Jimu News reporter Dong Shujian
Correspondent: Yang Hui
This troupe, from the grassroots, performs in the countryside all year round with tents and bunks; This group of actors, unwilling to be mediocre, was the first to sing Huangmei Opera to the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, and they won the first prize in the Huangmei Opera Art Festival in the province, and won a series of honors such as "Top 100 Social Literary and Art Teams in the Province". Their leader, Li Wenjie, is the only representative of a private troupe in Hubei Province in the National Art Troupe Management Leading Talent Training Project.
In the 20 years of "farming", Li Wenjie led his troupe to 10 provinces (regions) and performed more than 10,000 performances, guarding the roots of opera in the countryside and continuing the strong nostalgia.
In the audience, 58-year-old opera fan Wu Yisheng nodded frequently with gongs and drums: "This team sings well and has a fight with the regular troupe." On stage, Li Wenjie, the person in charge of Huanggang Baiyue Huangmei Opera Performance Co., Ltd., repeatedly told the actors: "This is my hometown and the hometown of Huangmei Opera." The people here love drama and understand opera, everyone must sing it well. ”
On the morning of May 9, the annual peaceful opera performance in Baishazhou Village, Xinkai Town, Huangmei County started on the people's stage
On the morning of May 9th, in order to celebrate the bumper harvest of summer grain and pray for good weather and rain, the annual peaceful opera performance in Baishazhou Village, Xinkai Town, Huangmei County started singing on the people's stage. This village, which has just over 2,100 people, gathered more than 1,000 spectators.
20 years ago, Li Wenjie started from the new opening and pulled up the team to go to the Quartet; In the past 20 years, he and his private troupe have traveled through 10 provinces (regions) such as Hubei, Anhui, Jiangxi, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Fujian, Hunan, Henan, Guangdong, and Mongolia, with the rural areas as the main position, with a frequency of no less than 10 months a year and no less than 2 performances per day, and more than 10,000 performances for farmers, becoming a rare professional troupe in the private theater troupe with neat stage equipment, stable cast, and full performance business.
In the past 20 years, there have been three ups and downs, and the private troupe has sung Huangmei Opera on the grassland
In 2004, Li Wenjie, an actor of Huangmei County Huangmei Drama Troupe, was not satisfied with the marginal role of running tricks and decided to set up his own door. He asked the person in charge of the troupe to "grind" 4 suitcases, 2 speakers, 2 chandeliers and a few costumes, and went back to his hometown Xinkai Town to find seven or eight people, and set up a grass stage team.
In order to find the opera, Li Wenjie borrowed a motorcycle, walked all the way and asked, rode for 13 hours, asked from Xinkai Town to Wuning County, Jiangxi Province, and finally rented a small theater in Wuning to sell tickets and sing. After 7 days, everyone only earned 6 yuan a day, which was not enough to buy a pack of cigarettes. The troupe, which was established less than 2 months ago, was disbanded.
After the first failure of entrepreneurship, Li Wenjie took up the burden and embarked on the road of "drama drifting". At the end of 2007, only half a year after marriage, he and his wife Tao Qiuyue, who is also a Huangmei Opera artist, established Huanggang Baiyue Huangmei Opera Performance Co., Ltd. and pulled up the team again.
If a private troupe wants to survive, it must be willing to create a good look
Three years of "drama drifting" tempering made Li Wenjie a beginner. He has always followed the "three rules" for the survival of private theater troupes: First, he must be willing to create appearance. The folk troupe comes from the grassroots, but it must have the "fan" of a regular troupe: the costumes should be new, the actors should be neat, especially the lighting, sound and other hardware should be of high grade. In the provincial troupe, Li Wenjie was the first to put the LED screen on the stage, 20 years, his LED screen has been updated to the fourth generation, the troupe has invested more than 3 million yuan in lighting, sound and clothing. The second is that the troupe and the actors' association will have more "work". In Li Wenjie's troupe, there are 120 plays that can be performed at any time, not only life dramas, love dramas and other literary dramas, but also martial arts dramas such as "Three Dozen Fan Pear Flowers" and "Mu Guiying in Charge". Actors must not only be able to sing, but also sing and dance, and even magic, ventriloquism, and acrobatics. In rural performances, opera and variety shows have become the standard. The third is to be able to sing "water" opera well. In rural performances, the same play sometimes has to be sung for three or four hours, sometimes only for thirty or forty minutes; Sometimes Party A will also temporarily come up with a topic, asking the troupe to "water" a scene on the spot. In this case, the artists have to rely on years of experience to complete the performance through adaptations of similar plots and lyrics. In 2011, when they performed in Jiangxi, they sang a play that was originally only 2 hours for more than 4 hours, and they also won a full house. After the former mayor of Nanchang City and the famous calligrapher Li Douluo learned the inside story, he happily wrote "Art Without Bounds" as a gift.
The troupe restarted, Baiyue Company became famous, and at the busiest time of business, 9 performance teams were sent at the same time. In February 2019, at the invitation of the Bureau of Culture, Sports, Radio, Film and Television of Yijin Huoluoqi in Inner Mongolia, he participated in the performance of the local Sacred Flame Cultural Festival, becoming the first troupe in Hubei to sing Huangmei Opera on the grassland.
During the three-year epidemic prevention and control period, the troupe was once again in trouble. A CEO of a medical device factory gave Li Wenjie a batch of masks, and the troupe survived the difficulties by selling masks.
In January 2023, Li Wenjie's troupe will make a comeback for the third time. This year, the troupe performed more than 730 performances throughout the year, setting a new high since the establishment of the troupe. Only four months have passed this year, and the performance orders received by the troupe have been scheduled until the spring of 2025.
Singing with tents and bunks on their backs, the grassroots troupe won word-of-mouth and trophies
This time in Baishazhou Village, the most satisfactory thing for the actors is the accommodation arrangement. All the actors live in the private rooms of the masses, where they can sleep in ready-made beds, use clean bathrooms, and take a shower every day. In most cases, their dormitories are ancestral halls, storehouses, old houses, or even an empty cement rice field. When the troupe was first established 20 years ago, there were still migrant workers and actors, who carried heavy burdens when they went out; Today, the bags of migrant workers have long been replaced by backpacks or suitcases, and only folk artists still walk around with tents and covers on their backs year after year.
The actors interact with fans over lunch
Because of love, so persistent. This is the inner strength of folk artists who have persevered for a long time in a difficult environment.
Anhui Xuancheng actor Zhu Ruyan, three generations of grandparents and grandchildren are all Huangmei Opera folk artists. She has not undergone any professional training, relying on the oral teaching of her elders, she has been the pillar of the troupe for 10 years, and she also has 130,000 fans on her personal Douyin account. For her, singing opera is not only a profession, but also the inheritance and glory of a Huangmei opera family. At the end of 2022, when the mask business was at its hottest, Li Wenjie chose to quit. He said to the CEO of the company that retained him: "The Spring Festival is coming, and the new performance season is about to begin." I'm a singer, and my world is always on the stage. ”
Because of love, so struggle. In rural markets, competition is equally fierce. Sing well, someone invites you every year; If you don't sing well, you will be cut off at one time. In some places, "anti-stage play" is often sung, and the two teams sing at the same time, the winner continues to sing, and the loser leaves overnight. "We always sing more and more people in front of the stage, and there are always fewer people singing in front of other stages." Li Wenjie said, "We have never lost on the spot PK. ”
Not only has it won word of mouth, but in the past 20 years, Li Wenjie's troupe has repeatedly ushered in highlight moments. In 2015, Li Wenjie was rated as one of the top ten leaders in the cultural industry of Huangmei County; The troupe won the title of Hubei Top 100 Social Art Team; In September 2016, during the 9th Huangmei Opera Art Festival in Hubei Province, Li Wenjie led the troupe to win the first prize in performance; In 2018, Baiyue Company was rated as one of the top ten grassroots opera organizations in Huanggang City; In 2021, Li Wenjie was selected into the list of innovative and entrepreneurial talents in Huanggang City's cultural and tourism industry.
No matter which province (region) the performance is in, there is always a lot of laughter on the scene
The party and the government have always paid great attention to and supported the development of private theater troupes. Since 2016, through bidding, Baiyue Company has won orders from Hubei Province and Huanggang City to send operas to the countryside for many years; In 2017, Baiyue Company won 300,000 yuan of special awards and support funds for cultural industry from the central government; During the epidemic prevention and control period in 2020, with the support of the work-for-training policy, Baiyue Company achieved the basic stability of the actor team. Since 2017, Li Wenjie has been a member of the Huangzhou District CPPCC for two consecutive terms and was named the "Entrepreneurial Star" of the CPPCC.
"In the past, when singing opera in the countryside, I often had to set up a stage with my hands, and sometimes I could only hide under the eaves and sing; Now every village has a big stage for the people, and some villages have also built a village hall. Li Wenjie said that the conditions for singing opera in rural areas have improved, and everyone has more energy to sing opera.
The 23-second video is swiped across the network, and the grassroots take root in the countryside to continue the nostalgia
A group of aunts wearing red and green headscarves watched the Huangmei Opera performance intently, with happy smiles on their faces. In March 2023, a piece of material taken by Li Wenjie when he led the troupe to perform in Ma'anshan City, Anhui Province, was edited into a 23-second video, which was forwarded by more than 40 media across the country such as Xinhua News Agency and People's Daily Online, with more than 10 million clicks, more than 200,000 likes, and more than 60,000 comments within 2 days. Netizens exclaimed, "A cute little scarf, a simple Chinese village painting." ”
The actors take a lunch break in the tent
Opera is nostalgia, and singing itself is also nostalgia. After 20 years of walking in the countryside, Li Wenjie has this feeling: the roots of Chinese opera are in the countryside, it is a cultural symbol of 5,000 years of farming history, and it is the deepest nostalgia in the depths of the soul. For example, Huangmei Opera, its earliest source is the tea picking in Huangmei County; The 36 major books and 72 small classic repertoire that have been sung so far, each of which is the life memory of the ancestors of Wutou and Chuwei. Moreover, every opera performance in the countryside is closely related to traditional folk activities such as dragon lanterns, social fires, market gatherings, harvests, ancestor worship, and birthday celebrations. It is in the sound of gongs and drums that folk customs can be passed on and nostalgia can be renewed. Yu Shiliu, the 90-year-old head of the Dragon Lantern Festival in Yujiawan Community, Donghu Street, Huangzhou, once said to Li Wenjie that with dragons, lanterns and plays, the history of our countryside is complete, and our countryside is like a rural area.
Participating in the training of leading talents in the management of the National Literary and Art Troupe, and discussing with many big names, Li Wenjie was originally uneasy. But he soon discovered that everyone had a lot of love for the representatives of the private theater troupe. good lyrics and singing, teach him well; Good stage scenes, for him to use for free. During the discussion and exchange, everyone asked Li Wenjie to tell more stories about his performances in the countryside. The students said that the countryside is the source of Chinese opera, where there are loyal audiences of opera, and there is the bloodline inheritance of opera. Everyone encouraged Li Wenjie to sing in the countryside, guarding the roots of opera and the soul of nostalgia. The Chinese National Orchestra also gave a set of stereos worth 30,000 yuan to Baiyue Company.
Rooted in the earth, in the old garden, Huangmei is renewed; In a foreign land, the fragrance of yellow plum floats thousands of miles.
Li Wenjie said that inheriting opera and continuing nostalgia is the responsibility of our artists.
(Photo courtesy of Yu Tao)
(Source: Jimu News)
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