made up her mind to do a good job in Douyin, "I really can't go back to drive."
She is rarely anxious about traffic, sometimes there are only a few hundred people a night, and when the number of people online is as high as 30,000, no matter how many people are in the live broadcast room, Amei always tries her best to show the excitement of the puppet show. She believes that going with the flow can also attract audiences who truly love drama.
In this way, in just half a year, Amei's fans exceeded 700,000. Up to now, Amei has grown into an opera anchor with millions of fans.
What the audience said about Ame
For more than two years, Amei has continued to broadcast live puppet shows and Chinese opera performances, not only on the small stage in the village, but also in well-known scenic spots, grand theaters, TV stations, etc.
Amei's Douyin has become a world for fans to communicate and interact. Netizens from all over the world were touched by the play: "This is traditional Chinese culture, the girl is really not simple, the master is in the folk!"
The puppet show was finally seen.
Innovate and rejuvenate
Compared with traditional puppet shows, Amei's performances are indeed different in many ways.
In traditional performances, even the hands that operate the puppets are not allowed to appear on camera. In order to attract an Internet audience, Amei took the initiative to innovate the performance form, expanding the puppet background from 2 meters to 3 meters, and the actors showed their faces, singing and showing the process of thread lifting.
At first, this form of representation was met with some skepticism, arguing that puppet shows should not see the performers. However, more fans said that seeing the puppets being manipulated improved the overall viewing experience. These voices of support have given Ame the confidence to innovate.
Amei believes that puppets do not have expressions, the performer gives expressions to the audience, and for the audience, the charm of the performer will increase the charm of the puppet show. In addition, Amei also skillfully incorporated elements of Western instruments such as the cello into the orchestra accompaniment of the puppet show. These changes were well received by the audience.
Now, Ah Mei doesn't have to do other work as before to maintain her opera dream, and the reward income is enough for the whole team to spend.
The most rewarding thing for her is not how much money she makes, but that she has revitalized the performance market of local private theater troupes through live broadcasting.
In 2022, Amei and her friends established the Fengguixiang Theater Troupe and began to perform independently under the name of Amei Puppet Troupe. The predecessor of Xiang Opera is Gezai Opera, which is one of the most important and popular operas in southern Fujian, and when combined with puppet theater, it can not only take into account different needs, but also expand their respective markets.
Before Amei's live broadcast, a local drama could only be called for a few thousand yuan. After the live broadcast became popular, now the troupe has more than 10,000 guarantees, and the maximum can reach more than 20,000, and the actor's performance fee has also doubled.
Nowadays, in the southern Fujian opera industry, Fenggui Opera Troupe is an out-and-out cutting-edge "top Internet celebrity". The huge traffic and attention of short videos and live broadcasts have brought more and more drama appointments to Fenggui Theater Troupe. Previously, Amei and the team basically only performed in Zhangpu and rarely went out of Zhangzhou. Now, they perform everywhere in Xiamen, Zhangquan and as far away as Beijing, Hong Kong and other places, and the audience is full of people at each performance. In 2023, Fenggui Theatre Troupe will receive more than 300 Chinese opera and more than 100 puppet show appointments, and the troupe will be open all year round.
There is also a whole puppet show business that profits. A colleague once told Ah Mei that since her account became popular, many people have known about puppet shows and want to invite the troupe to perform, "which has led to our industry, and everyone's wages have increased." "Amei doesn't have to worry about the loss like the master. The people who gave up because the puppet show didn't make money have slowly returned in the past two years. Several sixteen or seventeen-year-old young people want to learn drama from Amei. Amei is deeply grateful: "When you achieve yourself, you also achieve others."
After appearing on the stage of the CCTV opera party, everyone around her was excited for Amei, but she herself held a normal heart: "Everyone said that CCTV was back this time, I said what was different, don't you have to go to the countryside to perform when you come back?"
Ah Mei did a good job in every performance as always, conveying the charm of the puppet show to more than 1,000 audiences at the scene, more than 1 million fans on Douyin, and fans and friends from all over the world gathered in the live broadcast room.
A confidante in Haimi, a doctor living in the United States, said that when he heard Amei's singing, he remembered the scene when his mother took his three brothers to listen to the play under the stage when he was a child. Equally touched were compatriots from Malaysia and Taiwan. Amei's puppet show takes fans back to their distant childhood.
Amei's master is in his 70s, and he has witnessed the development of puppet theater from a difficult situation to a hot one. He told Ah Mei that he had acted in a puppet show all his life, and he felt honored to persist seriously until today.
Listening to the master's words, Ah Mei was happy and immediately thought that now that the troupe is so famous and has so much business, the quality must keep up, and the puppet show must not be turned into a "one-shot deal" - this is Ah Mei, who rarely talks empty words and just wants to do practical things.
The inheritance of intangible cultural heritage needs to let more "Amei" be seen.
Author: Xu Guan