Drama director Gong Xiaodong - interpreting the wonderful ordinary world

Atlas

"Drama must not be repeated. Don't let the audience smack it, the good wine bottle is still old wine. Director Gong Xiaodong used his concept to make the drama "Ordinary World" have a different stage appearance. In the past four hours, the 360-degree rotating stone mill set slowly rotates, laying out the picture of life belonging to an era. Written by Meng Bing, directed by Gong Xiaodong and performed by the Shaanxi People's Art Theatre, the drama "Ordinary World" is touring the country.

At the beginning of March, this drama will be performed at the Centennial Lecture Hall of Peking University. Previously, as the opening year of the National Centre for the Performing Arts, more than 3,000 tickets were sold out more than a month before the performance of the play.

The three-volume million-word tome "Ordinary World" presents a vast scene of life and a vivid and rich character image. As an adaptor, how to grasp the balance between trade-offs and make "Ordinary World" shine with the brilliance of the new era? Recently, the reporter interviewed Gong Xiaodong, director of the drama "Ordinary World", hoping to find the answer in the discussion.

Absorb the soul of literature in drama

Reporter: How do you understand "ordinary"? And how to understand this ordinary being admired and praised?

Gong Xiaodong: Sun Shaoping, one of the protagonists of the novel, is touching because he could have changed his destiny, but in the end he "obeyed" his own destiny. In this process, a group of young people represented by Sun Shaoping did not lose the impulse and effort to change their destiny, they did not feel that their lives were wasted, but felt more fulfilling, and they still loved the land under their feet. For people today, being high above is certainly valuable and respectable, but like Lu Yao and his characters, farming like an ox and dedicating like the land may be even greater.

Reporter: What is the biggest difficulty in adapting? What is the core of your grasp during the adaptation process?

Gong Xiaodong: The difficulty is reflected in how to delete the complex and simplify, extract and refine, and adapt the literary classics into dramas, which needs to give the audience a deeper and fresher aesthetic experience. For drama creators, it is crucial to grasp the strongly actionable depictions in literature. The core is to grasp the "soul" of the work, that is, the spiritual core that the work can resonate with the audience through the times, and absorb and dock the "soul" of literary classics in the drama works and character shaping.

Reporter: The stage presents a transformation of the black and white world and the color world, and the puppet mask is also used at the beginning, why did you choose these stage expressions with a sense of ritual?

Gong Xiaodong: The gap between abstract exaggeration and deformation and realistic natural life can be formed, and this distance can bring surprises to the audience. I hope that when the audience watches the drama, they can slightly transcend their aesthetic stereotypes for the novel "Ordinary World", forming a sense of distance and strangeness. I don't want the audience to forget that because of the rich group portraits of the black and white world, there is the world of color reality that is presented on a short and narrow stage today. The characters who still wear the puppet head remain in the novel, while those who have taken off the puppet head have come out of the novel and been reborn on the stage.

See life alive in grand narratives

Reporter: In this play, what do you most want the audience to perceive and get?

Gong Xiaodong: Without the era, there would be no destiny, without the era there would be no "Ordinary World", and without the changes of the era of reform and opening up, there would be no living conditions of all sentient beings on the stage.

I want the audience to be moved by the twists and turns of these characters in the big era, or smile or dismissively, or shed tears of sympathy or tear them apart with pain... In short, when they walk out of the theater, they may ask themselves where they came from and where they are going; they may think about what they have received and what they want; perhaps they will think about how life should continue and how to face the future.

Reporter: In your creation, how do you reflect and deal with the relationship between the times and the individual?

Gong Xiaodong: From the past memories and experiences, from the history of the development of the times to leave traces, we can find the roots of creation, read these little people who are not remembered by people and their dignity.

If the sigh of concrete life is not heard in the grand narrative, the grand narrative is empty. Our mission is to be like Lu Yao, to record those who are alive in the reform and opening up, so that everyone can hear their sighs, see their hopes, and also be able to go deep into their dreams and remember the lives left in the torrent of the times.

Reporter: In your opinion, what kind of classic works are suitable for being adapted into plays? In the future, what other literary works do you want to put on the stage?

Gong Xiaodong: From the perspective of the actual operation and appropriateness of the adaptation, literary works with more concentrated events and more complex character personality and character relationships are relatively more suitable for presenting in the form of drama. For example, also as a literary classic, "War and Peace" is more suitable for the stage than "The Catcher of the Rye", because the latter's story and character action are stronger.

I want to adapt many works, such as Liu Qing's "History of Entrepreneurship", Xu Huaizhong's "Anecdotes on the Western Front", Liu Zhaolin's "Ah, gunshots in the Solun Valley". I also hope that more drama workers will not pluck onions in the dry land and cut the cake on the flat ground, nor can they narrow the theme and theme of the drama because of the quick success, or pay more attention to the existing literary accumulation, and see farther and fly higher on the shoulders of giants. Starting from the existing literary classics, advancing towards the goal of creating theatrical classics, and forming a general climate, this is of great benefit to the development of Chinese drama. Reporter Wang Yan

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