After 5 years, the puppet drama "The Legend of Luohan" will be newly unveiled

Yangtze River Daily Wuhan client October 26 (reporter Wan Xuming correspondent Jiang Yanli) In 2016, the large-scale original puppet drama "Legend of Luohan" took the stage, opening a new chapter in the development of Wuhan cane puppets. After 5 years, Wuhan People's Art Theater will launch a new version of "The Legend of Luohan", which will debut in the 8th Wuhan International Theater Performance Season on November 18 and 19, and perform two consecutive performances at the Zhongnan Theater.

This is a creation entirely from Wuhan, "The Legend of Luohan" is derived from the familiar "Guiyuan Temple Number of Arhats" in Wuhan, adapted from the childhood legend of "Contemplating Arhats" in the "Five Hundred Arhats of Guiyuan Temple". The young monk in the play, Luo Yaoluo, is kind and innocent, knows bird language since he was a child, and in order to rescue the birds shot by the king, he went down the mountain to the "abandoned old country" to help the abandoned old people return to their homes. In 2016, "The Legend of Luohan" premiered at the Zhongnan Theater, sweeping away the regret of Wuhan puppet theater's 20 years of no major drama "Shangxin".

In the past 5 years, the Wuhan cane-headed puppets have often performed new and are loved by audiences large and small. In June this year, the Wuhan Canetou Puppet Show was included in the fifth batch of national intangible cultural heritage representative projects, and the Wuhan People's Art Theater became the project protection unit.

On the 26th, the new version of the "Legend of Luohan" drama formed a group. Tian Qingquan, president of the Wuhan People's Art Theater and secretary of the Party Committee, said: "The play is changed and polished, and the new version of "The Legend of Luohan" will strive to be polished into a puppet drama work with good ideology, artistry and ornamentation, and realize the exploration of a play from the plateau to the peak. ”

According to the main creator, the new version of "The Legend of Luohan" will be based on Wuhan cane-headed puppets, while integrating various forms such as cloth bag puppets and iron branch puppets, and will make a lot of use of film techniques to break through the previous single form and old-fashioned puppet theater stage performance. In addition, the play will use a large number of symbolic expression techniques to poetically display the stage characters and characters' hearts, so as to achieve the combination of realism and freehand, the combination of reproduction and performance, to achieve exaggeration without losing its true color, humor without losing seriousness, simplicity without losing depth, rigorous and flexible, and passing on the Chinese national virtue of respecting the old and loving the young to the majority of children in an entertaining and educational way.

【Editor: Zhang Ling】

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