On the afternoon of July 10th, Guo Baochang, director of "The Great House Gate", held a meeting for readers of the two new books "Great Game: Where Is Peking Opera Good" and "All Big Characters" at the Capital Library, and the host Zhao Baole, actors Chen Baoguo, Song Xiaochuan, Dou Xiaoxuan, and Tao Qingmei, a collaborator scholar of the book "Great Game", attended the scene to talk about Guo Baochang's artistic life for more than 80 years.
Guo Baochang, known as Baoye in the industry, was sold into the giants since childhood, experienced vicissitudes, read the world, and recognized many strange people and strange things. Baoye is a great director with profound skills, directing more than thirty film and television dramas, a "Big Mansion Gate" has been chased by generations of audiences for twenty years, and won the 29th Huading Awards Lifetime Achievement Award in 2020; Bao Ye is also a writer, the script of "Big Mansion Gate" is his family story as the prototype, a wonderful pen, writing the vicissitudes of the world and the vicissitudes of life; Bao Ye is also obsessed with Peking Opera, listening to drama at the age of five, obsessed with more than seventy years, and also studied for a lifetime, in 2017, he and Li Zhuoqun choreographed the Peking Opera "Big Mansion Gate", every time it was staged, the scene was full.
The scene of the new book sharing meeting
Recently, baoye's two most important books, "Great Games: Where Is Peking Opera Good" and "All Big Characters", which have been accumulated for many years, are planned by movable type culture and published by Life, Reading and Xinzhi Triptych Bookstore.
At the event site, the guests praised the two books "five-star praise", saying that Baoye is a "four old people" with ideals, abilities, materials and interesting children, and this book is the sound of his decades of humanity and art, which is very worth reading. But Bao Ye did not accept the old, only said that they are still "stage results".
Two secrets in "The Gate of the Mansion"
In April 2001, CCTV premiered the TV series "Dazhaimen", the rise and fall of the "Baicao Hall" medicine shop based on China's century-old brand "Tongrentang", as well as the enmity and resentment of three generations of the medical family Baifu, which were displayed in front of hundreds of millions of viewers. In that year, the drama won the CCTV annual rating championship with a super high rating of 17.74%. Since then, series of works such as "Dazhaimen 2", the drama "Dazhaimen", and the Peking Opera "Dazhaimen" have been chased by generations of audiences for 20 years, and are still popular on many video websites.
Guo Baochang, screenwriter and director of the TV series "The Gate of the Big House"
For audiences who love this drama, especially a new generation of audiences, Guo Baochang's new book unveils two secrets in "The Gate of the Big House" for them.
Secret one, the story of "The Gate of the Big Mansion" was originally Guo Baochang's personal experience! Guo Baochang is the prototype of Li Tianyi, the adopted son bought by the seventh wife Li Xiangxiu, and his experience of being sold into the Tongrentang Lejia family since childhood eventually made him famous at home and abroad.
Chen Baoguo, who starred bai Jingqi, once said: "The role in "The Gate of the Mansion" is a role that cannot be copied. "The large and small characters in the door of the house, with distinct personalities, vivid images, and legendary experiences, can be described as born and ugly, and everything is complete. Most of these characters have archetypes in life, or even real people and real events. This kind of artistic creation between true and false, fiction and reality, let the audience can't help but explore the real side behind it. The story of "The Gate of the Great Mansion" ended abruptly at the place where Bai Jingqi made his will at the age of 86, but the rise and fall of the mansion door is not all of Guo Baochang's legendary experience, in the new book "All Are Big Characters", he tells his own story, and also continues to write legends for many characters in "The Gate of the Great Mansion".
Secret two, "The Gate of the Great Mansion" uses a large number of Peking Opera art forms. Many people think it is good to watch "The Gate of the Big Mansion", but they ignore the fact that a large number of Peking Opera art forms are infiltrated in the play. For example, a large number of soundtracks, including the opening song, are based on Peking Opera, and many Peking Opera song and card singing segments are used to highlight the character of the characters. The setting of the characters in the play also refers to the concept of Peking Opera, such as Bai Sanye played by Liu Peiqi, Bai Jingye played by Zhao Yi, Wang Xiguang played by Lei Kesheng, etc. In Guo Baochang's view, these roles are the "ugly" in traditional Peking Opera. And he especially advocated that ugly behavior should be used as a penetrating character in the film and television script. Because it is ugly, it can best reflect the sense of play and can most touch the audience. Guo Baochang even proposed that "our actors should strengthen their love and study of Peking Opera" and achieve "the integration of opera performance and film and television performance".
The little people abandoned by history are all big roles in interpreting sorrow and joy
The script of "The Gate of the Great Mansion" has more than seventy important roles, and a leader once asked to delete half of it when reviewing it. But Guo Baochang insisted that "no matter how big or small the role is, if there is a soul, it will stand!" In his view, as long as the small person can reflect the style of the times, show a unique personality, establish a distinct image, and let people read thousands of thoughts from him, the small person will become a big role.
This time, Guo Baochang took the character writing as the main body and presented a group of wonderful, complex and vivid group portraits of "little people": the legendary martial arts master who hid in the mansion door and his cunning young master apprentice; the ladies who were elegant and beautiful in appearance but twisted and deformed in the mansion door; the simple and kind grandmother who was afraid of her daughter who was sold into the mansion by herself and helped her wife; the extremely ugly looking daughter-in-law doing the most beautiful work, a bad but extremely kind and cowardly domestic servant The guqin culture and guqin masters hidden in the garden of the house gate; the paranoid close friends who firmly believe that communism has gradually lost itself in the wheel of the times and eventually fallen into the trap of cheating money... The complexity and multi-faceted nature of human nature and the unpredictability of life constitute the biggest feature of this work, and behind these rich and profound character trees are the complex taste and profound feelings of the times, fate, and human nature.
Jiang Wen was amazed after reading this book: "How come all the strange people in the world have made him meet?" These strange people not only constitute his story traits, but also his own personality, provenance and spiritual themes, and to write about them is to write about himself. ”
In the book, Guo Baochang also tells his legendary experience: his dedication to pursuing his own life, his obsession and exploration of art, the ridiculous and lamentable troubles of the decentralization of cadre schools, his sincere feelings with his teachers and friends in the historical storm, the loneliness of his lack of family affection due to being manipulated by fate... The ups and downs of the past and the strange things encountered along the way constitute Guo Baochang's extraordinary life that is different from ordinary people.
In contrast to his film and television works, Guo Baochang's talent for storytelling is also reflected in his writing ability - he is good at writing articles in vivid and crisp Beijing-style colloquial language, and every character is vividly written by him as if in front of his eyes. Guo Baochang himself sighed: God let me experience so many things, know so many characters, and gave me the ability to tell stories, which is probably the mission I came to this world, God gave me.
Jiang Wen said: "Elder Guo has three major advantages: he has the opportunity to see, has the ability to write, and is hot enough to shoot." Indeed, the people Guo Baochang knew, the things he had experienced, and his artistic creations had achieved mutual achievements, and finally presented a vivid and vivid sense of heaviness and the situation of artistic life- and the unique charm of the "Big Mansion Gate" series of works also lies in this.
Peking Opera is an amazing game!
Guo Baochang's greatest wish is to let young people go to the theater. He said "... As far as I know, ninety-five percent of young people don't like Peking Opera and have never seen it once. ...... Saying that it is an old antique is for the old people to see, and I can't understand it. This is so strange, you have not heard of Peking Opera once, how do you know that you do not understand? When creating the Peking opera "The Gate of the Great Mansion", Guo Baochang publicly declared that "get young people into the theater and let them find Peking Opera very good" Later, this play did attract young people into the theater, and also got their approval: the original Peking Opera can be modernized, younger, and really beautiful.
Guo Baochang understands opera, is familiar with the anecdotes of Pear Garden, and loves to read, which can be called a living encyclopedia of Peking Opera. He often regrets that his predecessors have not been able to clearly and unambiguously sort out the aesthetic principles of Peking Opera from the standpoint of Chinese culture, and contemporary researchers always refer to Western art theories and concepts to interpret the aesthetic problems of Peking Opera, which is difficult to justify themselves. So, can you get rid of them and describe and analyze them as much as possible in the language you are familiar with? So he began decades of painstaking exploration and thinking about what Peking Opera is. In the end, he summed up the art of Peking Opera with these words, "all kinds of things, all kinds of strange things, glittering, game mentality" - the word "game" is Guo Baochang's decades of thinking and summarizing, giving everyone the key to open the door of Peking Opera art.
What is a game? "Lang rode a bamboo horse and went around the bed to get green plums." This "bamboo horse" children's game eventually evolved into a horse whip on the stage. Guo Baochang started from the "sense of play", how our Peking Opera in the process of its development, from the mask to the face, from the beard to the beard hanging on the ear, from the bamboo horse to the horse whip, from the armor to the big leaning, from the headdress to the dotted headface, from the figurative to the abstract, from the empty stage to the meteorological universe space and time.
The sense of play of Peking Opera comes from a highly stylized artistic expression on the surface, but why does Peking Opera form such a program? Guo Baochang analyzed and questioned a series of Peking opera performance phenomena such as the beautiful costume and its function, the band's colorful "Gong and Drum Sutra", the "flag" in the props, the "Shozi Gong" in the martial arts, the lyrics and singing voice, and the stage time and space, and finally found that the Peking Opera program covers all the ancient life forms, but it is the beauty of life presented by game means, and the hundreds of life are overlooked from a super high perspective - this is the game rules of Peking Opera.
"When the fake is true, it is also false, and there is nowhere to do anything", when the game is played into art, the game has a philosophical meaning, beyond the true and false, looking down on the existence or not. Guo Baochang realized that this unique aesthetic principle of Chinese Peking Opera is a kind of emotion and realm mixed with life game and game life. This playfulness stems from our ancestors' understanding of the origin of the world. "All things under the heavens are born of existence, and there is birth of nothing" (Lao Tzu, chapter 40), "When you use today's philosophical language, it is probably dialectics, the unity of opposites. But I want to use games rather than dialectics to discuss the philosophical thought of Chinese Peking Opera, because I want to emphasize its free transformation side, the experience of change in the observation of life and nature that is changing at the Chinese, and a kind of transcendence realized by the experience of change. This is the most core way of thinking in the past two hundred years to achieve the art of Peking Opera. The actors and audiences of Peking Opera share the sense of play brought about by this transcendent perspective of philosophy, aesthetics and outlook on life. Guo Baochang said: "The audience's appreciation interest will change, and what will not change is the perception of life and the pursuit of life. ”
"The Great Game" was jointly completed by Guo Baochang and scholar Tao Qingmei, who jumped out of the traditional discourse framework of traditional Chinese literati on Peking Opera, and also got rid of the routine that the academic circles have been applying Western literary and art theories and concepts to interpret and study Peking Opera in the past hundred years, deeply rooted in the interior of Peking Opera art and Chinese culture, using the original "jargon" of Peking Opera, rich pear garden stories and details, vivid and straightforward colloquial narration, and made a pioneering and lofty summary and refinement of the nature and aesthetic principles of Peking Opera. It is easy to understand and refreshing to unlock the code of the charm of Peking Opera.
Such a book will surely bring inspiration to people's understanding of other traditional Chinese cultures. As Tao Qingmei, one of the authors of this book, said: "When we talk about the aesthetics of Peking Opera today, it is impossible to be a kind of retro, but to discern: which principles in Peking Opera, after being tempered in the twentieth century, are still brilliant today; in the future, they will also be brilliant." ”