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At the crossroads of life, where should young people who seem to be at the intersection go? In 1937, the film "Cross Street" directed by Shen Xiling premiered in Shanghai, causing a huge sensation. 83 years later, a group of young actors put this film on the stage, looking back again, paying tribute to the classics from the perspective of today's young people, and re-examining the meaning of the classics. One of the highlights of the National Centre for the Performing Arts's drama "Cross Street" pays homage to the classics while combining two-dimensional images with three-dimensional actor performances. This issue of the Classic Art Lecture Hall invites Huang Ying, the screenwriter and director of the play, and Zhang Pengpeng, the stage designer, to share with the audience the unique creative methods and concepts behind the play through explanations and live demonstrations.
First, the director's creative concept of "turning the stage into a film editing station" makes the actor's performance and image become an intertextual relationship
The movie "Cross Street" is a classic film that will never be recorded in the annals of history, and now it is forever frozen in the form of an image. Director Huang Ying, in the creation of the drama version of "Cross Street", juxtaposes the performances of live actors and the film images of more than 80 years ago on the stage at the same time, forming an intertextual relationship in a sense. That is to say, watching the actor's performance or image alone cannot completely obtain the expression of the main creator, but must complement each other and combine the two to obtain a complete stage vocabulary expression.
The drama "Cross Street" began to create a literary script, and it used the thinking of "film editing table" to create. The director introduces four different threads – the live performance of the play, the images of the year, the lives of the artists involved in the play, and the story behind the scenes in front of the film. These four threads are used as four major types of materials, placed on the "film cutting table" of the stage as "film materials" for splicing. The director does not need to do too much new creation, re-edit the material, first do addition and then subtraction, in the rehearsal process to rough refinement, and finally formed the current one-hour and fifty-minute performance version.
The live performances of the actors in the drama "Cross Street" are juxtaposed with old movies
Second, the core concept of stage design: how to return from the plane of two-dimensional images to the fulcrum of three-dimensional three-dimensional
For the stage design, this play has several creative considerations: first, to think about how to restore the scene where the story takes place; second, to think about how to cooperate with the stage presentation concept of the director's "editing platform"; third, how to let the actors combine their respective performances in this stage space; fourth, during the performance process, the actors will jump out of their own roles and perform as narrators - that is, the so-called jumping in and out, at this time the stage artist should consider how to give support.
The core idea of the stage creation of this play is how to return from the plane of the two-dimensional image to the fulcrum of the three-dimensional three-dimensional. There are two main image carriers in the stage space of "Cross Street": one is a strip screen behind the stage that feels like an old movie curtain, and many images in the performance will be presented on the back of the screen; the other is a floor that echoes the curtain. The whole choreography sets off all the changes in the fulcrum through these two planes.
Pictured here is the famous director Katie Michelle rehearsing "Miss Julie" at the Schoempiner Theater in Germany in 2010.
Third, through the change of the combination of bell cars to flexibly respond to the needs of the performance space
In "Cross Street", there are many performances that jump in, jump out, and switch, which requires a lot of flexibility in the stage. Therefore, the creative team chose the two most important scenes in this story as visual subjects: one is the cubicle where the male and female protagonists live; the other is the bell car they often get on and off. Everything the audience sees on the stage is the stage display effect that the director and designer finally obtained after overturning the complete stage presentation plan of the twelve versions, which is very hard-won.
In these two visual subjects, the stage designer and director have been exploring the scale between the virtual and the real on the stage, and how to present the vocabulary of the film in a dramatic way. The creative team cut the bell car into four pieces, each of which served both as a body and as a screen to carry a two-dimensional video narrative. At the same time, the recombination of the body structure of the bell car itself and another wall piece can be turned into a scene between the indoor lattices. Through different combinations of changes to fold, surround and synthesize different spaces, so that the lens language can find different carriers in the space of stage art, combine and change.
The visual subject of the play - the bell car. In the drama, it becomes an important scene of the hero and heroine's life and love.
Artist Introduction
Huang Ying is a national first-class director, an associate professor of the Directing Department of Beijing Film Academy, and a member of the Chinese Dramatists Association. He has created 49 theatrical works, representative works: "Open 1990", "Broken Gold", "Huangliang A Dream", "Unfinished to be continued", "Language Class", "Jujube Tree", "Brine Boiling" and so on. He has won the National Theatre Culture Award For Director Gold Award, the Ministry of Culture National Academy of Arts Troupe Performance Season Repertoire Award, the Excellent Director Award, the Tian Han Drama Award (Script) First Prize, the Communist Youth League Central Committee "Five Ones" Project Award, Japan Riga Asian Directors Festival Outstanding Creation Award and other international and national awards.
Zhang Pengpeng, a master's degree in drama, film and television art design at the Central Academy of Drama, is currently working at the National Centre for the Performing Arts. He has won the National Theater Culture Award For Stage Design Gold Award and the Best Stage Design of the 4th Beijing University Student Theater Festival. His major works include: "Qin Shi Mingyue", "Bird", "Merchant of Venice", "Dream of A Midsummer Night", and "Two Ants on the Road".
Ministry of Education/Planning for the Popularization of Arts at the National Centre for the Performing Arts
Huang Ying, Zhang Pengpeng /Speaker
Wang Chengyin/Finishing