Many years ago, Liu Tianchi debuted as a mute girl Fengxia in Zhang Yimou's film "Alive"; later went to Japan to study at the Four Seasons Theater Troupe; after returning from school, she not only starred in many film and television dramas, but also became an acting instructor and founded Liu Tianchi's performance workshop. While serving as an associate professor of the Acting Department of the Central Academy of Drama, she also served as a performance director in variety shows such as "The Birth of an Actor" and "I Am an Actor", cultivating many industry backbones and a new generation of professional actors.
On September 11, the five-year-old Liu Tianchi Performance Workshop held a performance with the theme of "Please Start Your Performance!" "The annual open house event, through a variety of contents, allows the guests and the audience to experience the enrichment of the performing arts. In an exclusive interview with reporters, Liu Tianchi talked about her attitude towards the current situation of the performing arts and performing arts industry, and called on the entire industry to respect professionalism, respect for performing arts, respect for serious practitioners, and her various thoughts on art, life and life. In her opinion, "Acting is the innate ability of everyone. Education, on the other hand, is the teacher who inspires this wonderful ability. Under the guidance of the teacher, people who maintain curiosity, imagination and action can explore a different heart, and then carry the joy of discovering surprise to a broader life situation. ”
Practice "martial arts" to help young actors cope with the "battlefield"
Reporter: You are a teacher at the Central Academy of Drama, why do you want to set up such an acting teaching workshop outside the school?
Liu Tianchi: Acting is not learned after four years of learning, you can master it all. Four years of schooling is really just the beginning. The complete teaching system of professional colleges and universities for four years is to train an ordinary person to become an actor with creative ability, so that he can master some methods of opening his own body, have some basic skills of actors, and know how to establish the psychological state of the character. But now many schools teach and cultivate semi-finished products. When the students went outside to shoot the scene, due to the time problem of the shooting scene and the ability of some of the main creators, many young students had been thrown to the "battlefield" when the "martial arts" were not yet skilled, which must be the state of "losing the armor and removing the armor". Faced with this dilemma of young actors, I told my good friend and later partner Li Mei that we should make a studio to continue the concept of "5th year teaching". When students "lose their armor and remove their armor" on the "battlefield", we will help him integrate his desire to learn and skills into a skillful state to deal with various "battlefields", and his confidence will be enhanced. So in 2016, we did studios.
Reporter: What kind of training will the studio do to the actors?
Liu Tianchi: I have always adhered to such a principle in my performance: heroes can ignore the provenance, but if you want to become a hero, you have to have some martial arts tricks. So our studio will do "devilish" professional training for young actors. I tell these children that it is far better to be suppressed by our teachers in class than to be suppressed by others when you go to the shooting scene. And if others suppress you, I will be sad. Because our teachers are trainers on the one hand, they must also be protectors. But some directors or staff members on the scene are likely to directly look at the actors coldly, or verbally clip guns and sticks. If young actors want to eat this bowl of rice, they should make their own profession good. For the group of actors, on the one hand, I hope that this group can thrive, but at the same time, I know and feel sorry for this group. In fact, actors are more fragile, and anyone can judge and point at them, so they have a lot of pressure to bear. As a teacher, I really want to help young actors grow up so that the industry can get on track, which is what our studio is going to do. I often say, "Do you want to be a teacher, or do you want to be a teacher?" It's not the same. "It's easy to be a teacher, but it's not easy to be a teacher. You have to do it in your entire field to burn others up and pass on knowledge to a group of young children.
Reporter: Actors are different from other industries, sometimes a person with little acting experience can get a lot of people's likes, while a very experienced mature actor may face all kinds of doubts, and even doubt his own acting skills. So what is the standard of acting?
Liu Tianchi: Acting and acting are actually directly linked to a person's life experience and experience. In the long river of an actor's artistic life, his life experience, quality cultivation, and vision can only be improved layer by layer, and it is possible to control more complex roles with age. The more complex the role, the stronger the actor's spiritual pursuit. If the actor's own experience and exploration of the depth and breadth of life are not enough, it is finished when encountering complex roles. As an actor, to smelt steel in the furnace of emotion, you must also nourish yourself, rather than just using the "few axes" you learned in school to cope. Therefore, acting is a lifelong learning profession, and it is the profession that is most closely related to your own life. As an actor, if you don't hold on to the roots of life, you will be empty and you don't know where to go. And the deeper you experience life, the richer the role you will play.
Role king helps the performing arts industry improve as a whole
Reporter: What do you think is the difference between an actor and a star?
Liu Tianchi: When we set up the workshop, it was also a chaotic period in the showbiz circle, and there were many traffic stars, who brought a large number of fans and relied on the power of capital behind them. After they came, a group of young actors who had originally studied acting were squeezed out. These young actors have no way to survive, the original "martial arts" is not so sound, and began to learn other "crooked ways", but also ran to maintain the so-called fans, to various video platforms, try everything to do something in the market, but put down their original performance ability. In fact, the production paths of actors and stars are not the same, they are two different tracks, but now there is a deformed glue state, which has led to such a situation. Many young actors themselves do not have the ability to star, and their performance skills are not so skilled, but the big wheel of the whole era has wrapped them up. This makes the average audience uncomfortable, because the level of their work is uneven. Fortunately, now that it has begun to clear the source, everyone realizes that actors still have the professional ability of actors.
Reporter: Are all the actors who come to your workshop to study acting?
Liu Tianchi: Before our workshop came a group of international students who had returned from studying art in the United States. They did not return to the United States because of the epidemic. The majors they studied in American schools were not specialized in acting, some studied directing, some studied production, and some studied photography, but they all said that they must learn to act. This phenomenon is very interesting, these international students studying art abroad, they all realize that although they are in other positions, performance is the ultimate presentation of the work, so everyone is interested in performance and should have some understanding. But on our current shooting scene, many other types of work are almost ignorant of performance, or only stay in hearsay, and then they throw some of the hearsay and particularly one-sided requirements for the performance to the actors on the spot, telling the actors, "You should act like this!" "The actors are even more clueless. So I think that if you want a work to be particularly good, people in all the functional departments around the creation ontology, especially the core creative functions, should have some understanding of performance. Even if you're not necessarily a physical performer, you should know what acting is, otherwise what you say, or the opinions you participate in, have the potential to leave young actors completely overwhelmed.
Reporter: It seems that all kinds of work in the film and television drama industry should have a certain understanding and understanding of performance, in order to help the entire industry improve its progress.
Liu Tianchi: Yes, the quality of a work is not the responsibility of an actor's profession, and all other types of work should have common responsibilities. When director Zhang Yimou made the movie "Homecoming", he once asked me a question. He said, "Tianchi, you've been following me for so many years, I want to ask you, who is the king on the set?" The first answer that popped up in my head was "director," and I said, "Is that you?" He said, "No. You think again. "I was just embarrassed there, not knowing what to say. Zhang Yimou said that on the set, the "king" that everyone recognizes should be the role. Actors also serve the role; the director also serves the role; the lighting and set of all the various departments of the role, are in the service of the role. So in addition to the role, everyone is not a "king", no one can show off their might, or be unique, but must play the role well, and everyone works around the role. I've remembered the saying ever since: "Character is king." So I'm now able to jump out and see a lot of phenomena, and I can know how to protect the atmosphere of the scene, because the character is the king, and the character is the only one who communicates with the audience. I think if our entire industry can really get to the point and really come back to a point of origin, I believe that our performance will no longer be a metaphysics, but a science. Because what I insist on is not how important the performance is, of course the performance is important, but it may be more important for everyone to shape the character together.
Serving the public makes life a better place
Reporter: Now many ordinary people are learning drama and acting, and I see that many children participate in your open day activities, and I feel that drama art and performing arts are now being more and more applied to the lives of the public.
Liu Tianchi: Applied drama is actually a particularly large branch, and it is also an important field for our studio to study and practice since 2018. We have invited international teachers from the United Kingdom, the United States, norway and other countries to teach us some of the teaching methods that have been very successful in the West. The emergence of applied drama stemmed from the spiritual collapse of the whole of Europe after World War II, and everyone felt that life was hopeless, which was also the most exuberant period of avant-garde theater. At this time, some people suddenly found that drama is not just a simple artwork created by exclusive artists, drama can also be a means, a set of tools, can serve the process of our life and growth at the same time. Our inner world, the spiritual world, including our emotions and emotions that have nowhere to rest, can be expressed in a relatively safe way in a hypothetical situation, so improvisational drama, educational drama, drama therapy, and so on have come into being. Drama has a healing function. Some people have some personality defects, or some mental health, and when they can have such a place to release, they will become another person. I had a trainee, he was a documentary filmmaker, he came to us at that time to study acting, I asked him why? He said: "I'm going to solve my own problems. "He's realized that acting can actually solve his problems. He also sent me a long message yesterday, saying, "Teacher, I didn't end up being an actor, but during my time in the drama workshop, I was healed." "So I think it's also a very big feature of theater. Performance explores the discipline of people, the sum of people, so performance is also a key to solving the problems in the field of life.
Reporter: Your studio now has both acting teaching for professional actors and drama education for the public?
Liu Tianchi: Yes, we will strictly distinguish. The professional line part is faced with the professional performing arts talents needed in the artistic threshold, who must undergo strict "devil-style training" to enter the industry. Drama education in the face of the public is through drama and art, so that people can improve their expression ability, adaptability, and become the role they want to become in life. Now the drama education in our studio mainly focuses on two parts, one is the educational drama for children, and the other part is for the service of the school. We are also thinking about how to integrate quality education and subject education, rather than cultivating everyone to become actors. Drama education can't all produce actors, which is too scary, this is not our goal. What I want to do is to make performance and art more real, more lifely, and better serve the public.